• Complain

Daniel Goleman - Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything

Here you can read online Daniel Goleman - Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2009, publisher: Broadway Books, genre: Romance novel. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

No cover
  • Book:
    Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    Broadway Books
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2009
  • Rating:
    3 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 60
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

From Publishers Weekly Two years ago, British fashion designer Anna Hindmarch produced the must-have accessory of the season: a bleached, organic cotton tote manufactured in fair-wage factories, subsidized with carbon offsets and emblazoned with the slogan, Im NOT a plastic bag. But according to Goleman (*Emotional Intelligence*), the people who bought the bag were advertising their ecological ignorance, not their consciousness. In this thorough examination of the inconsistencies and delusions at the core of the going green effort, the author argues that consumers are collective victims of a sleight of hand, helplessly unaware of the true provenance and impact of the products they purchase: they reassure themselves by buying environmentally friendly tote bags that, upon ecological assessment, reveal some uncomfortable facts, e.g., 10,000 liters of water were required to grow the cotton for one bag, and cotton crops alone account for the use of about 10% of the worlds pesticides. Golemans critiques are scathing, but his conclusion is heartening: a new generation of industrial ecologists is mapping the exact impact of every production process, which could challenge consumers to change their behavior in substance rather than just show. *(Apr.)* Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist *Starred Review* Goleman, best-selling author of such groundbreaking works as Emotional Intelligence (1995) and Primal Leadership (2002), brings his invaluable behavioral insights to our most urgent dilemma: how to halt environmental catastrophe. Whats required, Goleman believes, is ecological intelligence, which he defines as understanding the hidden web of connections between human activity and natures systems, and the subtle complexities of their intersections. More concretely, Goleman encourages readers to learn about the many invisible threats to our health and the health of the environment caused by product manufacturing. Wisely focusing on the one element we can control, what we purchase, Goleman calls for higher green standards and radical transparency regarding how products are made. An enlightening foray into industrial ecology reveals how new forms of analysis determine precisely how the manufacture of such disparate items as toys, shampoo, and paper contributes to natural resource depletion, chemical pollution, and global warming. Brimming with intriguing, useful, and galvanizing information, this is an exceptionally sharp, innovative, and realistic approach to raising the demand for environmentally safe merchandise. Given Golemans track record and the pressing need for smart strategies, this fascinating treatise has tremendous potential for reaching and motivating a large and diverse audience. --Donna Seaman

Daniel Goleman: author's other books


Who wrote Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make
ALSO BY DANIEL GOLEMAN Social Intelligence Primal Leadership Working with - photo 1
ALSO BY DANIEL GOLEMAN

Social Intelligence

Primal Leadership

Working with Emotional Intelligence

Emotional Intelligence

For all the grandchildren And their grandchildrens grandchildren CONTENTS 1 - photo 2

For all the grandchildren,
And their grandchildren's grandchildren

CONTENTS
1
THE HIDDEN PRICE OF WHAT WE BUY A while ago I made an impulse buy a small - photo 3
THE HIDDEN PRICE OF WHAT WE BUY

A while ago I made an impulse buy: a small, bright yellow wooden racing car, with a green ball for the driver's head and four black discs pasted on its sides for wheels. The toy cost just 99 cents. I bought it for my eighteen-month-old grandson, who I thought would love it.

After I came home with that little wooden racer, I happened to read that because lead in paint makes colors (particularly yellow and red) look brighter and last longerand costs less than alternativescheaper toys are more likely to contain it. Then I came across a news item reporting that a test of twelve hundred toys taken from the shelves of storesincluding the chain where I bought that car revealed a large percentage contained various levels of lead.

I have no idea if the sparkling yellow paint on this toy car harbors lead or notbut I am dead certain that once it was in the hands of my grandson his mouth would be the first place it would go. Now, months later, that toy car still sits atop my desk; I never gave it to my grandson.

Our world of material abundance comes with a hidden price tag. We cannot see the extent to which the things we buy and use daily have other kinds of coststheir toll on the planet, on consumer health, and on the people whose labor provides us our comforts and necessities. We go through our daily life awash in a sea of things we buy, use, and throw away, waste, or save. Each of those things has its own history and its own future, backstories and endings largely hidden from our eyes, a web of impacts left along the way from the initial extraction or concoction of its ingredients, during its manufacture and transport, through the subtle consequences of its use in our homes and workplaces, to the day we dispose of it. And yet these unseen impacts of all that stuff may be their most important aspect.

