That bag called my attention to my carbon footprint: those 75 grams added to the 2.3 million from the plane I took there and back, plus the total of all the carbon impacts of everything else I do and buy. Call it carbon guilt, but just thinking about it gets me depressed.

Enter the good news: handprints, the sum total of all the positive changes we make that lower our footprint. That’s something we can feel good about.

To know precisely how big our carbon prints are we need to do the math on what we buy and do. The metrics for this come from life cycle assessment, or LCA, which was used to calculate the carbon released over the entire life history of those chips, from the planting of the potatoes to tossing the empty bag in the trash.

Handprints are the brain child of Gregory Norris, who teaches LCA at the Harvard School of Public Health. He has set up a website [RUTH: url TK] that let’s us calculate our handprint and pledge or confirm ways we intend to enlarge it – with a Facebook status update about the action.

One neat feature: if your friends do the same because they learned from you (like boosting fuel efficiency by inflating their tires to the correct pressure), your handprint increases, too. The more people we recruit, the bigger our handprint (picture a girl scout troop going door to door with tire gauges and pumps). Now there’s a feature just waiting for a gaming app – one way more beneficial than becoming “mayor” of the water cooler.

This could grow into a market force for a cooler planet. The more we all pursue our handprints, the greater the financial incentives for eco-friendly innovations like the new carbon-negative cement (5% of the human carbon footprint is from cement) that stores carbon instead of releasing it.

Elke Weber, a cognitive scientist at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, says the handprint might remedy a major reason so few people go from awareness of global warming to ongoing action. When folks harp on the harm we do to the planet we feel bad and want to do something to feel better – and then we tune out. But if we have a positive goal in mind that we can take small, manageable steps toward, we feel good — and so are more likely to keep going.

Any group has a handprint, the sum total of its activities. Norris envisions a day when individuals and families, schools and clubs, companies and cities – maybe even nations – would compete on the size of their handprints.

Now that’s a game where we’d all be winners.

A slightly different version of this article ran recently in Time.

How about your shampoo’s DALY? This measure comes from public health: “disability adjusted life years,” the amount of one’s life that will be lost to a disabling disease because of, say, a liftetime’s cumulative exposure to a given industrial chemical. So if your favorite shampoo contains two common ingredients, the carcinogen 1,4 dioxane, or BHA, an endocrine disrupter, its DALY will be higher.

PDFs and DALYs are among myriad metrics for Anthropocene thinking, which views how human systems impact the global systems that sustain life. This way of perceiving interactions between the built and the natural worlds comes from the geological sciences.  If adopted more widely this lens might usefully inform how we find solutions to the singular peril our species faces: the extinction of our ecological niche.

Beginning with cultivation and accelerating with the Industrial Revolution, our planet left the Holocene Age and entered what geologists call the Anthropocene Age, in which human systems erode the natural systems that support life. Through the Anthropocene lens, the daily workings of the energy grid, transportation, industry and commerce inexorably deteriorate global biogeochemical systems like the carbon, phosphorous and water cycles.

The most troubling data suggests that since the 1950s, the human enterprise has led to an explosive acceleration that will reach criticality within the next few decades as different systems reach a point-of-no-return tipping point. For instance, about half the total rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration has occurred in just the last 30 years – and of all the global life-support systems, the carbon cycle is closest to no-return.  While such “inconvenient truths” about the carbon cycle have been the poster child for our species’ slow motion suicide, that’s just part of a much larger picture, with all the eight global life-support systems under attack by our daily habits.

Anthropocene thinking tells us the problem is not necessarily inherent in the systems like commerce and energy that degrade nature; hopefully these can be modified to become self-sustaining with innovative advances and entrepreneurial energy. The real root of the Anthropocene dilemma lies in our neural architecture.

We approach the Anthropocene threat with brains shaped in evolution to survive the previous geological epoch, the Holocene, when dangers were signaled by growls and rustles in the bushes, and it served one well to reflexively abhor spiders and snakes. Our neural alarm systems still attune to this largely antiquated range of danger.

Add to that misattunement to threats our built-in perceptual blindspot: we have no direct neural register for the dangers of the Anthropocene age, which are too macro or micro for our sensory apparatus. We are oblivious to, say, our body burden, the lifetime build-up of damaging industrial chemicals in our tissues.

To be sure, we have methods for assessing CO2 buildups or blood levels of BHA. But for the vast majority of people those numbers have little to no emotional impact. Our amygdala shrugs.

Finding ways to counter the forces that feed the Anthropocene effect should count high in prioritizing scientific efforts. The earth sciences of course embrace the issue – but do not deal with the root of the problem, human behavior. The sciences that have most to offer have done the least Anthropocene thinking.

