Growing green antennae

Best known for his seminal book Emotional Intelligence, psychologist and former New York Timesscience editor Daniel Goleman now turns his attention to our ecological intelligence, writes ARMINTA WALLACE

GAZING OUT my living-room window recently at a good- humoured altercation between rival bin lorries on the street outside, I was moved to wonder about the exact meaning of the word “green”.

In the dim and distant past, one tatty lorry used to trundle around doing its dusty business. But now that we’re all busily sorting our household gunge into piles of paper, plastic, glass and whatever else, then putting it into the appropriate colour-coded bin, at least six bin lorries visit my road every week.

Six lorries instead of one, drinking six lots of diesel and sending six times the amount of exhaust fumes into the biosphere. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not a recycling rebel or anything. I did wonder, though – how green is it, really? Or is that a silly question?

Not according to US psychologist and journalist Daniel Goleman. He reckons we’re all going to have to ask a lot more of these kinds of questions, if we’re to develop what he calls “ecological intelligence”. Many of our so-called “green” decisions are actually, Goleman suggests, “greenish” – we’re basing them on incomplete or even wildly inaccurate data – and we can end up doing more harm than good.

“Our craze for all things green represents a transitional stage,” he writes in a recently published book, “a dawning of awareness of ecological impact but one that lacks precision, depth of understanding, and clarity.” It may not sound very upbeat, but Goleman is an optimist. He believes we’re about to enter a new information age: consumers will be able to find out the real hidden costs of the stuff to which we’re so addicted, and make purchasing decisions accordingly. Not so much “we buy, therefore we are” as “we buy green, therefore we are green”.

This is what has to happen, he says, if the green revolution is to progress to the next stage. It needs to be about more than just changing our brand of lightbulbs and switching our gizmos out of standby. It must influence everything we buy, from parsnips to detergents, from toy cars to the fancy boxes our favourite perfumes are packaged in.

Here’s how it works. An eco-conscious mother finds out that the mass-market brand of baby shampoo she’s been using contains an undesirable chemical compound. She changes to another brand (probably, though not necessarily, a less well-known brand) and is delighted with the results; the chemical is absent, the shampoo smells nicer, bubbles up better, lasts longer. She goes on Facebook and tells her friends. They tell their friends, and one of them posts it on a mumsy chatline as well. Before you can say jumping jellybabies, sales of the less well-known brand have bounced into the stratosphere.

Meanwhile, lots of mums get in touch with the well-known brand to register their unhappiness with the chemical. The well-known brand removes the chemical from the product. Everyone wins.

It’s all fine in theory. But as Goleman points out, in order to make these decisions we need to develop sharper consumer antennae – not just some of the time, but all of the time. We need a lot more information than we’re currently getting, and we need to face up to things we’ve been happily ignoring for years.

While researching his book, Goleman spoke to a range of specialist scientists and eco-heads. Chapter six finds him interviewing an industrial engineer. Pointing to his tape recorder, the boffin observes: “I’m sure you got a great deal on that. But how did they make it so cheap? What corners did they cut in the manufacturing of the metals, plastics and chemicals that went into the recorder’s body, the Led display, the circuit boards? What did they dump in a local river? What emissions went into the air? What did they just bury somewhere? And what was the impact on the neighbours, or the workers in those factories?”

Ouch. I’m now eyeing my own trusty little digital recorder in a totally different light. When I bought it I didn’t ask questions about local rivers in the country where it was made. Nor did I think about whether and how, when it finally conks out, it might safely be disposed of. I never thought of my little widget as a lethal weapon. But that, says Goleman, is how we’re going to have to think if we’re to accomplish what amounts to an evolutionary leap for our species.

Ecological intelligence isn’t the easy option. The interconnected webs of manufacturing, distribution, sales and consumption in our world are unbelievably labyrinthine. Most of this activity, however, is hidden from consumers – who, in any case, have been educated to focus on “price and value for money”.

As we’re now beginning to realise, this can also be translated as “it’s cheap for me, so to heck with the bigger picture”. Which may have been good enough for the 20th century – but just won’t hack it in the 21st.

Instead, Goleman proposes something called “radical transparency”. When we consider the green-ness of an item, we need to include its impact right through from manufacture to disposal.

