Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything

Daniel Goleman

Doubleday (2009)

Ecological intelligence is our ability to adapt to our ecological niche. Our individual decisions reflect our understandings of organisms and their ecosystems and our capacity to deal effectively with our environment.

Goleman feels its our responsibility as consumers to make our business decisions based on full information. We have access to marketplace transparency like never  before. We can inform our purchasing decisions with instant access to the product, the supplier and the price, allowing the average person to spend his or her money ethically.

Goleman’s “green” is a process not a status; he urges us to think of green as a verb, not an adjective. Furthermore, much of what “green” represents is hype and it’s our responsibility to not fall into these faddish traps set for consumers. We should understand that while much “green” tracks value added, there is also the value subtracted and its negative impacts.

Radical transparency can create a vibrant new competitive play ground. Businesses can rethink their operations and can begin to reevaluate their definition of value. Sometimes, cost and value cannot be equated. Every purchase a consumer makes reflects what that consumer values, whether it be quality, how the product was made, where the product was made, the service received in relation to the product, or where the business was located.

With this in mind, we, Lemurians, are interested in helping our readers get the right book for your reading needs. We want you to have a good book, one that does not cost you valuable reading time. Each purchase is a vote as to whether price or reading time is more valuable to the reader.

Ecological Intelligence is very broad-minded and thought-provoking with concepts that can be applied to all our individual and business environs.

Elizabeth Gilbert has a new book.

Ordinarily, this kind of thing is not huge news but this particular writers’ previous book was Eat Pray Love. So what? Well….several years ago, THAT book become a megabestselling and deeply beloved memoir about Gilberts’ process of finding herself by leaving home. She faced down a premidlife crisis by doing what we all secretly dream of…running off for a year!! She spent that time in spiritual and personal exploration while traveling abroad through Italy, India and Indonesia. The memoir was on The New York Times best seller list in the spring of 2006 and by October, 2008, after 88 weeks, the book was still on the list at #2!

But now what do you do?

Gilbert said, “There’s something very scary about having millions of people waiting to see what you’re going to do next. The people who love ‘Eat Pray Love’ are very dear and are very encouraging, but they also have their expectations” (Motoko Rich, The New York Times Book Review, August 19, 2009).

“At the end of Eat Pray Love, Elizabeth Gilbert fell in love with Felipe, a Brazilian-born man of Australian citizenship who’d been living in Indonesia when they met. Resettling in America, the couple swore eternal fidelity to each other, but also swore to never, ever, under any circumstances get legally married. (Both were survivors of previous horrific divorces.) But providence intervened one day in the form of the United States government, which—after unexpectedly detaining Felipe at an American border crossing—gave the couple a choice: they could either get married, or Felipe would never be allowed to enter the country again. Having been effectively sentenced to wed, Gilbert tackled her fears of marriage by delving into this topic completely, trying with all her might to discover through historical research, interviews, and much personal reflection what this stubbornly enduring old institution actually is.” (From the jacket)

Her next book, Committed, was born.

When she finished a draft in May 2008, she took it to a copy shop to print out a first version. As soon as she began paging through it, she recoiled. “It was different from just the anxiety and insecurities that you feel when you’re writing something,” she said. “It was non-debatable.”  Without showing it to Viking’s publisher, she wrote asking for a deferral on her deadline. They gave her another year. After taking six months off, she decided she could write again, this time in what she believed was a more authentic voice. “I was scared that all the people who loved ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ might not want to read that new voice,” she said. “But I knew that if I didn’t do it that way it would just be a lousy book” (Motoko Rich, The New York Times Book Review, August 19, 2009).

“Ultimately, Gilbert is clear about what she, like most people, wants from marriage: everything. “We want intimacy and autonomy, security and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, coziness and thrills. But we can’t have it.” Gilbert understands this, yet she tries to convince herself and her readers that she has found a loophole. She tells herself a familiar story, that her marriage will be different. And she is, of course, right—everyone’s marriage is different. But everyone’s marriage is a compromise” (Ariel Levy, “The New Yorker“, January 11, 2010).

Committed has not received the acclaim or initial devotion of Eat Pray Love but at least she had the guts to get back out there. We seem to long for books that enlighten, entertain and motivate change in its readers, etc, but we tend to turn right back around and skewer any follow-up writings from that same beloved author. Go figure. This new book is good. It’s just not as good as the other. So what? I still like her.

Just in case your wondering what Elizabeth Gilbert was up to before she wrote Eat Pray Love; I think you will be fairly amazed! She was no literary lightweight. Her previous books include the collection, Pilgrims, a compilation of short stories which received the Pushcart Prize and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. This was followed by her novel, Stern Men, (about lobster fishermen in Maine) which was selected by The New York Times as a “Notable Book” and a biography of the woodsman Eustace Conway, called The Last American Man, which was a finalist for the 2002 National Book Award and a finalist for the 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award.

