Booked by HooksBookEvents: Tuesday, October 06, 2009
Book: Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything
Author: Daniel Goleman
Publisher: Broadway Books, 2009
About the Author – Bestselling author Daniel Goleman’s original and groundbreaking theories on emotional intelligence have radically altered common understanding about the nature and origins of intelligence.
An internationally renowned author, psychologist, science journalist, and corporate consultant, he is the author of the international bestsellers Emotional Intelligence, Working with Emotional Intelligence, and Social Intelligence. Emotional Intelligence was on the New York Times bestseller list for a year-and-a-half, with more than 5,000,000 copies in print worldwide in forty languages, and has been a bestseller in many countries.
Dr. Goleman received his Ph.D. from Harvard University, and was a science reporter focusing on the brain and behavioral sciences for the New York Times for twelve years. He was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and was awarded the American Psychological Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
He was a cofounder of the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning at the Yale University Child Studies Center (now at the University of Illinois at Chicago), is a member of the board of directors of the Mind and Life Institute, and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
About the Book – Goleman reveals the critical role of the psychological dimension in our decision making. We buy “herbal” shampoos containing industrial chemicals that can threaten our health or contaminate the environment. We dive down to see coral reefs, not realizing an ingredient in our sunscreen feeds a virus that kills the reef. We wear organic cotton T-shirts, but don’t know that its dyes may put factory workers at risk for leukemia. Goleman exposes why “green is a mirage” and illuminates the wild inconsistencies in our response to the ecological crisis.
Drawing on cutting-edge research, Goleman explains why we as shoppers have found it impossible to know the true range of harmful environmental and health consequences of our purchases. Both individuals and companies suffer from collective self-deception and blind spots in our thinking about our impacts on the environment and our own health. The problem is exacerbated by a blackout of information about the detrimental effects of producing, shipping, packaging, distributing, and discarding the goods we buy. Data about the adverse effects of so many of the things we purchase—from cleaning products to shampoos to the foods we eat—has not been available. But that is about to change.
Now, Goleman argues, the balance of power will shift from seller to buyer, as a new generation of technologies reveals the ecological truth about products as we are about to buy them. This “radical transparency” will enable consumers to make smarter purchasing decisions, and will drive companies to rethink and reform their businesses. This powerful alignment of consumers’ values with their purchasing power will foster, Goleman contends, a new age of competitive advantage.
Ecological Intelligence demonstrates how we can unlock the latent potential of the free market to drive the changes we, as individuals and corporations, must make to save the planet.