Take the example of glass jars. They are, we’ve been led to believe, “greener” than plastic ones. But have you any idea how a glass jar is made? You need – among other things – silica sand, caustic soda, limestone, natural gas and electricity, all of which come from dozens of individual suppliers. Goleman counts a total of 1,959 distinct unit processes in the manufacturing process. For each jar, 100 substances are released into the water table and 50 or so into the soil. And all this for a glass jar that is 60 per cent “recycled”.

This is difficult stuff to stomach. It’s complicated and often depressing. “Why bother?” many people will ask. Well, if we don’t care about the damage we’re doing to the planet, and the evidence is that we really don’t, maybe the evidence of the damage we’re doing to ourselves will be something of a wake-up call. Increasingly, many of the women I know are beginning to wonder about the number of chemicals in the makeup and body lotions and bits and bobs we all use every day.

Take my body moisturiser. I like it a lot. It’s relatively inexpensive, you can get it in the supermarket. It’s neither too oily nor too light, and it’s unscented – so you can add whatever essential oil you fancy. Also, it has been recommended by Irish healthcare folks to at least one person I know who’s had a course of chemotherapy. So it’s gotta be safe, right? That’s what I thought – until I read the label. The lotion turns out to be almost one-third paraffin. It also contains lanolin, alcohol, sodium hydroxide, and methyl hydroxybenzoate. What on earth is methyl hydroxybenzoate? I look it up on the web.

It’s safe, says the information sheet. The only thing is, is may cause skin irritation – especially after repeated applications. A good ingredient to avoid, you might think – if you were manufacturing a body lotion.

It isn’t only the cheapie brands that are the problem, though. Nor is it just body lotions. Goleman is very good on chemicals. He writes about the compounds used to harden (or soften) plastics, which leach carcinogens into everything “from IV bags in hospitals to water wings”. He writes about the compounds commonly found in lipstick and the gases given off by computer terminals and printers. What he reveals about shampoos will either turn your hair grey or make it fall out.

These are, of course, tiny amounts. But what if the cumulative effect of tiny amounts over a lifetime adds up to something like a single massive overdose of radiation? As Goleman points out, our current toxicology safety standards are based on the latter; nobody has systematically studied the former.

Finding the information – and knowing whose information to trust – is going to be the big stumbling-block for consumers who want to consume with ecological intelligence. Goleman recommends the website goodguide.com, which is run by a for-benefit corporation based in California. In theory, it allows you to check the products you use and read up on their ecological back stories. It’s supposed to have 65,000 products and counting.

I tried to use it while researching this article, with a marked lack of success. It’s grindingly slow; the products are mostly US brands I’ve never heard of; and it crashed my computer three times in a row. But there are other sites – Skin Deep, for instance – which have given me pause for thought, even about expensive brands I once regarded as automatically kosher. That, it seems to me, is Goleman’s real message. There may be no such thing as completely kosher from here on in. But there should definitely be no automatic.

Ecological Intelligence: The Hidden Impacts of What We Buy, by Daniel Goleman, is published by Broadway Books

Changing minds, changing habits

The greener – as opposed to greenish – mindset is hard to get your head around. Take smells. Some of the smells we enjoy most – the smell of fresh paint, say, or that elusive “new car” smell – are actually the result of volatile man-made chemical compounds that act like low-grade toxins in our bodies. We’re going to have to learn to dislike them, big-time.

Nobody wants to pay extra for organic cotton. But would you still not pay the extra, even if you knew that the non-organic kind is responsible for 10 per cent of the world’s pesticide use? That it takes 2,700 litres of water to grow the cotton for one non-organic T-shirt? That many of the chemicals routinely used in dyeing are carcinogenic, which may not affect you and me to any great extent, but has been shown to cause high rates of leukaemia among workers in dye plants?

We all vaguely know there’s a problem with coral reefs. The culprit, however, is something unimaginable: sunscreen. Between 4,000 and 6.000 metric tonnes of the stuff wash off swimmers every year, threatening to turn 10 per cent of the planet’s most beautiful reefs into bleached skeletons.

Plastic food containers – we all use them. They’re handy, cheap and great for school lunches. They may also contain Bisphenol-A, an oestrogen-like chemical compound which may leak into water, disrupting the endocrine system. Is that a risk we should really be taking?