DANIEL GOLEMAN ON OUR EVOLVING ECOLOGICAL INTELLIGENCE
by Owen Lipstein
Daniel Goleman is an internationally renowned psychologist
best known for popularizing cutting-edge neuroscience on emotional and social
intelligence. In Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of
What We Buy Can Change Everything (Broadway Business, 2009), this best-selling
author once again showcases his consummate ability to harvest complex data and
boil it down to what really matters. But this time his focus is on our capacity
to understand and address our current ecological crisis
When we spoke he helped us understand why it’s actually
physiologically difficult for us to care about things like global warming, why,
even if we do care, it's realistically harder to act, and why that's all about
to change—beginning with the least likely of places.
Owen Lipstein: Ecological Intelligence is the third book in
your narrative about intelligence.
Daniel Coleman: Yes, you could say that Emotional
Intelligence (Bantam, 1995) is really about self-awareness and self-mastery.
Social Intelligence (Bantam, 2006) is about our relationships with other people,
and Ecological Intelligence is about our relationship with the material world.
The root meaning of ecological comes from the word for home; it is our
relationship with the physical. It's about being intelligent and learning how
to take better care of the planet, its ecosystems and the people on it.
OL: Basically, what this book discusses is the cost and
benefit of actually behaving well—as a business premise.
DG: The book is aimed at both you and me as shoppers, and as
business people. I talk about how we are about to be given complete transparency
about the full ecological footprint of the stuff we buy, from the extracts of
the ingredients, to manufacture, transport, retail and disposal. So over the
entire life cycle of a box of Kleenex, or detergent, or an X-Box, we can know
what toxic chemicals were dumped where, and what the impacts on global warming
were, and what chemicals are going to come into our body—or someone else's—as a
result of buying this product, or even how the workers who made it were
treated. We can know all of that at the point of purchase, and in fact, have it
immediately compared to other competitive products.
OL: Now that we are about to have, as you say, better
transparency in consumer information, are you optimistic that information will
actually cause people to buy or behave differently?
DG: Well, for years there has been a kind of static number
coming up in consumer surveys that suggests about one in ten shoppers are passionate
about this and will go out of their way to get the more virtuous product, that
about 25 percent couldn't care less, and that about two-thirds in the middle
say, "I would do it if it was easy."
Well, it's about to get easy. Last week Wal-Mart announced
that it is developing a sustainability index, which is basically ecological
transparency on the products they stock. They are going to put the ratings of products
next to the price tag in their stores, and they invite other retailers like
Target and Costco—and everybody else—to do the same.
What has prevented most people from taking advantage of dozens
and dozens of eco-labels around is that there's what is called "high information
costs." You have to make an effort. You have to get online, you have to go
to the website, you have to look up your product, you have compare it to other
products, and you have to remember all of that when you go shopping. Now we are
on the verge of that being made completely effortless for us, and that lowers
information costs to zero.
I think that smart money says that lots of shoppers who
haven't bothered before are now going to include this in their shopping decision,
and what that does is put ecological virtue into play in terms of market share
in a way that it has never been before.
Now, this is a business implication, but once that happens
it changes the game. You have to have sustainability as part of your core strategy—not
just something nice to do because it's socially responsible, but really there's
no business benefit—now it's survival. In fact, Wal-Mart hinted that if you
don't do this, if you don't reveal your impact and so on, they won't stock you
anymore.
OL: Don't you think that people actually have to believe—not
just in their intellectual self, but in their core self—that if we don't do something,
then really bad things are going to happen and alongside that, they also have
to believe that they as individuals, in some small way, can make a difference?
DG: I think that we're wired in evolution to be alert and
hypersensitive to a very narrow range of things. Global warming is not one of
them: it’s too remote, too slow—it's not like a wildcat about to leap. However,
these new sustainability indices also include toxic chemicals—things that can
make us or our loved ones sick down the road because our body accumulates these
chemicals, and that begins an inflammatory syndrome, which leads to disease—so
I think the more immediate motivator will be self-interest, and trying to avoid
toxic chemicals.
I mean, I care very much about the environment, but speaking
as a psychologist, the environmental crisis, the destruction of non-renewable
resources, and the dead zones in water, and global warming including the air,
and so on, are actually all removed from any one us, and not as compelling as
the danger of tocix chemicals in our home.
OL: In effect, you're saying that we're simply not hard-wired
to respond to global crisis.
DG: We’re wired to prioritize crises, but the ones we
respond to immediately are the ones that seem imminent and are personal. A crisis
someone else is not as compelling as a crisis in our own life, and a crisis for
someone else fifty years from now is not as compelling as what is happening to
us this minute.