Not too shabby!!!

But Gilbert writes: “I don’t think I will ever write another book as raw, intimate and revealing as Eat. Pray, Love, which I wrote without imagining that millions of people would ever read it. While Committed is also written in a familiar-enough memoir structure, it is far less personal, and much more a meditation, or a contemplation, on a vast historical subject. I use myself and Felipe as sort of stand-ins for the readers, who, I suspect, probably have similar questions and hesitations about their own marriages and relationships, but I actually don’t feel very exposed or revealed by this story. If anything, I think Felipe and I are pretty representative of modern day lovers…” (see Elizabeth Gilberts’ website for full Q & A)

On writing, in general, she shares this:

“I love this work. I have always loved this work. My suggestion is that you start with the love and then work very hard and try to let go of the results. Cast out your will, and then cut the line.” (see Elizabeth Gilberts’ website for full Q & A)

There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby is the title of selected stories by one of Russia’s most outstanding contemporary fiction writers. Ludmilla Petrushevskaya is a writer of short stories, novels and plays, winner of prestigious literary prizes. Ludmilla is dear and her stories will leave you with a sense of magic. There is humor as well as the satisfaction that comes when an author can convey all our disappointments and consolations.

Selected and translated by Keith Gessen (author of All The Sad Young Literary Men) and Anna Summers (a Boston scholar of Slavic literature), their introduction provides you with the story of Ludmilla’s struggle to become a writer with critics considering her stories to be too dark and grim. In There Once Lived a Woman almost every story is a form of nekyia: “Characters depart from physical reality under exceptional circumstances: during a heart attack, child birth, a major psychological shock, a suicide attempt, a car accident” (xi).

Liesl Schillinger, writing for The New York Times Book Review, comments:

The stories in this exquisite collection — vital, eerie and freighted with the moral messages that attend all cautionary tales — reflect only one of Petrushevskaya’s many modes of expression. Readers who would like to experience others can turn to another story collection, “Immortal Love,” and her short novel “The Time: Night,” which were both translated into English in the 1990s. In those books, writing expansively, even garrulously, she conveyed the rough texture of life (mostly for women) in Soviet and post-Soviet society, showing the world she observed and overheard in all its unairbrushed detail — the poverty, the alcoholism, the illnesses, the cramped living conditions, the disappointed parents and worthless children, the unreliable suitors and resigned women. Russians long ago put a name to this sort of grim, neorealist writing, which has flourished since glasnost put an end to the enforced optimism of the Soviet period. They call it chernukha — from the word cherny, which means “black” — suggesting a pessimistic sensibility.

Lately, chernukha has fallen out of vogue with Russians who seek escape from reality in their reading. But Gessen and Summers have chosen shrewdly. In these beautifully translated pages, they deliver savory tastes of Petrushevskaya’s dark perspective, but in portions so small and distinct that the chernukha seasons rather than overwhelms them. We are left hungry for more.

Indeed, after reading a few stories last night, I was left hungry. So much that while sleeping my brain entertained me with fantastical dreams that were a little scary, but pleasantly so. I awoke with excitement and remembered that the woman who was following me through the corridors as I frantically locked seven doors–thinking that this divine investment of time would certainly keep this grave woman with a deep voice away–was Ludmilla in her unforgettable hat.

It’s 2010!  I’m going to learn to sew.  It’s my new year’s resolution/goal/ambition, brought on partly by the fact that I’m not doing anything creative with myself and partly because I’ve seen so so so many amazing craft books here that are inspiring in nature!  That’s good!

One of those books is S.E.W.  It stands for Sew Everything Workshop.  And hopefully by the time I’m done with it, I can?  Maybe?  It’s a beginner’s guide, and author Dianna Rupp, despite the fact that she’s been sewing since her fingers were the size of needles, does a great job of making sewing – or reading about sewing, rather – easy for beginners (and I am a complete beginner).  She goes over machinery, various sewing supplies, types of fabric, even the anatomy of a needle.  She explains how to understand patterns, take care of your sewing machine – she even includes instructions on how to make a sewing inspiration banner.  What helps is that in between all the information in the book, she includes little lists: secrets to sewing success; ten reasons why you should love sewing; a cheat sheet to pattern symbols and markings.  It’s easy to read, fun to look at, full of pictures.

According to Rupp, sewing is ‘like driving a car’, (=easy) and, armed with this book, it’s easy to believe her.  Oh!  and she includes 10 paper patterns in the book, so that you can make ‘Foxy Boxers’ or a ‘Naughty Secretary Skirt’, among other things.

I’m not going to lie.  It might take me ages before I can make the Naughty Secretary Skirt.  But I think what this book is good at is getting the fledgling sewer excited about learning.  And for beginners, that’s crucial.

Susie