Daniel Goleman - Emotional Intelligence, Social Intelligence, Ecological Intelligence

"Green" Is a Mirage

An industrial engineer’s version of the deconstruction of stuff is called Life Cycle Assessment, or LCA, a method that allows us to systematically tear apart any manufactured item into its components and their subsidiary industrial processes, and measure with near- surgical precision their impacts on nature from the beginning of their production through their final disposal.

LCAs had a prosaic start; one of the very first such studies was commissioned by Coca- Cola back in the 1960s to determine the relative merits of plastic and glass bottles and quantify the benefits of recycling. The method slowly spread to other industrial questions; by now a large and growing band of companies with national or international brands deploys the method somewhere along the way to make choices in product design or manufacturing—and many governments use LCAs to regulate those industries.

Life Cycle Assessment was created by a loose confederation of physicists and chemical and industrial engineers documenting the minutiae of manufacturing—what materials are used and how much energy, what kinds of pollution are generated and toxins exuded, and in what amounts—at each basic unit in a very long chain. In that dusty text the Riddle of the Chariot names a handful of components; today the LCA for a Mini Cooper breaks down into thousands of components—like the electronic modules that regulate electrical systems. These electronic modules deconstruct—like the chariot into its main parts—into printed wiring board, various cables, plastics, and metals; the chain leading to each of these in turn leads to a trail of extraction, manufacture, transport, and so on. These modules run dashboard systems, regulate the radiator fan, wipers, lights, and ignition, and manage the engine—and for each of these parts in turn the analysis can run into a thousand or more discrete industrial processes. In total, that petite car’s LCA entails hundreds of thousands of distinct units.

My guide in this terrain is Gregory Norris, an industrial ecologist at the Harvard School of Public Health. With degrees in mechanical engineering from MIT and aerospace engineering from Purdue and several years in the air force as an astronautical engineer helping build better space structures, Norris has impeccable credentials. But he readily concedes, “For LCA you don’t need to be a rocket scientist—I know, I was one. It’s mainly data tracking.

That meticulous analysis yields metrics for harmful impacts over an auto’s life cycle, from manufacture to junked car, for the raw materials consumed; energy and water depleted; photochemical ozone created; contribution to global warming; air and water toxicity; and production of hazardous wastes—to name but a few. An LCA reveals that in terms of global warming effluents, for example, everything in the car’s life cycle from manufacture to getting scrapped pales when compared to the emissions while it is driven.

When Norris walked me through a Life Cycle Assessment for glass packaging, like that for jams or pasta sauce, we ended up in a maze of interdependent linkages in a seemingly endless chain of material, transportation, and energy demands. Manufacturing bottles for jams (or anything in a glass container for that matter) requires getting stuff from dozens of suppliers—including silica sand, caustic soda, limestone, and a variety of inorganic chemicals, to name but a few—as well as the services of suppliers of fuels like natural gas and electricity. Each one of the suppliers makes purchases from or otherwise utilizes dozens of its own suppliers.

The basics for making glass have changed little since the time of ancient Rome. Today, natural gas- powered furnaces burn at up to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit for twenty- four hours to melt sand into glass for windows, containers, or the monitor on your cell phone. But there’s far more to it than that. A chart showing the thirteen most important processes deployed to make glass jars revealed a system stitching together 1,959 distinct “unit processes.” Each unit process along the chain itself represents an aggregate of innumerable subsidiary processes, themselves the outcome of hundreds of others, in what can appear an infinite regression.

I asked Norris for some detail. “For example, let’s trace the production of caustic soda. That requires inputs of sodium chloride, limestone, liquid ammonia, a variety of fuels and electricity, and transport of those inputs to the site. Sodium chloride production in turn involves mining and water use, and inputs of materials, equipment, energy, and transport.”

Because “everything connects to everything,” Norris says, “we need to think in a new way.”

Another insight: the supply chain for a glass jar may consist of seemingly endless links, but these eventually hook back onto earlier links. As Norris explained, “If you go beyond the total 1,959 links in the glass jar’s supply chain, you loop into repeats—the chain goes on forever, but asymptotically.”