OL: Given your various books on intelligence, do you think
that there is kind of a turning point in this area—that people are changing now,
not just because they have better information, but because there is something else going on?
DG: Well, I think that a huge generational shift is about to
happen. I'm a baby boomer and our generation grew up during the cold war. The
big trauma was the nuclear fear. This generation is growing up with ecological,
environmental and climate warming crises foremost on their mind, and I think
that they are going to vote with their dollars much more enthusiastically than
our generation about all of this, and I think that is what's going to make a
huge difference.
I also think it's part of a mass awakening from a trance
we've been in that led us to tell ourselves the story about how [our
lifestyles] had no bad consequence.
OL: We're working on our harvest issue now, and of course
the harvest is largely about food, but on a slightly different level it is also
about what we reap from our activities.
DG: Well, I think there is a direct analog from food, and
harvesting food, and what goes into the food, and what the consequences of what
goes into growing the food are. With consumer goods, that's just another harvest:
we have a year-round crop of a seemingly endless flow of consumer goods, where
the ingredients are being harvested—usually in some distant part of the world.
[For instance, we are] clear cutting the Amazon, or destroying the rain forests
in Malaysia at a vast rate for rubber plantations, or [upsetting] the delicate
ecosystem of Tibet, which is the source of the main rivers for half of
Eurasia—and it's all to feed the same massive appetite which we experience
every time we go to the store. It's being driven by the consumer. All of that
is happening to make stuff to sell to us, and once we understand the cost of
that harvest—and that we now have the data at our fingertips that will allow us
to make wiser decisions—that can change. We can redirect.
OL: At one point in your book you refer to Paul Hawken's
book [Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and
Why No One Saw If Coming (Viking. 2007)] where he basically hopes and
hypothesizes that there is going to be some kind of event, a process that is
going to happen, that is spontaneous and from a lot of different places. Do you
think that is true?
DG: There is no question that there are stirrings at the
grassroots worldwide. I think Paul has really identified something, because we
are all responding in one way or another to the same forces in our lives, and
how we need to respond varies from group to group and person to person, but the
great commonality, I think, is the ecological—the inexorable destruction of the
human niche on the planet by humans, and how we enumerate that depends on what
part of it we can reach.
OL: We are having this conversation in the midst of bad
economic times, unprecedented in most of our lifetimes. What about the fact
that many of us think, I can't afford to worry about any of this stuff—it's all
I can do to make ends meet?
DC: Well, the nice thing about this is that it's being
spearheaded by Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is not only going to make the suppliers
engage in a process of perpetually upgrading the ecological impact of the
products in order to survive; they are also going to make them cheap. This sustainability
index is a disruptive technology. It's a game changer.
It has been a luxury to have organic, or to have the
ecologically virtuous product, but that is actually an artifact of those
products being early in the market—and also that they have been marketed as premium.
Wal-Mart is not going to market this stuff as premium. It's going to make sure
there are safer, greener, smarter products within reach of everyone, and that
is quite revolutionary.
OL: I guess it isn't useful to think about what Wal-Mart's
reasons —whether they're doing it because they conclude they can sell more
product, or if they're doing it because they want to help save the planet in
small ways, or if they just decided it looks good.
DG: I have no idea what their motivation is. But it really
doesn't matter to me because what they are going to do is creating an
earthquake in in business and in manufacturing—a wake-up call for everyone who
is doing strategic planning in any company.
OL: You think that just their very power in the
marketplace—for whatever reasons—will affect outcome?
DG: Wal-Mart has 100,000 suppliers. When I say suppliers,
they count Proctor and Gamble as one supplier. In other words, almost everybody
sells stuff to Wal-Mart to sell to us, and Wal-Mart is now telling its suppliers,
"You have to become transparent about the stuff we are selling from you,
and if you don't do it, you may not be able to sell your stuff at our store
anymore."
OL: Has Wal-Mart found that people are willing to pay
slightly more for these products?
DC: Not at all. We're talking Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart finds ways
to do whatever it does cheaply. This means it's going to present this conundrum
to manufacturers that you've got to upgrade the ecological impacts of what you
sell us—and keep the price the same. That opens the door to an enormous
entrepreneurial opportunity, because now those suppliers have to find suppliers
for them that have new ways of doing things ecologically.
OL: It's a game change.
DG: One guy at Wal-Mari said to me that it's "the
biggest innovative opportunity for the next 50 years. We have to reinvent
everything." What it means, for example, is that people who are struggling
with, say, a green chemistry alternative to something that now is petrochemical
based, are all of a sudden going to have a better face for investors. There is
going to be a demand for this stuff. This is the future. Wal-Mart is driving
it.
