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Time March 12, 2012
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10 Ideas That Are Changing Your Life
4. Handprints, Not Footprints,
By Daniel Goleman,
Goleman is the author of many books, including Emotional Intelligence
A bag of chips I bought recently in England had some bad news printed on the back. First, the chips had 14g of fat. Worse, they had caused 75g of carbon to be released into the atmosphere.
That bag called my attention to my carbon footprint: those 75g, added to the 2.3 million from the plane I took there and back, plus the total of all carbon impacts--the emissions into the air that contribute to global warming--of everything else I do and buy. Footprint math uses life-cycle assessment, or LCA, which calculates the amount of carbon released over the entire life history of those chips, from planting the potatoes to tossing the empty bag into trash.
While our footprints are a significant measure we've all been getting used to, they do not tell the whole story. We don't just trample the planet; we also sometimes leave a positive impression. A more encouraging way to conceptualize our impact is by our handprints: the sum total of all the reductions we make in our footprints. When she bought my plane ticket, my travel agent also paid for a carbon offset--planting trees in a deforested region--as a boost to my handprint.
Handprints are the brainchild of Gregory Norris, a lecturer at the Harvard School of Public Health...
David CK Chang, SSN057-86-4042,
March 14, 2012,
New Taipei City Library,
Panchiao, New Taipei City
