Daniel Goleman - Author of Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence

If you were trapped by a blizzard and your very survival depended on how well you could work together with a handful of other people, what should you wish for in your team-mates? A goodly dose of emotional intelligence.

That conclusion stems from two independent studies reported in the journal Human Performance. In both studies teams of volunteers were posed the challenge of how to survive in simulation of desperate survival scenarios, like a blizzard. Close to 20 teams were evaluated on how well they came up with solutions that would help them survive.

The champion teams, both studies found, were highest in group emotional intelligence. Intriguingly, when individuals were given the same challenge, their cognitive ability (as measured by SAT scores – these were college students) was the best predictor of survival. But once people were put in a team situation, individual cognitive ability made virtually no difference – instead emotional intelligence made the difference.

“This book is not a tree.”

That modest, if enigmatic, statement holds out hope for the environmental crisis facing our planet. It comes in the prologue to Cradle to Cradle, an inspiring and visionary book by William McDonough, a green architect and designer, and Michael Braungart, a chemist and former chief scientist for Greenpeace. Together they have written a manifesto for a rethinking of the way we manufacture products and use the resources of our planet.

They urge us to go beyond merely recycling, to utterly rethinking what goes into the things we use so that they when we finish with them they can re-join nature’s cycles rather than simply become clutter in a toxic landfill.

The paper used in the book itself exemplifies this approach. Developed by Charles Melcher of Melcher Media, the book’s publisher, the “paper” uses no wood pulp – and so “is not a tree.” Instead it is made from plastic fibers and other inorganic fillers that make it more durable than other paper. And, perhaps most important, this new kind of paper is what’s called a “technical nutrient,” a substance that can be re-used endlessly because it can be broken down and put into myriad other industrial products that use polymers. And no tree was sacrificed to make it.

This essay is also available at http://www.edge.org.

I live in a bowl-shaped valley on the edge of the Berkshire hills in New England. The prevailing winds come from the southwest. As it happens, a coal-burning electric plant sits in the dip next to the Holyoke Range at the southern edge of the valley, perfectly placed to fill the air with its unsavory mix of particulates – the plant is a dinosaur, one that due to various regulatory loopholes has been able to dodge costly upgrades that would make its emissions less toxic.

Nobody seems to mind. True, the head of pulmonary medicine at the local medical center bemoans the toll of the plant’s particulates on the respiratory tracts of those who live in the valley, particularly its children. But those who operate the Mt. Tom power plant blithely buy carbon-pollution credits that let it avoid the expense of upgrading its scrubbers.

The indifference of those of us whose respiratory systems routinely become inflamed, I’m convinced, is due in large part to a failure in collective awareness. As we join the throngs in the waiting room of the local asthma specialist, we make no connection between our being there and that smokestack, nor between our own use of electricity and the rate at which that smokestack belches its toxins.