When my daughter recently returned from a class trip to a farmers' market, she handed me a vocabulary list: "Food miles," one entry read. "The distance a food must travel from farm to plate. The farther the distance, the more impact on our environment (transportation pollution) and the more need to preserve and package the food."
When deciding what to buy, it’s important to know the whole story. That’s the central message of Daniel Goleman’s Ecological Intelligence, which explores why the environmental and social impacts of consumer goods remain hidden and how “radical transparency,” a system the author proposes for revealing those costs to the public, will force producers to change how they make things.