The Courage to Continue

Stay the Course on Sustainability to Secure Our Future

De: Alex Kruzel

Narrado por: Frank B.

The Courage to Continue spotlights the bi-partisan American tradition of environmental stewardship and its relevance in today’s business and political landscape. President Trump’s second term brings a whole-of-government national security strategy that permeates other policy priorities – energy, global trade, deregulation, military spending, industrial policy, immigration, and more.

Although the Trump administration’s agenda includes rolling back environmental protections and propagating fossil fuel development, enshrining environmental security has long been an area of political cooperation. In fact, most environmental protections were passed and reinforced by Republican Presidents like Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, Herbert Hoover, George H.

W. Bush, Richard Nixon, and Theodore Roosevelt. All understood that environmental security serves as the basis of national security and economic prosperity.

In the spirit of finding more in the middle, this book advocates for a refreshed, non-partisan approach for business leaders to evaluate the reasons why they should continue to advance their corporate sustainability goals. This book evaluates the multi-dimensional rationale: the favorable economics of the renewable energy transition, broadening foreign and state-level environmental disclosure requirements, increased climate litigation risk, AI’s application to remove cost and friction, and America’s need to compete with China on renewable technology, critical mineral access, and more. This is a bridge to both sides of the aisle to see environmental security as a platform to help make America a better version of itself. By making the environment great, we can better respond to climate threats and challenges from foreign adversaries. We can ensure long-term economic prosperity by mitigating the financial and personal loss that climate disasters bring. Ultimately, we will have bolstered U.S. national security and enshrined global leadership position.

©2025 Alex Kruzel (P)2025 Alex Kruzel

A Difficult Read Shaped by Personal Loss

The Courage to Continue: Stay on the Course to Secure Our Future presents itself as a reflection on perseverance, responsibility, and moral direction. Yet reading this book as someone deeply affected by the author’s personal choices made the experience profoundly difficult.

I am the father of Anastacia Ululi. For the past three years, I have not been allowed to see or spend time with her, nor with her sister, two siblings separated from each other and from their father due to irreconcilable differences among adults. As someone who was present and deeply involved in my child’s earliest years, this absence is not abstract; it is lived, daily, and painful.

Because of this, I struggle to reconcile the themes of courage and continuity in this book with the reality I have experienced. From my perspective, courage is inseparable from compassion, and continuity requires care for human bonds—especially between children and their parents, and between sisters. When power is exercised in ways that divide rather than heal, the message of moral leadership rings hollow to me.

This review is not about denying the author’s right to tell her story or express her vision. It is about acknowledging that values written on the page do not always align with values lived in practice, at least not as I have experienced them. As one of our mutual friends once said, power exists in many forms, including social and institutional power, and how it is used matters.

I am Angolan and lived in the United States for nearly 30 years. From that position, both inside and outside American culture, I have often struggled to understand an obsession with power, control, and organized conflict, especially when it comes at the cost of family and emotional well-being. Responsibility, to me, includes reckoning with the harm we cause, not just the futures we imagine.

I give this book three stars not because it lacks structure or intention, but because my reading of it is inseparable from grief and anger. Separating two sisters from each other, and a child from her father, is a profound mistake, one that no amount of rhetoric about courage can offset in my heart.

This is my personal perspective. It is written from lived experience, not ideology. And it reflects the reality that words alone cannot secure a future if the present is built on division.