With climate legislation dead in Congress and the fizzled hopes for a breakthrough in Copenhagen fading into distant memory, the time seems ripe for fresh strategies – especially ones that do not depend on government action. Here’s a modest proposal: radical transparency, the laying bare of a product’s ecological impacts for all to see.

Three teen-aged girls are at a shopping mall looking for sunscreen. It’s an impulse purchase, and it has to be an all-natural choice. They think they’ve found what they’re looking for at one store, but on the way to the register one of the girls takes out her phone and swipes it by the barcode… Read more »

The age of ecological transparency is nigh. Business leaders now must learn to embrace “externalities” (like pollution) and work to lessen them, as Christopher Meyer and Julia Kirby argued in the Harvard Business Review last month. If this is our emerging business reality, here’s a hot tip: look into www.Earthster.org.

Here’s sobering news: any one of us, anywhere on the planet, lugs hundreds of industrial chemicals around in our bodies – and they are up to no good.

Consider a box of microwaveable, butter-flavored popcorn. The label assures buyers it has zero grams of trans-fat and “zero mg cholesterol.” But the ingredients list fails to mention that the savory butter taste and mouth-watering aroma comes courtesy of diacetyl, a flavoring long known by pulmonary specialists to cause “bronchiolitis obliterans,” a disease that causes… Read more »

I’ve got some bad news. Toxicology seems to have a blind spot when it comes to the stew of chemicals we breathe, drink or otherwise absorb over the course of life. Currently federal standards for determining toxicity are based on whether single exposures to a specific chemical cause a given medical problem. But growing bodies… Read more »

The bad news for my nine-year-old nephew Joey came when he looked up Webkinz Pink Pony on GoodGuide.com, a website that rates the environmental, health, and social impacts of the things we buy.  On a scale where ten is best, Pink Pony came up with a disappointing 3.7.

The guru of green: After years of being told that products are eco-sensitive, author Daniel Goleman says consumers are finally getting a better sense of which ones really are

Daniel Goleman and Dara O’Rourke discuss emerging technologies that reveal the hidden societal, environmental and health impacts of products we buy. If you missed this on NPR, you can still find out more about consumer awareness and radical transparency.