Norris gave a simple example of such repetitive loops. “It takes electricity to make steel, and it takes steel to make and maintain an electric power plant,” he explained. “You could truly say that the chain goes on forever—but it’s also true that the extra impacts of the upstream processes get smaller and smaller as you trace them farther and farther back.”

Making a glass jar requires the use of hundreds of substances somewhere upstream in the supply chain, each one with its own profile of impacts. There are around one hundred substances released into water and fifty or so into soil along the way. Among the 220 different kinds of emissions into the air, for instance, caustic soda at a glass factory accounts for 3 percent of the jar’s potential harm to health and 6 percent of its danger to ecosystems.

Another ecosystem threat, accounting for 16 percent of glassmaking’s negative impact, results from the energy for the furnace. Twenty percent of the negatives specifically for climate change are attributed to the generation of electricity for the factory that makes the glass. Overall, half the emissions from making a glass jar that contribute to global warming occur at the glass factory, the other half in other parts of the supply chain. The list of chemicals released into the air from the glass factory runs from carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxides at relatively high levels through trace amounts of heavy metals like cadmium and lead.

When you analyze the inventory of materials needed to make one kilogram of packaging glass, you get a list of 659 different ingredients used at various stages of production. These range from chromium, silver, and gold to exotic chemicals like krypton and isocyanic acid to eight different molecular structures for ethane.

The details are overwhelming. “That’s why we use impact assessment, where we can sum it all up into a few informative indicators,” says Norris. For instance, if you want to know what
carcinogens are involved in glassmaking, an LCA tells you the main culprit is aromatic hydrocarbons, the best known being VOCs, the volatile organic compounds that make the smell of fresh paint or a vinyl shower curtain a matter of concern. For glassmaking, these compounds account for about 70 percent of the process’s cancer-causing impact.

However, none of these are released directly from glassmaking at the factory; they are all somewhere else in the supply chain. Each one of the units of analysis in the glass jar’s LCA offers a point for analyzing impacts. Drilling down into the LCA reveals that 8 percent of the cancer-causing impacts come from releases of volatile organic compounds associated with constructing and maintaining the factory, 16 percent from producing the natural gas the factory uses to heat its furnaces, and 31 percent from making HDPE, high- density polyethylene for the plastic the glass is wrapped in for shipping.

Does this mean we should stop using glass jars for foods? Of course not. Glass, unlike some plastics, does not leach questionable chemicals into fluids and remains endlessly recyclable.

But as Norris took me through the highlights of that glass jar’s LCA, it hit me: all this was for a glass jar that is 60 percent recycled.

Exactly what, I asked Norris, is gained by that 60 percent? For one, he answered, the amount of new glass replaced by the recycled content saves about that proportion of weight in raw materials extracted, processed, and transported. “Of course you still need to process and transport post- consumer glass, but the net impact of glass recycling is still beneficial,” he reassured me, adding an example: “Every twenty- eight percent of recycled content saves five hundred gallons of water per ton of glass produced and avoids emissions of twenty pounds of CO2 to the atmosphere.”

And yet all those other impacts remain, despite the recycling. This transforms our notions of “green” from what seems a binary judgment—green or not into a far more sophisticated arena of fine distinctions, each showing relatively better or worse impacts along myriad dimensions. Never before have we had the methodology at hand to track, organize, and display the complex inter-relationships among all the steps from extraction and manu facture of goods through their use to their disposal—and summarize how each step matters for ecosystems, whether in the environment or in our body.

Every small step toward green helps, to be sure. But our craze for all things green represents a transitional stage, a dawning of awareness of ecological impact but one that lacks precision, depth of understanding, and clarity. Much of what’s touted as “green” in reality represents fantasy or simple hype. We are past the day when one or two virtuous qualities of a product qualify it as green. To tout a product as green on the basis of a single attribute—while ignoring numerous negative impacts—parallels a magician’s sleight of hand.