The fields that hold keys to solutions include economics, neuroscience, social psychology and cognitive science – and their various hybrids. With a focus on Anthropocene theory and practice they might well contribute species-saving insights. But first they have to engage this challenge, which for the most part has remained off their agenda.

When, for example, will neuroeconomics tackle the brain’s perplexing indifference to the news about planetary meltdown, let alone how that neural blindspot might be patched?  Might cognitive neuroscience one day offer some insight that might change our collective decision-making away from a lemmings’ march to oblivion? Could any of the computer, behavioral or brain sciences come up with an information prosthetic that might reverse our course?

Paul Crutzen, the Dutch atmospheric chemist who won a Nobel for his work on ozone depletion, coined the term ‘Anthropocene’ ten years ago. As a meme, ‘Anthropocene’ has as yet little traction in scientific circles beyond geology and environmental science, let alone the wider culture: A Google check on ‘anthropocene’ shows 78,700 references (mainly in geoscience), while by contrast ‘placebo’, a once-esoteric medical term now well-established as a meme, has more than 18 million (and even the freshly coined ‘vuvuzela’ has 3,650,000).

Published at the Edge foudnations World Question Center 2011

Here’s a modest proposal: radical transparency, the laying bare of a product’s ecological impacts for all to see.

Economic theory applied to ecological metrics offers a novel way to ameliorate our collective assault on the global systems that sustain life. There are two fundamental economic principles that, if applied well, might just accelerate the trend toward a more sustainable planet: marketplace transparency about the ecological impacts of consumer goods and their supply chains, and lowering the cost of that information to zero.

First transparency. A maxim in economics holds that transparency makes markets work more efficiently. This rule has long been applied to price, but why not also apply it to the ecological impacts of industry and commerce? At present when it comes to the ecological consequence of the things we buy, we have information asymmetry, where sellers know far more than buyers.

This seems about to change. One big mover is WalMart, which last summer announced it will develop a “sustainability index,” a credible rating of the ecological impacts of the products it sells boiled down into a single metric that shoppers can use to compare Brand A and Brand B.  There are signs this is more than marketing hype: WalMart has started to pilot life-cycle analyses of products it carries, and, some say, hopes to make transparent such data on the environmental and social impacts of suppliers four levels deep in the chain of vendors. The key, of course, will be to make sure the cost of quantifying and listing such data is minimal, as price will remain the primary determining factor for consumers.

WalMart is by no means the only player in taking steps to become more ecologically transparent. Companies such as Unilever (brands like Dove Soap and Lipton Tea) and Google (its servers consume enormous amounts of energy) are following their own maps to transparency about the eco-impacts of their operations, to find ways to make operations more sustainable.

Several global companies are forming a “Group of Ten” to develop a supply chain transparency system called Earthster into its newest version, “E2 Turbo.” Rather than go to the expense of a full life-cycle analysis (which can cost $50,000 and take months), E2 Turbo asks for data only on the 20 percent or so of a product’s life cycle that accounts for around 80 percent of environmental impacts.

Now under development, this supply-chain-tracking software lets companies understand where their largest negative impacts are, and how to find more sustainable alternatives. A built-in recommendations engine, drawing on a Department of Commerce database, suggests suppliers or other players that can help companies improve those impacts. That guides business-to-business decisions, with companies better able to find vendors that will let them keep their eco-impact scores low.

As more and more companies feed data into E2 Turbo – which is open source – they will together build what amounts to an information commons. There has also been discussion about the U.S. government establishing a site for that commons, creating a public database on ecological impacts that amounts to new public resource that any company, small or large, could draw on to improve the impacts of its operations.

A radical transparency about the ecological impacts may yet emerge from these efforts – and many in the business world are paying attention. A recent article in Harvard Business Review proclaims that sustainability has become an essential business strategy and the key driver of innovation. To be sure, there are large numbers of companies who resist – but they may yet join in, if markets shift toward brands that are more transparent about ecological footprints, creating a compelling business case.

That shift will become far more likely with the application of the second economic principle, lowering to zero the “cost” of this information, the cognitive effort we must make to get relevant data. Consumer surveys show that about ten percent of today’s shoppers will go out of their way to get information about the ecological impacts of what they buy, while about a third could not care less. The majority in the middle say that if the information were easy to come by, they might use it in deciding what to buy.

That’s where the action is: making crucial data easy to get. That was done, for instance, at the Hannaford Brothers grocery chain in Maine, with nutritional ratings of foods. While the ratings were sophisticated – made by nutritionists at institutions like Yale and Dartmouth – they were boiled down into a three-, two-, or one-star rating posted next to the price tag (there was also zero, which about 80 percent of foods received, mainly because of the salt and fats in processed foods).

