What could make that reinvention pay? A factor unnoted by Ehrlich and others who have tried to diagnose this dilemma: ecological transparency.
Knowing where to focus in a system makes all the difference. Take the biggest mess facing our species: our slow-motion mass suicide as human systems degrade the global systems that support life on this planet. We can begin to get a more fine-tuned handle on this degradation by applying life cycle analysis (LCA) to the products and processes that cause it.
Over the course of its life cycle a simple glass jar, for instance,goes through about two thousand discrete steps. At each step the LCA can calculate a multitude of impacts, from emissions into air, water, and soil to impacts on human health or degradation of an ecosystem. The addition of caustic soda to the mix for glass-one of those steps-accounts for 6 percent of the jar's danger to ecosys tems, and 3 percent of its harm to health; 20 percent of the jar's role in climate warming is from the power plants that feed the glass fac tory. Each of the 659 ingredients used in glassmaking has its own LCA profile. And so on, ad infinitum.
Life cycle analyses can give you a tsunami of information, over whelming even the most ardent ecologists in the business world. An information system designed to cache all that life cycle infor mation would spew out a bewildering cloud of millions or billions of data points. Still, digging into that data can pinpoint, for in stance, exactly where in the history of that object changes can most readily reduce its ecological footprint.
The need to focus on a less complicated order (whether in or ganizing our closets, developing a business strategy, or analyzing LCA data) reflects a fundamental truth. We live within extremely complex systems, but engage them lacking the cognitive capacity to understand or manage them completely. Our brain has solved this problem by finding means to sort through what's complicated via simp)e decision rules. For instance, navigating our lives within the intricate social world of all the people we know gets simpler if we use trust as an organizing rule of thumb.
What could make that reinvention pay? A factor unnoted by Ehrlich and others who have tried to diagnose this dilemma: ecological transparency.
Knowing where to focus in a system makes all the difference. Take the biggest mess facing our species: our slow-motion mass suicide as human systems degrade the global systems that support life on this planet. We can begin to get a more fine-tuned handle on this degradation by applying life cycle analysis (LCA) to the products and processes that cause it.
Over the course of its life cycle a simple glass jar, for instance,goes through about two thousand discrete steps. At each step the LCA can calculate a multitude of impacts, from emissions into air, water, and soil to impacts on human health or degradation of an ecosystem. The addition of caustic soda to the mix for glass-one of those steps-accounts for 6 percent of the jar's danger to ecosys tems, and 3 percent of its harm to health; 20 percent of the jar's role in climate warming is from the power plants that feed the glass fac tory. Each of the 659 ingredients used in glassmaking has its own LCA profile. And so on, ad infinitum.
Life cycle analyses can give you a tsunami of information, over whelming even the most ardent ecologists in the business world. An information system designed to cache all that life cycle infor mation would spew out a bewildering cloud of millions or billions of data points. Still, digging into that data can pinpoint, for in stance, exactly where in the history of that object changes can most readily reduce its ecological footprint.
The need to focus on a less complicated order (whether in or ganizing our closets, developing a business strategy, or analyzing LCA data) reflects a fundamental truth. We live within extremely complex systems, but engage them lacking the cognitive capacity to understand or manage them completely. Our brain has solved this problem by finding means to sort through what's complicated via simp)e decision rules. For instance, navigating our lives within the intricate social world of all the people we know gets simpler if we use trust as an organizing rule of thumb.
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What could make that reinvention pay? A factor unnoted by Ehrlich and others who have tried to diagnose this dilemma: ecological transparency.
Knowing where to focus in a system makes all the difference. Take the biggest mess facing our species: our slow-motion mass suicide as human systems degrade the global systems that support life on this planet. We can begin to get a more fine-tuned handle on this degradation by applying life cycle analysis (LCA) to the products and processes that cause it.
Over the course of its life cycle a simple glass jar, for instance,goes through about two thousand discrete steps. At each step the LCA can calculate a multitude of impacts, from emissions into air, water, and soil to impacts on human health or degradation of an ecosystem. The addition of caustic soda to the mix for glass-one of those steps-accounts for 6 percent of the jar's danger to ecosys tems, and 3 percent of its harm to health; 20 percent of the jar's role in climate warming is from the power plants that feed the glass fac tory. Each of the 659 ingredients used in glassmaking has its own LCA profile. And so on, ad infinitum.
Life cycle analyses can give you a tsunami of information, over whelming even the most ardent ecologists in the business world. An information system designed to cache all that life cycle infor mation would spew out a bewildering cloud of millions or billions of data points. Still, digging into that data can pinpoint, for in stance, exactly where in the history of that object changes can most readily reduce its ecological footprint.
The need to focus on a less complicated order (whether in or ganizing our closets, developing a business strategy, or analyzing LCA data) reflects a fundamental truth. We live within extremely complex systems, but engage them lacking the cognitive capacity to understand or manage them completely. Our brain has solved this problem by finding means to sort through what's complicated via simp)e decision rules. For instance, navigating our lives within the intricate social world of all the people we know gets simpler if we use trust as an organizing rule of thumb.
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