News & announcements from the ‘Ecological intelligence’ category
Handprints
Wednesday, April 25th, 2012When I bought a bag of chips in England it had some bad news printed on the back. First, the chips had 14 grams of fat. Bad enough. Worse, they had caused 75 grams of carbon to be released. That bag called my attention to my carbon footprint: those 75 grams added to the 2.3…
Anthropocene Thinking
Monday, January 17th, 2011Do you know the PDF of your shampoo? A ‘PDF’ refers to a “partially diminished fraction of an ecosystem,” and if your shampoo contains palm oil cultivated on clearcut jungle in Borneo, say, that value will be high. How about your shampoo’s DALY? This measure comes from public health: “disability adjusted life years,” the amount…
How Market Forces Can Build a Greener World
Friday, August 20th, 2010With 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.
Leading sustainability
Monday, July 26th, 2010Three 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…
Earthster: A Metric Tool for Leaders in the Age of Transparency
Friday, May 21st, 2010The 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.
Our Bodies’ Chemical Burden: Little Doses Matter a Lot
Monday, May 17th, 2010Here’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.
What We Don’t Know About the Toxic Stuff Around Us
Monday, May 10th, 2010Consider 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…
What Toxicology Won’t Measure – And What To Do
Monday, May 3rd, 2010I’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…
Voting with our dollars for a better planet
Wednesday, April 28th, 2010The 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.
Daniel Goleman in the Boston Globe
Tuesday, April 20th, 2010The 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
Welcome to the website and blog of psychologist Daniel Goleman, Ph.D., author of the New York Times bestseller Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships. Dr. Goleman is an internationally known psychologist who lectures frequently to professional groups, business audiences, and on college campuses. Working as a science journalist, Goleman reported on the brain and behavioral sciences for The New York Times for many years. His 1995 book, Emotional Intelligence (Bantam Books) was on The New York Times bestseller list for a year-and-a-half; with more than 5,000,000 copies in print worldwide in 40 languages, and has been a best seller in many countries.