The result was a significant shift in purchases toward the more nutritious food and away from the less. The shifts in market share were large enough to get the attention of food brand reps who started asking what they needed to do to get higher ratings.

That switch in a company’s actions because transparency in the marketplace has driven consumer decisions in a better direction has been called a “virtuous cycle” by Archon Fung at Harvard’s JFK School of Government. Fung led a group studying how transparency alters market dynamics and becomes a mechanism for positive change.

Such marketplace transparency about the ecological impacts of consumer goods can be seen today at www.GoodGuide.com, a website that aggregates more than 200 databases on the environmental, health, and social impacts of tens of thousands of consumer goods.  GoodGuide – a free smart phone app — allows shoppers to compare the eco-virtue of products while in the aisles of a store.  Today that comparison requires running your shopping list by the website on your computer or swiping a product’s bar code with a cellphone. But the day will come when a daring retailer puts that data next to price tags – thus reducing the information cost to zero, as Hannaford Brothers did with nutritional data.

Another website, www.Skindeep.com, reveals the potential medical risks of the chemicals used in personal care products, and so ranks them from safest to most risky. A project of the Environmental Working Group, Skindeep’s ratings are made by searching in medical databases for the biological effects of a given ingredient, and then weighting the health risks accordingly. Skindeep has been consulted more than 100 million times by shoppers wanting to know which skin cream or baby lotion might be a better bet.

These two websites offer ratings that are credible, independent, and transparent themselves – the three criteria proposed by the JFK School of Government group. To be sure, systems like GoodGuide  have yet to obtain fully transparent data about the total eco-impacts of any company or product. These consumer-facing transparency systems are more proof of concept than state-of-the-art. But they offer a hopeful sign we may be headed in that direction.

As the head of product innovation at a global company pointed out to me, ecological transparency would change the business landscape in two ways. First would be a shift in the “value basis” of a product, adding its ecological impacts into the equation.  Second, such transparency would drive intense competition to rethink products to lower those impacts, and so protect a brand’s market position.

As non-proprietary data collection systems like Earthster compile numbers on the ecological footprints of industry, that information could well feed into an emerging metric that has been designed to replace GDP. Called the “General Progress Indicator,” or GPI, this index of national progress rethinks economic indicators by, for example, rising when the poor receive a larger portion of a nation’s income and dropping when they get less.

Among the indicators factored into GPI are resource depletion, pollution, and long-term environmental damage. So while the GDP counts pollution as a double gain for an economy – for the economic activity while it is created and again while being cleaned up – GPI counts the costs of that pollution as a loss. Earthster-type databases could bring more precision and currency to GPI’s metrics.

Another movement in economics that might embrace such data is the attempt to “internalize externalities” – that is to make companies bear the costs of, say, cleaning up their pollution rather than governments, by taxing their goods proportionally to their negative eco-impacts. That idea remains a hard sell to business, and so to most governments. But marketplace ecological transparency makes pollution, toxics and the like a reputation cost for a brand or company. This substitutes a market force for government action, which –given political realities – may be both more realistic and quicker.

While many business people are starting to take ecological transparency seriously enough to embed it in their strategic thinking, the question arises: Are economists paying attention?

A few are. But for the most part these potentially disruptive information technologies, and the marketplace transparency they promise, are beneath the field’s radar, or entirely off the map.

One exception is James Angresano, a political economist at Albertson College of Idaho, who sees promise in ecological transparency as a tool for sustainability — itself not a topic central to orthodox thinking in economics. “We’ve got to think differently,” Angresano told me.

When Angresano lectured on these ideas recently to students in environmental economics at Peking University, they were so interested they stayed an extra hour. “Of all the theories I covered over several weeks of lecturing, this resonated the best,” he commented. “They’re depressed just hearing what the problems are. This is a way of making changes; here are some solutions.”

Originally published at e360.yale.edu

This scenario is not a pipedream. In fact, the technology needed to make it happen is already in place. Retailers like Wal-Mart Stores Inc. are developing sustainability indices; one day soon comparative product ratings will be posted next to price tags. The website GoodGuide.com provides a free iPhone app that rates and compares tens of thousands of products on their environmental, health and social impacts. Because of such technologies, the guiding principle for many companies, increasingly, is caveat venditor: let the seller beware. As many markets become ever more “transparent” to environmentally conscious customers, the pursuit of sustainability will shift from a choice that companies make to a sheer necessity of survival. It will affect the de facto “license” of a business to operate — a license that customers won’t hesitate to revoke.

