About Verdant Growth

Mainstream culture got it backwards.

We've built a world that prioritizes productivity, monetary success, and consumption as the path to a good life. The implicit promise is that if you optimize hard enough for those things, the real rewards — happiness, meaning, connection — will follow.

But for most people, they don't. Rich people are not happier or healthier.

Burnout, loneliness, anxiety, a persistent sense that something's off even when you've got a good job and lots of money. You're not broken. The cultural operating system is. Corporations and marketing have quietly convinced us that a convenient life is a good life. That comfort equals fulfillment. That more is always better.

I'm here to pull back the curtain on that — and help you build a better life. I promise it exists.

I know, because I had to figure this out for myself. When I started trying to live more sustainably, I realized something: I'd been thinking about it backwards. The goal isn't to be sustainable. The goal is to be healthy, happy, and more connected to the people and places around you, and the sustainability follows naturally.

About Me

I'm Eugene — Hawaii-based sustainability coach, podcast host, writer, and stubborn optimist about what people are capable of when they're pointed in the right direction.

I have a mechanical engineering degree from UCLA, but some of my most formative years were spent living abroad — nearly a decade between Korea and Japan. I wasn't on some spiritual journey. I was just living — teaching kids, getting around by bike, eating differently, existing inside a different set of cultural norms. And that distance from what I'd always considered "normal" did something useful: it made me question whether "normal" was actually "good."

Turns out, a lot of it isn't.

What I believe

We've been sold a story that the good life looks like more: more convenience, more consumption, more noise. That's the promise, anyway.

But here's what I believe, and what the research keeps confirming: meaning, happiness, health, and genuine human connection aren't rewards waiting at the end of a long grind. They come first. They're what make everything else feel worthwhile.

And here's the part nobody tells you: when you start building your life around those things — not out of guilt, not out of fear, not to keep up with anyone — something shifts. You feel better. More grounded. More alive. The choices get easier. The life gets richer.

I'm not here to tell you to go vegan or sell your car or feel bad about your choices. I'm here to help you ask better questions about what you actually want — and what kind of life you're actually building.

What I'm Building

On the Verdant Growth blog, I write about the everyday choices that quietly shape the life you're living — food, habits, transit, culture, connection. Nothing preachy. Just honest thinking about how to live better.

On the Solve for Nature podcast, I sit down with scientists, farmers, entrepreneurs, and people who are actively working on solutions at the intersection of people and planet. But it's not just an interview show. Each conversation has a twist: I bring guests on a journey through their own values and lived experience to help them uncover a personal sustainability challenge that actually means something to them. The result is something richer than an expert talking at you. It's two people figuring something out together, in real time.

Through Rooted & Rising — my coaching methodology — I work with people who are done circling and ready to move. If you've been thinking about changing the way you live but haven't quite found the entry point, that's exactly what Rooted & Rising is designed for.

And The Shared Table is my experiment in what real community looks like — more on that soon.

If any of this sounds like something you've been looking for, you're in the right place.

Welcome.