Daniel Goleman - Emotional Intelligence, Social Intelligence, Ecological Intelligence

The Earth Needs a New Operating System and You are the Programmers

Paul Hawken is a personal hero, someone who has led the way in progressive thinking and action for an ecologically sound world. In terms of ecological intelligence, he’s a genius.

I was deeply moved by the address he gave to the University of Portland graduating class of 2009, and want to share it:

“…You are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation – but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement. Basically, the earth needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades.

This planet came with a set of operating instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don’t poison the water, soil, or air, and don’t let the earth get overcrowded, and don’t touch the thermostat have been broken. Buckminster Fuller said that spaceship earth was so ingeniously designed that no one has a clue that we are on one, flying through the universe at a million miles per hour, with no need for seatbelts, lots of room in coach, and really good food – but all that is changing.”

To read more: http://www.up.edu/commencement/default.aspx?cid=9456&pid=3144

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"Empathy" – Who's Got It, Who Does Not

When President Obama tells us he wants a compassionate Supreme Court justice with “empathy” for people’s struggles, he’s wandered into arguments within psychology of what we mean by the term.

There are at least three varieties of empathy, each with very different implications for spotting the right candidate. The first, cognitive empathy, means that we can understand how the other person thinks; we see his point of view. This makes for good debaters, sales people and negotiators. On the other hand, people who have strengths in cognitive empathy alone can lack compassion – they get how you see it, but don’t care about you. Psychologists speak of the “Dark Triad” – narcissists, Machiavellians, and sociopaths, who can be slick with their arguments but have a heart of stone (think Dick Cheney).

The next variety, emotional empathy, refers to someone who feels within herself the emotions of the person she’s with. This creates a sense of rapport, and most probably entails the brain’s mirror neuron system, which activates our own circuits the emotions, movements and intentions we see in the other person. This lets us feel with the other person – but not necessarily feel for, the prerequisite for compassion.

That requires empathic concern, the third variety of empathy. Empathic concern means we not only understand how the person sees things and feels in the moment, but also want to help them if we sense the need. A study of empathic concern in seven-year-olds found that those who showed least concern when they saw their mother in distress were most likely to have a criminal record two decades later.

All three varieties of empathy should be at play in the compassionate nominee President Obama seeks.

Does that point to a woman as the likely best candidate? Maybe. Converging data confirms that women tend to be more empathetic on average than men, especially when it comes to emotional empathy. On the other hand, Ruth Jacobs, who coaches executives to boost leadership essentials like empathy, has found that among those who perform in the top ten percent on business outcomes, the men’s empathy is as strong as the women’s.

Empathy can be strengthened – at least some varieties. Paul Ekman, the psychologist who inspired the TV series “Lie To Me,” developed a web-based training tool that lets anyone (at least, me, when I tried it) up their ability to read another person’s emotions from their facial expressions. You can learn to detect super-fast facial tics that reveal a person’s true feelings – a way to sense when they might be lying, or denying that something upsets them, or that they are really attracted to so-and-so despite their protestations to the contrary.

Then there are the studies on “mindsight” of Dr. Daniel Siegel, a child psychiatrist at UCLA, that suggest these are essential human abilities we should be teaching every child. Since empathy is the basis of concern and compassion, should it be just for Supreme Court Justices?

Originally published at Huffingtonpost.com

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Ecological Intelligence

There’s a new kind of math for the environmentally concerned, one that answers those everyday eco-conundrums like, Which is better: a reusable stainless steel water bottle, or those throwaway plastic ones?

The answers come from life cycle assessment (or LCA), the method used by industrial ecologists — a discipline that blends industrial engineering and chemistry with environmental science and biology — to assess how man-made systems impact natural ones. LCAs tells us that buying food in one store that’s been shipped in bulk leaves a smaller carbon footprint than driving around town to the local bakery, farmer’s market, and dairy. Or that the better wine choice for those living east of Columbus, Ohio, is a French Bordeaux, and for those to the west it’s the Napa Valley.

Those are simple problems in ecological accounting, which is designed to evaluate any manufactured thing — your iPhone, Cheerios, lip gloss — on its entire range of impacts on the environment, human health, and the people who labored to make it. An LCA lays bare the hidden impacts of our stuff from the moment its ingredients are extracted or concocted, through manufacture, transportation, retail, use and disposal. A simple glass bottle requires 1,959 discrete steps from birth to disposal, each of which can be analyzed for dozens of impacts, from particles emitted to air, water and soil, to energy footprint or impact on the incidence of cancer.

Gregory Norris, the industrial ecologist who walked me through these ecological calculations, is putting LCAs to good use in Earthster, an open source website designed to help the folks who manage supply chains identify the impacts of their products and find less harmful upgrades.

And the more we all apply this new math, the greater our collective ecological intelligence. So here’s the lowdown on a very practical question: is it more ecologically correct to tote a stainless steel bottle you refill with water, or to use water in throwaway plastic bottles? As it turns out, it all depends.

Off the bat, making stainless steel has a worse impact profile than knocking out plastic bottles. Food-grade stainless is an alloy of chromium, nickel, and pig iron. The chromium comes from minds in places like Kazakstan and India, where workers have a heightened risk of cancer from exposure to the raw ore. Melting the metals requires heating them to thousands of degrees. All these processes release hundreds of pollutants into air, water and soil — including green house gases like methane and lung-clogging particulates. Then once you have your steel bottle, if you wash it 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.

Putting aside the question of plastics ridden with BPA, the chemical suspected of being a carcinogen and endocrine disrupter, the overall ecological impacts of a stainless bottle, compared to plastic, are more worrisome pretty much across the board.

So does it pay to use plastic bottles rather than stainless? Yes — but.

You’ve got to use the stainless bottle enough times to offset a great number of the plastic ones. At just five plastic bottles replaced by the stainless, the math starts to tip toward stainless; 25 uses brings you to the tipping point where most of the ecological negatives of the plastic bottles are outweighed by your using stainless steel. And at 500 replaced plastic bottles you pass the last marker — freshwater eco-toxicity — so you’re benefiting the planet every time you sip from your stainless.

Originally published at Huffingtonpost.com

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