The Leading Question

Many executives understand how these dynamics will fundamentally alter their businesses, and they understand that sustainability is, ultimately, about the sustainability of their own organizations. But they often stumble in making the transition because of basic misconceptions about what it will take to transform their companies. Many make the mistake of treating sustainability like any other large corporate initiative: It’s actually different in several crucial ways. Or they assume that it will require a steady, constant effort over years. In fact, it entails three distinct phases, each requiring different leadership skills. When implementing a business strategy that commercially incorporates sustainability, managers must first recognize how such efforts are unique, and then understand how best to advance through each major stage of a sustainability initiative.

From “The Change Leadership Sustainablity Demands,” by Chrisopth Lueneburger and Daniel Goleman, MIT Sloan Management Review, Summer 2010. For the rest of the article, see: http://sloanreview.mit.edu/the-magazine/articles/2010/summer/51412/the-change-leadership-sustainability-demands/

Earthster represents an emerging generation of information systems that uses the metrics of life cycle assessment (LCA) to track sustainability impacts throughout a given product’s supply chain in their entirety, making visible the externalities with precision. This metric gives companies the tool they need to manage – and reduce – eco-impacts and assess a products sustainability footprint from cradle-to-cradle in the new competitive arena.

While no one can say with certainty if such information systems will play a critical role in an ecologically transparent business world, signs from the government are beginning to point in that direction. Last week I was at an EPA-cohosted meeting about these information tools for an audience of key players from a handful of Federal agencies. As one attendee put it, “We’re tired of all the eco-labels, where you don’t know what’s truly green or greenwashing. The only solution will be an open-source LCA-based system. . That way we can give reliable assurance and transparency to consumers.”

The GSA, meanwhile, is looking for just such a screen that the Feds can use for their half trillion dollars in yearly purchasing. One reason: an executive order, now under review at the White House, that will mandate how specific ecological goals – like reducing resource use – are evaluated by vendors for procurement.

The ripples from this metric mandate could take tidal proportions. The rule-of-thumb is that what the Feds do will be modeled by States and municipalities in their purchase policies. And Walmart, of course, has already set the stage for the same movement among retailers. Like WalMart to its own suppliers, the GSA might say, “You play this, or you don’t play at all.”

Mark Tulay of Earthster.org has been leading a series of meetings featuring Earthster for environmental groups, asset owners and asset managers looking for ways to minimize sustainability risk, and companies wanting to manage their eco-impacts better – and looking for a seat at the table ahead of the pack. One attendee at the EPA meeting was Jeff Rice, at the University of Arkansas, and leader in the Sustainability Consortium set up by Walmart and other retailers to work out a product sustainability measurement systems and tools.

Rice said he saw the ascendence of resources  like Earthster as creating a marketplace for LCA data far greater than exists today, telling me, “Today LCAs area niche industry, but if thousands of companies start pursuing LCA data it will create a vibrant data marketplace, for companies big and small”.

Representatives from data storage nodes of the Federal Government are assessing whether they could act as collators for a massive data commons on eco and social impacts – in effect a new information utility that could be enormously useful to industry as companies scramble to asses their externalities and find ways to reduce them. Earthster 2.0, now under development, has been named as a model platform for such a commons.

What’s so great about Earthster in particular?

• Open source. Unlike today’s standard LCA, which is a proprietary study done for a company, Earthster operates as a sustainability wiki, with everyone reporting into a data commons that companies build together. This allows, for instance, the establishment of sector averages for a given process or product and enables even the smallest companies to assess sustainability impacts
• Trackable. Participating companies can protect their proprietary processes and ingredients, but report their outputs – like emissions into water, soil, and air – establishing their baseline to demonstrate improvement against. The head of the agency’s Sustainable Product Network saw Earthster as a potential tool for the Government to measure product improvement.
• Certifiable. While companies can post data from their own LCA efforts, they cannot enter the data into the Earthster system until it has been independently audited.
• Salient. In an analysis he did for the EPA, Gregory Norris found that “80 percent of a company’s cradle-to-gate impacts are in its supply chain, not within its own facility.” Making changes like energy and fossil fuel reduction within a plant are all to the good, but barely begin the job.

These are key elements of any sound ecological transparency information system. Earthster itself is at a critical stage: beyond proof-of-concept but not  yet fully launched.  Stay tuned.

Daniel Goleman’s full interview with Gregory Norris, developer of Earthster, is an audio download; there is also a version condensed for distribution to Walmart house brands suppliers.

If you want to know what industrial chemical compounds Michael Lerner or his wife Sharyle Patton carry around in their bodies, just go to this Environmental Working Group website. Lerner and Patton are both active in environmental health, the field that studies how the chemical byproducts of industry and commerce impact the human body.

