The great John Muir once wrote that "when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." If there are truer words to describe the world's current environmental situation, I don't know them. Muir's is about as primal a thought as I've ever read. In it lies much of what we need to know, and putting this crucial message into practice sits at the center of a new book that may just be the most important work of 2009.
The book is called Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything and its author, Daniel Goleman, takes on the subject of Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs), which are the science and the soul of responsible consumerism.
LCAs tell the story of the environmental impacts of a product from the time its raw materials are created through its manufacture, sale, use, and ultimate disposal by the consumer. LCAs help us discern whether buying a particular product is a wise decision or a wrong choice where the environment is concerned.
Here at Seventh Generation, we wrestle with LCAs on a daily basis. An enormous amount of work goes on behind the scenes here to identify the various impacts each of our products creates in the world around us and then to figure out how to ameliorate each one to the greatest extent possible.
It's all-consuming, and in this work we aspire to something Goleman calls, "radical transparency," which he says (and I agree) is the key to genuinely meaningful green buying. Radical transparency simply means quantifying and communicating every single environmental impact created at every single step of a product's life so that when we consider it for purchase we can do so with a deep knowledge about what its use will really cost. That may sound easy enough, but it should come with a don't-try-this-at-home warning because real radical transparency is insanely difficult to achieve.
Making, using, and disposing of a single glass bottle, to cite just one instance in a world of hundreds of thousands of consumer products, involves 1,959 separate steps, each of which has dozens of impacts, including pollution created, energy consumed, and any health problems that are detected. Or take stainless steel drinking bottles for water. They're the ideal alternative to disposable plastic bottles, right? Maybe not. It depends on how much you'll use yours because when we add up and compare all the impacts of the two types of bottles, what we find is that you have to use the stainless steel bottle 500 times before it beats bottled water to become the cleaner, healthier choice.
Ecological Intelligence is, if you'll excuse the phrase, littered with entirely fascinating and extremely useful information. It's got a lot of vital things to tell us about the secret environmental consequences of the stuff of daily life and why many of the products we think are green are actually not. Its lessons go a long way toward teaching us how to be far more empowered and infinitely more effective green consumers. I guarantee you'll be surprised by what Goleman has to say in this must-read work. If you read it, please come back and tell us what you think.