Our manufacturing technologies and the chemistry they deploy were largely chosen in a more innocent time, one when shoppers and industrial engineers alike had the luxury of paying little or no attention to the adverse impacts of what was made. Instead they were understandably pleased by the benefits: electricity generated by burning coal, with enough to last for centuries; cheap and malleable plastics made from a seemingly endless sea of petroleum; a treasure chest of synthetic chemical compounds; cheap lead powder to add luster and life to paints. They were oblivious to the costs of these well-meaning choices to our planet and its people.

Though the composition and impacts of things we buy and use daily are for the most part the outcome of decisions made long ago, they still determine daily practice in manufacturing design and industrial chemistryand end up in our homes, schools, hospitals, and workplaces. The material legacy left to us by the once wonder-inducing inventions of the industrial age that ran through the twentieth century has made life immeasurably more convenient than the life our great-grandparents knew. Ingenious combinations of molecules, never before seen in nature, concoct a stream of everyday miracles. As utilized in yesterday's business environment, today's industrial chemicals and processes made utter sense, but all too many make little sense going forward. Consumers and businesses alike can no longer afford to leave invisible decisions about those chemicals and processesand their ecological consequencesunexamined.

In my past work I've explored what it means to be intelligent about our emotions and, more recently, about our social lives. Here I look into the sense in which we can, together, become more intelligent about the ecological impacts of how we live and how ecological intelligence, combined with marketplace transparency, can create a mechanism for positive change.

In the interest of full disclosure, when it comes to ecological intelligence I am as clueless as most of us. But in researching and writing this book I've been fortunate enough to stumble upon a virtual network of peopleexecutives and scientists alikewho excel in one or another subset of the skills we urgently need to build the human store of shared ecological intelligence, and to let that knowledge guide our decisions in better directions. In sketching the possibilities of this vision I've drawn on my background as a psychologist and science journalist to delve into the world of commerce and manufacturing, and to explore cutting-edge ideas in fields like neuroeconomics and information science, and particularly an emerging discipline, industrial ecology.

This journey continues one I began more than two decades ago, when I wrote in a book on self-deception that our habits of consumption on a worldwide scale are creating an ecological deficit at a rate unparalleled in history, as I put it, simply by our heedlessness of the links between the decisions we make daily for instance to buy this item rather than thatand the toll those decisions have.

Back then I imagined that one day we would somehow be able to gauge with accuracy the ecological damage from a given act of manufacturing or the packaging, shipping, and disposal of a given product and sum it up in some handy unit. Knowing that metric about a TV set or box of aluminum foil, I reasoned, we could take more responsibility for the impact on the planet of our individual choices. But I ran out of steam, conceding there is no such information available, and even the most ecologically concerned among us do not really know the net effect on the planet of how we live. And so our obliviousness lets us slip into a grand self-deception that the small and large decisions in our material lives are of no great consequence.

All those years ago I had never heard of industrial ecology, the discipline that routinely does the very impact analyses I dreamed of. Industrial ecology exists at the cusp where chemistry, physics, and engineering meet ecology, and integrates those fields to quantify the impacts on nature of manmade things. Back when I was wishing for this field to exist, that still-obscure discipline was just gathering itself. In the 1990s a working group of the National Academy of Engineering spawned the field, and the very first issue of the Journal of Industrial Ecology appeared in 1997, well over a decade after I had wished for its existence.

Industrial ecology had its roots in the insight that industrial systems parallel natural ones in many ways: the streams of manufactured stuff running between companies, extracted from the earth and emitted in new combinations, can be measured in terms of inputs and outputs regulated by a metabolism of sorts. In this sense industry, too, can be seen as a kind of ecosystem, one that has profound effects on every other ecological system. The field includes topics as diverse as estimating CO2 emissions from every industrial process or analyzing the global flow of phosphorus, to how electronic tagging might streamline the recycling of garbage and the ecological consequences of a boom in fancy bathrooms in Denmark.

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything»

Look at similar books to Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything»

Discussion, reviews of the book Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.