Consider a study of 1,753 environmental claims made for over a thousand different products plucked from the aisles of big- box stores. Some paper brands, for instance, focus on a narrow set of features, like having some recycled fiber content or chlorine- free bleaching, while ignoring other significant environmental issues for paper mills, such as whether the pulp comes from sustainable forestry or whether the massive amounts of water used are properly cleansed before return to a river. Or there’s the office printer that proclaims its energy efficiency but ignores its impact on the quality of indoor air or its incompatibility with recycled printer cartridges or recycled paper. In other words, it was not designed to be green from cradle to grave, but only engineered to tackle a single problem.

To be sure, there are relatively virtuous products, building materials, and energy sources. We can buy detergent without phosphates, install carpeting that exudes fewer toxins or flooring of sustainable bamboo, or sign up for energy that comes mainly from wind, solar, or other renewable sources. And all that can make us feel we have made a virtuous decision.

But those green choices, helpful as they are, too often lull us to more readily ignore the way that what we now think of as “green” is a bare beginning, a narrow slice of goodness among the myriad unfortunate impacts of all manufactured objects. Today’s standards for green ness will be seen tomorrow as eco- myopia.

“Very few green products have been systematically assessed for how much good they actually do,” says Gregory Norris. “First you have to do an LCA, and that’s rare.” Maybe thousands of products of any kind have gone through these rigorous impact evaluations, he adds, “but that’s a tiny fraction—millions are sold. Plus, consumers don’t realize how interconnected industrial processes are,” let alone their myriad consequences.

“The bar is too low for green products,” Norris concludes. Our current fixation on a single dimension of “green” ignores the multitude of adverse impacts that shadow even the most seemingly virtuous of items. As Life Cycle Assessment of just about anything shows, virtually everything manufactured is linked to at least trace quantities of environmental toxins of one kind or another, somewhere back in the vast recesses of the industrial supply chain. Everything made has innumerable consequences; to focus on one problem in isolation leaves all the other consequences unchanged.

As one industrial ecologist confided, “The term ‘eco- friendly’ should not ever be used. Anything manufactured is only relatively so.”

This shadow side of industry has been overlooked in the value chain concept, which gauges how each step in a product’s life, from extracting materials and manufacture through distribution, adds to its worth. But the notion of a value chain misses a crucial part of the equation: while it tracks the value added at each step of the way, it ignores the value subtracted by negative impacts. Seen through the lens of a product’s Life Cycle Assessment, that same chain tracks a product’s ecological negatives, quantifying its environmental and public health downsides at each link. This window on a company or product’s negative ecological footprint might be called the “devalue chain.”

Such information has strategic importance. Every negative value in an LCA offers a potential for upgrading and so improving the item’s overall ecological impacts. Assessing the pluses and minuses throughout a product’s value chain offers a metric for business decisions that will boost the pluses and lessen the minuses.

In a day when major players in every industry, and more and more consumers, are pressing for green, we would do well to understand the implication of improving impacts all along the supply chain and throughout a product’s life cycle. Green is a process, not a status—we need to think of “green” as a verb, not an adjective. That semantic shift might help us focus better on greening.

Excerpted from Ecological Intelligence © 2009 Random House – also reprinted at Scientific American

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Is What You're Buying Safe?

A while back I bought a bargain-bin, shiny, toy car for my grandson, a
toddler, only to learn within the next few days two disheartening
facts: First, the bright colors painted on cheap toys are often spiked
with lead dust to add luster. Worse, toys plucked from the shelves of
the very chain where I bought the car had been found to contain lead. I
knew, too, the toy car would inevitably end up in his mouth at some
point. I’ve never given him that little gift.

Read the full post at wowowow.com

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Truth and Consequences

Now we can trace the real environmental impact of the stuff we buy. How to raise your own eco-IQ.

(Originally published at Newsweek.com)

A while ago I bought my grandson, a toddler, a bright yellow wooden racing car, for just 99 cents. But then I happened to read that lead in paint makes colors (particularly yellow and red) brighter and last longer; because lead costs less than alternates, cheaper toys are more likely to contain it. I have no idea if the sparkling yellow paint on this toy car harbors lead or not—but now, months later, that sporty racer sits atop my desk. I never gave it to my grandson.