Lerner, it seems, lugs around relatively high levels of methylmercury, inorganic arsenic, and polycholorinated biphenols (better-known as PCBs). These are but a few of the 102 industrial chemicals (of the 214 assayed by measuring metabolites) in his blood and urine.

Patton’s body, in addition to these, also has relatively high levels of chlorinated dioxins and organochlorine pesticide residues, plus a generous helping of others that did not show up in her husband’s tests.

Medical databases link (at various levels of certainty), each of these compounds with a distinct set of illnesses. Environmental Working Group has done several body burden studies of its own and shown that babies come into the world contaminated with a complex mixture of chemicals, many of them known to be toxins or carcinogens.

For instance, inorganic arsenic is a known carcinogen. BPA, found in plastics, dental sealants and the linings of tin cans, is a chemical suspected in certain birth defects and developmental delays in children, some cancers, and disturbances in endocrine and hormone function.

Both chlorinated dioxins and PCBs come to us mainly in fatty meats, dairy products and fish. Like BPA, they may link to defects and delays in children and to cancers, as well as to malfunctions of the nervous and immune systems.

The pesticide residues enter our bodies via the foods they are used on, as well as in drinking water; they are associated with a similar roll call of disorders.

Stepping back and looking at the entire list of 214 industrial chemicals this assay finds in our bodies creates the creepy feeling that nothing is safe: toxins waft our way in house dust or thin air, in water and soil, or off-gas from a long litany of objects — from paint and carpeting to computer consoles and furniture.

The body is an ecosystem of sorts, an exquisitely coordinated mass of disparate units functioning within a whole. And like any ecosystem, the body can be invaded by foreign substances that muck up the works. Quantifying how many such invaders our bodies harbor has been the quest of studies on bio-accumulation such as the one Lerner and Patton participated in to assay this biological build-up over a lifetime.

Bio-accumulation has become its own corner of medical science, with studies suggesting that virtually everyone alive on this planet harbors a stew of toxic substances. This shift from measuring pollutants in our water, air or soil to studying what has melded into our biology has led to related shifts in thinking about medical etiology and chemical risk.

One medical model for these chemical invasions holds that ill effects can emerge slowly, over decades, from cumulative chemical exposures at doses so low they are measured in parts per million. For instance, an emerging consensus in oncology holds that a person’s lifetime exposure to many tiny amounts of cancer-causing agents can be just as toxic as a few big doses of carcinogens.

This model of causation rejects seeking a single smoking gun – some substance that in itself fosters cancer – but rather looks to a person’s lifetime, cumulative exposure to a wide range of chemicals that trigger cell mutation. This continual barrage of mutagens can finally overwhelm the immune system’s ability to kill off mutant cells, and so resist cancer.  Our risk of cancer, in this view, reflects the sum total of day-to-day doses of carcinogenic molecules shed into our air, food and water.

Dr. Martha Herbert, a pediatric neurologist at Harvard Medical School, points to the tens of thousands of manufactured compounds that now pepper the nature world in some three billion potential combinations, and the fact that no one knows all the ways these chemical concoctions might impact us. One of the greatest human dangers from this slew of molecules, Dr. Herbert reasons, comes when a child’s fast-growing organs, budding central nervous system and hummingbird-like rapid metabolism gets exposed to – and voraciously incorporates — small amounts of foreign molecules, doing biological damage that may not surface for years.

The brain has a special vulnerability to interference from invading chemicals because of all organs, it utilizes the widest variety of molecules to transmit the chemical messages that coordinate our mental life and biological functions. This very design means there are that many more ways molecules from outside the body can disrupt these processes if they happen to interact with any of countless chemical reactions in the brain.

That’s why little doses can matter a lot.

Adapted from Ecological Intelligence: The Hidden Impacts of What We Buy. Originally posted at ewg.org

Victims can breathe in deeply but have severe difficulty exhaling. More commonly known as “popcorn worker’s lung,” the disease has sometimes led to the death of those who labor in popcorn factories or plants that make candy and pastries, even dog food, where diacetyl gets used as a flavoring.

The canary in the coal mine for the rest of us was Wayne Watson of Centennial, Colo. When Watson was diagnosed with popcorn worker’s lung, his physicians alerted federal agencies to say the threat had leaped beyond factory walls to consumers’ homes.  The resulting public alarm swiftly led the largest U.S. makers of microwave popcorn to announce they were pulling diacetyl from their mix of ingredients.

In nature, diacetyl occurs in butter, cheese and some fruits at low levels that pose no danger. The popcorn companies were breaking no law by using diacetyl; the Food and Drug Administration approved its use. And Wayne Watson had put himself at unusual risk; he dubbed himself “Mr. Popcorn” because he devoured two or three bags every day for ten years.