Every item we buy has a hidden price tag: a toll on the planet, on our health and on the people whose labor provides those goods. Each man-made thing has its own web of impacts left along the way from the extraction or concoction of its ingredients, during its manufacture and transport, through its use in our homes and workplaces, to the day we dispose of it. These unseen impacts are incredibly important. For instance, an ingredient in sunscreen primes the growth of a deadly virus in coral reef. Four thousand to 6,000 metric tons of sunscreen wash off swimmers each year worldwide. The dangers are greatest, of course, where the most swimmers are drawn to the beauty of coral reefs.

Read the full story at Newsweek

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Ecological Accounting

By Daniel Goleman and Gregory Norris (a version of this blog appeared as a New York Times OpEd on Sunday, April 19, 2009)

With spring in the air, our thoughts turn to outdoor pastimes, and increasingly these days, to ecological correctness. Consider, for example, that paragon of eco-virtue, the stainless steel water bottle that lets us hydrate without discarding endless plastic bottles. A fine-grained accounting of the ecological impacts of steel versus plastic reveals some surprising twists.

What we think of as “green” turns out to be less so (and sometimes more so) than we assume, when viewed through the lens of life cycle assessment or LCA, a method used by industrial ecologists – a discipline that blends industrial engineering and chemistry with environmental science and biology — to assess how manmade systems impact natural ones. LCAs yield a fine-grained analysis of the environmental and health impacts of a stainless steel bottle from the extraction or concoction of its ingredients and its manufacture, through distribution, use and final disposal.  

We’re all concerned about carbon footprints these days. But for stainless steel the main concerns in addition to climate change are releases into the environment of particulates and human toxins, depletion of fossil fuels and natural resources, and eco-toxicity.

 The 21st century has inherited from the 20th (and sometimes the 19th) a legacy of manufacturing processes and a palette of industrial chemicals that were developed in a more innocent age, when no one knew – or cared that much – about the impacts of industry on nature.  Today LCA, among other methods, makes these impacts vividly clear. This end of innocence presents a vast entrepreneurial opportunity: we need to re-invent everything, starting with the most basic methods of commerce and industry.

Many companies are already doing this. When Proctor & Gamble analyzed the energy footprint of all their products, the biggest villain was heating water for detergents – and so they developed a cold water alternative.

One avenue for speeding up such reinvention could be Earthster, a free, open-source, web-based program that offers business people LCA analysis of the various stages in a product’s supply chains. Earthster, now under development, will allow these industrial shoppers to signal their suppliers about the ecological improvements they want to see in products, and lets innovators tell potential buyers they have an upgrade to offer.

This process could set in motion a continuous easing of industry’s ecological impacts. Each product’s life cycle analysis can be read as a map for spotting where upgrades will do the most good. For enterprising inventors and entrepreneurs, every man-made thing represents opportunities to innovate to lessen impacts. For example, using a single wall rather than the double walls found in stainless steel thermos bottles uses 30 percent less steel, with proportional benefits in all the bottle’s ecological impacts. 

We can all help motivate these improvements by making such upgrades a business opportunity for innovation that pays. Newly available shopping software, called Goodguide, lets you roam the aisles of a store consulting your iPhone to get a comparison of Product A’s ecological impacts compared to five other brands of the same thing. Shoppers can choose any of hundreds of impacts as their lens on products, from carbon footprints or depletion of natural resources, to suspected carcinogens or other toxins. As we vote with our dollars on these issues, market share will shift to favor innovative eco-improvements.

Highlights from the Life Cycle Analysis of a Stainless Steel Water Bottle

1) Raw material extraction and processing: By some estimates there are over 1,400 discrete steps involved in producing stainless steel, like mining nickel and chromium ores, then heating the ore, and adding chemicals to concentrate and extract them. Each step can be analyzed for its environmental and health impacts. The largest are from processing the alloys used; food-grade stainless steel typically contains 18% chromium and eight to ten percent nickel, both in the form of alloys that readily mix with steel. Most chrome ore comes from mines in Kazakstan, South Africa, or India. Workers exposed to chromium have heightened risk of cancer. Production of high-carbon ferrochromium (a precursor to stainless steel) is energy intensive, and releases into the air carbon dioxide and particulates dangerous for respiration (for example, nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide) as well as toxins like the heavy metals lead, arsenic, and mercury that end up in air, water, and soil – partly from burning coal for electricity and then disposing of coal ash. Likewise, producing ferronickel draws on a supply chain that spews over 400 pollutants to air, water and soil, including barium, greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide and methane – and particulates.