He especially loved to fill his lungs with a deep inhalation of the buttery cloud of aroma released the moment he ripped open a freshly popped bag – in other words, the strongest dose possible. That was a recipe for medical disaster.

When heated, diacetyl becomes a vapor, the form that poses a danger to lungs. If breathed in over long periods, concentrated doses of this very vapor leads to popcorn worker’s lung. When his doctor went to Mr. Watson’s house and measured levels of diacetyl in the air right after he made popcorn, they were found to be as high as those in a popcorn factory.

So should we all shun diacetyl-laced popcorn? Maybe, maybe not. As one report of the case put it, “There are no warnings from federal regulators, nor is there medical advice on how consumers” should treat the news. And that’s the quandary. The standards that the FDA, food industries and even physicians use for determining consumer safety do not always match the recommendations of scientists who study the health impacts of the multitude of chemicals we encounter.

No one knows how many chemicals with potential dangers lurk in the everyday objects we use and foods we eat. Informed estimates put the number of man-made chemical compounds floating about as high as 80,000 to 100,000. Of the ten thousand or so chemicals used in industrial amounts — yearly volumes greater than ten tons — only a fraction have ever been tested for toxicity in adults, let alone in fetuses or infants.

As for the potential harm from the chemicals in what we buy, use and own, many dangers are suspected but most all are “unproven,” in the sense of getting consensus on the verdict. Apart from a relatively small sub-class of chemicals, like concentrated doses of vaporized diacetyl, the chain of causality from chemical X to disease Y in most every case has yet to be investigated, let alone established.

In some cases science can identify certain ill effects from specific toxins and suggest a pathway consistent with those medical outcomes. But most of the apprehension centers on the simple fact that all synthetic chemicals are not natural elements in the body, and at a high enough level or in various combinations, their presence can do us harm.

Science cannot predict what specific effects these exposures will have in a given person; the body’s biological maze is simply too complex. Each industrial chemical engages our tissues in multiple ways. Some imitate the molecular structure of the body’s own hormones, ending up lodged in the endocrine system; others mimic the chemical messengers that keep cells in the brain and body working smoothly together. Some are readily absorbed in body fat, while still others – particularly the large number made from petroleum – readily slip through the oil-based membranes that surround cells (and these petroleum-based chemicals harbor carcinogenic benzene rings).

That’s one reason I love Environmental Working Group’s Skin Deep database: It levels the playing field.

Adapted from Ecological Intelligence: The Hidden Impacts of What We Buy. Originally posted at ewg.org

But growing bodies of medical evidence suggest that the cumulative tiny doses of chemicals we encounter over our lifetime can add up to disease. For instance, Deborah Cory-Slechta, a toxicologist at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, found that exposing lab animals to two common pesticides, paraquat and maneb, caused degeneration in the dopamine circuits that underlie Parkinson’s disease in humans. The damage only occurred if the exposure to one of the compounds was repeated (in this case, in the womb and again in adulthood), or to both pesticides in combination. Paraquat and maneb are quite distinct molecules, but the mixture or number or exposures produced the signature damage for Parkinson’s.

Such findings – and there are dozens of others like these – create a challenge for toxicology: an exposure just once to one of these chemicals resulted in no discernible damage.  And up to this point that method – assessing the damage from exposure to a single chemical or class of chemicals for a limited time – has been the gold standard in tests of a chemical’s toxicity, our early warning system for protection.

But that method tells us nothing about how a given chemical might cause damage if we are exposed to it in combination with others, or over a lifespan. The reality is that we all are exposed to a mix of countless chemicals continually, a predicament for which toxicologists have as yet no assessment method.

Here is the toxicologist’s dilemma: The standard methods for assessing safe levels of exposure to a chemical fail to address the environmental realities. Interactions among synthetic chemicals lodged in our bodies defy basic assumptions underlying toxicology risk analysis.

Standard tests assess whether a compound kills cells. But very low doses may fail to kill cells while nevertheless damaging the cells’ ability to function properly. Worse, a single-chemical, one-time exposure in healthy adults tells us nothing about how a substance might affect children, the chronically ill or the aged — groups with greater susceptibility to harmful chemical impacts. And what happens when we breathe polluted air, a mixture of countless varieties of ultra-fine particles whose chemical composition varies from place to place and day to day?

Cory-Slechta says neurotoxicology should adopt a “multi-hit” model, in which insults to different target sites — either over time from one molecule or all at once from many — harm a biological system. That would be in keeping with toxicology’s main mission, safeguarding human health.

So what are we to do in the meantime?

Try the precautionary principle: Find out what’s actually in all the stuff we eat, put on our bodies or otherwise are exposed to, and avoid the bad ones. Use Environmental Working Group’s Skin Deep database, for example, to learn the truth about the chemicals in personal care products.

If each of us did three things, it could actually get companies to get rid of all those toxic chemicals:

1. Know the true ecological impacts of what we buy.
2. Favor improvements.
3. Tell everyone we know.

Those three steps, if taken by enough shoppers, would shift the market share of products enough to get the attention of companies. The more we make it pay to drop toxic chemicals from products, the more efforts corporations will put into developing safer alternatives and giving their business to suppliers who innovate to find safer ingredients.

Economists call this a “virtuous cycle,” where sound information in the marketplace lets shoppers be smarter about their choices. That, in turn, creates a bottom-line incentive for companies to do the right thing. Let’s make virtue pay.

Adapted from Ecological Intelligence: The Hidden Impacts of What We Buy. Originally posted at ewg.org

Why? That cute toy seems to contain two toxins—chloride and antimony. To Joey’s relief the other toys in the Webkinz menagerie all had flying colors.

But then again, when he started looking up his favorite snacks – all junkfood – none scored above a deplorable 1.7, all because their nutritional values were largely based on sugar and fat.

These sad truths have a greater significance: they herald the dawn of an era of ecological transparency, where we shoppers – for the first time ever – can know the truth about the ecological impacts of what we buy.  GoodGuide.com, for example, aggregates more than 200 databases to produce ratings of more than 65,000 products, giving us an instant comparison on eco-virtue to all the alternatives for the same item.

This information hands all of us a powerful tool, knowledge.  Consider what might happen if each of us did just three things when we shop:

1)    Know the impacts of what we buy. GoodGuide is an iPhone app as well as a website; we can check it as we stroll the aisles, or run through our shopping list at home.

2)    Favor Improvements. The instant ranking on eco-impacts lets us find better choices. The same with www.SkinDeep.com, which reveals toxic ingredients in personal care products like shampoos and lip gloss.

3)    Share What We Know. If we Twitter while we shop, or post to Facebook when we learn, say, that our favorite kid’s sunscreen contains a chemical that becomes a carcinogen in the sun, then we multiply the impact of what we’ve learned.

With these simple steps we can together start to shift the market share of products toward those with better eco-impacts. This, in turn, can trigger a virtuous cycle, where companies start to compete on finding ways to improve their scores and win us back.

Some companies are already paying attention. WalMart – and a group of other companies – have announced their intention to have an independent consortium develop their own GoodGuide-like sustainability index, with ratings to be posted next to the price tags.

It’s about time.  Geologists now tell us that since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution we have been living in the Anthropocene Age – an era where human activity is eroding the planetary systems that sustain human life.  This includes not just global warming but eight other fragile systems, such as the consumption of nonrenewable resources like drinkable water.

The main driver of this attack on our ecological niche: our daily habits, multiplied by billions.  There are, of course, many ways we can change our personal habits to lessen our own ecological footprint. But consider recycling. If you recycle the plastic container your yogurt came in, that takes care of only 5% of its global warming impact. Theother 95% is elsewhere in the life cycle of that container.

That’s why voting with our dollars can make such a crucial difference: it sends ta powerful bottom-line message to business and industry to clean up its act by finding more sustainable alternatives for everything.

For starters, how about a yogurt container that we can eat when we’re done.

THE BERKSHIRES — Becoming a grandparent is a life-altering experience for a lot of people, but for Daniel Goleman, it was more than that. It was a planet-altering experience.

The prolific psychologist and science writer is best known for his 1995 bestseller Emotional Intelligence, which challenged existing definitions of what “smart” means. (He factored in interpersonal strengths, such as people skills and empathy.) He parlayed the book into a mini-industry as a researcher and lecturer promoting emotional literacy in schools and at work.

But having grandchildren propelled his work in a new direction. He has four, between the ages of 3 and 10, and like a lot of grandparents found himself thinking about the world that he’d be leaving them. Given what he does for a living, Goleman worried about things like global warming and toxic chemicals in the water and soil, problems he felt were exacerbated by his generation’s propensity for making and buying things without necessarily considering their impact on the environment.

“Unfortunately, [my grandchildren’s] world is likely to be a sadder version of the world we know now, because of our collective everyday choices,’’ said Goleman, 64. A former science writer for The New York Times who writes books about subjects he feels passionate about, Goleman was starting to feel passionate about this one. The result is his latest book, “Ecological Intelligence: The Hidden Impacts of What We Buy,’’ just out in paperback in time for Earth Day, which is Thursday.