2) Manufacture – at the steel mill: Steel can be made two ways: by melting and refining raw iron with an oxygen enhanced coal-burning furnace, or using electric arc furnaces to melt steel and iron scrap. In either case, making stainless steel is more polluting than making regular steel; environmental and health impacts are roughly ten times greater – largely because of the extra energy demanded by, and emissions from, producing the nickel and chromium alloys that make it “stainless”. Life cycle assessment lets steel-makers spot ways to lessen stainless’ ecological impacts, and to quantify the benefits. For instance, if the steel production used recycled iron scrap instead of newly mined pig iron, its impacts on human health and the environment would be 10-15 percent less; a single-wall design in addition to using recycled metals reduces the bottle’s ecological impacts by a total of about 36%.

3) Distribution – The bottle’s journey from factory to distribution center to you resulted in particulate and assorted other emissions, oil and energy use. If you bought it at a store,  heating and cooling, lighting, ventilation, heating, and all the materials needed to run the place can contribute as much environmental impact as producing the bottle itself. Shipping the bottle from Asia in a tightly packed cargo container, plus a few hundred miles by truck, add only one to five percent to the environmental burden.

4) Use. One danger of any reusable water bottle is bacteria build up. If you wash your stainless steel water bottle in a dishwasher that uses a half-liter of electrically heated water, somewhere between 50 and a hundred washes result in the same amount of pollution caused by making the bottle in the first place. If you wash it in cold water instead this still demands electricity to pump the water and chemical to treat it – but these impacts are tiny compared to those from making the bottle in the first place.

5) Disposal. Steel lasts forever; so disposal probably comes the day you lose the top. If you don’t replace the top, try to dispose of the bottle so that it finds its way to a steel recycler. By recycling stainless steel, you return not only steel but also the alloys of nickel and chromium, back into the production chain, reducing the need to mine and process these essential ingredients. The largest negative impact from throwing any steel into the garbage so it ends up in a landfill is the missed opportunity to recycle it. Some people object to the environmental cost of transporting recycled goods so they can be reprocessed. But the energy benefits and greenhouse gas reductions from using recycled steel to make a new bottle are more than ten times the energy required to ship its mass by rail freight from coast to coast.

The Bottom Line.  Stainless steel has virtues like being durable and hygienic makes it irreplaceable for, say, uses like surgical equipment. But is it always better than plastic as a water holder? If your steel water bottle takes the place of standard throwaway plastic ones, the steel alternative will become a net benefit to the environment somewhere between 15 to 25 uses for most impact categories. But this depends on the specific impact you care about; the tipping point is just eight uses for fossil fuel depletion, but near 500 for freshwater eco-toxicity.  Then again, there was a time before the advent of Perrier when we just used drinking fountains.

Bios: Daniel Goleman is the author of Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything. Gregory Norris teaches at the University of Arkansas and the Harvard School of Public Health, and heads the development of Earthster.

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What is ecological intelligence?

From Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything

Ecologists tell us that natural systems operate at multiple scales. At the macro level there are global biogeochemical cycles, like that for the flow of carbon, where shifts in ratios of elements can be measured not just over the years, but over centuries and geologic ages. The ecosystem of a forest balances the entwined interplay of plant, animal, insect species, down to the bacteria in soil, each finding an ecological niche to exploit, their genes co-evolving together. At the mico-level cycles run through on a scale of millimeters or microns, in just seconds.

How we perceive and understand all this makes the crucial difference. “The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way,” wrote the poet William Blake two centuries ago. “Some see Nature all ridicule and deformity, and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees.”

When it comes to seeing nature, these differences in perception have huge consequence. A polar bear stranded on an ice drift or a vanishing glacier offer powerful symbols of the perils we face from global warming. But the inconvenient truths don’t stop there — only our collective ability to perceive them does. We need to sharpen the resolution and broaden the range of our lens on nature; to see how synthetic chemicals disrupt the cells of an endocrine system as well as the slow rising of ocean levels.