A premise of the book is that most of us are oblivious to the health, environmental, and social impacts of what we’re buying, blundering through our consumer lives with a what-we-don’t-know-can’t-hurt-us attitude — even if we think we’re being eco-conscious. Most of us are functionally incapable of knowing which products are truly green, or when we’re merely being “greenwashed with green sounding PR,’’ says Goleman. We’re clueless about which shampoos contain toxic chemicals, what manufacturing processes emit greenhouse gases, which companies operate factories that exploit workers.
And it’s not all our fault. “All but the most obsessive among us lack the cognitive power to go through the endless computations that would make our decision-making approach optimal,’’ he writes. “And even if we do know about a specific hazard or two, who has the patience to read through a product list of dozens of arcane ingredients in a frozen pizza or floor polish and compare it with similar lists on an alternate choice?’’

The good news, though, is that there’s an emerging discipline called industrial ecology, which is devising new systems to rate products on how green they really are. Goleman cites the website GoodGuide.com, for example, which aggregates some 200 databases and scores products based on their ecological and health impacts. (GoodGuide even has an iPhone app that lets shoppers scan a barcode while they’re in a store to access its rating. Another website, Skin Deep — www.cosmeticsdatabase.com — evaluates the relative safety of personal care products.)
GoodGuide is working to expand into additional categories including electronics, apparel, pet food, and paper products, and other groups are starting to jump in, rating specific issues within specific product categories. Greenpeace, for example, publishes a guide to greener electronics.
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“GoodGuide represents the bare beginning of true ecological transparency in the marketplace. It can and will improve,’’ Goleman said. “If this goes to scale, as more of us use this information, we can create a virtuous cycle where shifts in consumer demand toward ecologically superior products make it a good business decision to innovate, to get rid of the bad chemicals, to find better ways of making things,’’ said Goleman. “Not because it’s a nice thing to do, but because it’s an essential business decision. . . . Doing the right thing will be aligned with doing the thing that makes money.’’

Goleman is sitting in a light-filled studio located behind his house, at the end of a long road in a small Western Massachusetts town that he prefers not be disclosed. Behind the studio is an ecologically sound tea house (local stone steps, wood harvested from a New Hampshire swamp, bamboo fence) built to accommodate his wife’s passion for Japanese tea ceremony and Ikebana flower-arranging; she is Tara Bennett-Goleman, a writer and psychotherapist. Goleman uses the tea house to meditate, and wrote “Emotional Intelligence’’ here, kneeling on a tatami mat until he hurt his neck and his doctor put a stop to it. Now he works in an ergonomically designed office in the studio.

Like many big ideas in life, the inspiration for this one came from a series of small revelations. There was the time, for example, he bought his 18-month-old grandson a bright yellow wooden racing car made in China — a bargain at 99 cents — only to read shortly afterward that lead in paint makes colors like red and yellow look brighter, and is commonly used in cheap toys.

Or the time he was shopping for pasta sauces in his local supermarket, and was about to reach for his favorite when another brand caught his eye. It was packaged in a reusable plastic jar labeled free of BPA, an organic compound used to harden plastic. Just that week he’d been reading about whether BPA caused serious health hazards; he went home and threw out all his BPA-riddled plastic containers. (And switched his pasta sauce allegiance.)

Goleman concedes that until fairly recently, he too was a clueless shopper, roaming supermarket aisles in “mindless mode,’’ making choices out of habit, feeling virtuous if he bought something that was labeled “green’’ or “organic’’ because he thought it would be better for the earth.

Not anymore. “I used to believe advertising when it said such-and-such was green,’’ he said. “Now I immediately disbelieve it, unless there is an independent transparent rating of a product, like GoodGuide . . . or Skin Deep that assures me that it is green. Because if the person who is telling you it’s green is the same person who is making money from your buying it, you have every reason to be skeptical.’’

He checks GoodGuide’s ratings before he buys things, which resulted in some tough choices: He gave up his favorite — but poorly scoring — shampoo and deodorant. He avoids tuna out of concern about mercury contamination, and tries to buy fish that are not endangered, or are farmed in ecologically sound ways. (He recommends Arctic char.) He uses a glass or stainless steel water bottle, but argues that towns should bring back drinking fountains because “it’s a much more sustainable solution.’’

He also buys locally grown products whenever he can, and avoids big box stores. “In a big box store, 30 cents from the dollar stays in the community,’’ he argues, “but in the local store, about 60 cents.’’ He drives a hybrid Lexus but when he’s asked to do a speaking engagement, he tries to convince his host to do a webinar, so he won’t need to travel.

And he never did give that toy to his grandson. He just keeps it as a souvenir.

Daniel Goleman will speak in Newton on April 28, in Oak Hill Middle School auditorium at 7 p.m. To register, contact Newton Community Education, 617-559-6999 or www.newtoncommunityed.org.

Originally published in the Boston Globe