Our species needs to re-sensitize ourselves to such dynamics in nature, in order to preserve them. We have no sensors nor any innate brain system designed to warn us of the innumerable ways that human activity corrodes our planetary niche. We have to acquire a new sensitivity to an unfamiliar range of threats, beyond those our nervous system’s alarm radar picks up — and learn what to do about them. That’s where ecological intelligence enters the picture.

“Ecological intelligence” denotes the ability to adapt to our ecological niche. Ecological refers to an understanding of organisms and their ecosystems, and intelligence lends the capacity to learn from experience and deal effectively with our environment .  Ecological intelligence lets us apply what we learn about how human activity impinges on ecosystems so as to do less harm and once again to live sustainably in our niche — these days the entire planet.

Today’s threats demand we hone a new sensibility, the capacity to recognize the hidden web of connections between human activity and nature’s systems, and the subtle complexities of their intersections. This awakening to new possibilities must result in a collective eye-opening, a shift in our most basic assumptions and perceptions, one that will drive changes in commerce and industry as well as in our individual actions and behaviors.

The Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner reinvented the way we think about IQ by arguing that there are several other varieties of intelligence besides the ones that help us do well in school, and that these intelligences also allow us to do well in life. Gardner enumerated seven kinds, from the spatial abilities of an architect to the interpersonal aptitudes that make teachers or leaders great. Each of these intelligences, he argues, has a unique talent or ability that helped us adapt to the challenges we faced as a species, and that continue to benefit our lives.

The uniquely human ability to design a way of living that adapts to virtually any of the extremes of climate and geology the Earth offers would certainly qualify.  Pattern recognition of any kind, Gardner suggests, may have its roots in the primal act of understanding how nature operates, such as classifying what goes in which natural grouping.  Such talents have been displayed by every native culture in adapting to its particular environment.

The contemporary expression of ecological intelligence extends the native naturalist’s ability to categorize and recognize patterns to sciences like chemistry, physics, and ecology (among many others), applying the lenses of these disciplines to dynamic systems wherever they operate at any scale, from the molecular to the global. This knowledge about how things and nature work includes recognizing and understanding the countless ways manmade systems interact with natural ones ecological intelligence. Only such an all-encompassing sensibility can let us see the interconnections between our actions and their hidden impacts on the planet, our health, and our social systems.

Ecological intelligence melds these cognitive skills with empathy for all life. Just as social and emotional intelligence build on the abilities to take other people’s perspective, feel with them, and show our concern, ecological intelligence extends this capacity to all natural systems. We display such empathy whenever we feel distress at a sign of the “pain” of the planet, or resolve to make things better. This expanded empathy adds to a rational analysis of cause-effect the motivation to help.

To tap into this intelligence we need to get beyond the thinking that puts mankind outside nature; the fact is we live enmeshed in ecological systems, and impact them for better or worse – and they us. We need to discover and share among us all the ways this intimate interconnectedness operates, to see the hidden patterns that connect human activity to the larger flows of nature, to understand our true impacts, and to learn how to do better.

We face an evolutionary impasse: the ways of thinking that in the ancient past guided our innate ecological intelligence were well-suited to the harsh realities of prehistory. It was enough that we had a natural urge to gobble as much sugars and fats as we could find to fatten ourselves against the next famine, sufficient that our olfactory brain would ensure toxins triggered nausea and disgust to spoiled food, and that our neural alarm circuits made us run from predators.  That hard-wired savvy brought our species to the threshold of civilization.

But ensuing centuries have blunted the skills of the billions of individuals who live amidst modern technologies. Career pressures drive us to master hyperspecialized expertise, and in turn to depend on other specialists for tasks beyond our realm. Any of us may excel in a narrow range, but we all depend on the skills of experts – farmers, software engineers, nutritionists, mechanics – to make life work for us. We no longer can rely on our astute attunement to our natural world nor the passing on through generations of local wisdom that let native peoples find ways to live in harmony with their patch of the planet.

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