Customer Reviews

Confessions of an Eco-Sinner: Tracking Down the Sources of My Stuff

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

By now we've all heard of our "carbon" footprint. Fred Pearce is interested in his "personal" footprint. Just how much was that Tanzanian farmer paid in so-called "fair trade" wages for his pound of coffee that Starbucks sells for $12 (answer: about $1.46)? What little girl in Bangladesh sewed your socks? Sure, you sort your garbage for curbside pickup and recycle as best you can, but where does your garbage ultimately end up? It all sounds ominous and guilt-inducing, but maybe I'm actually helping the subsistence farmer in Kenya by air-freighting his green beans to Britain so that people can enjoy that luxury in the winter months?

The British science writer Fred Pearce traveled over 100,000 miles in 20 countries to track down the sources of his stuff. His resulting book reads like a personal case study in globalization. He starts off by descending three miles into the earth to learn how a South African mine extracts the gold for his wedding ring. He wonders about fair trade coffee -- "why should feeling virtuous come so cheap when it still leaves farmers so poor?" He tracks down supply chains and examines the environmental consequences of goods and services. He identifies various trade-offs, some of which we can choose and others that are forced upon us. Child labor, government subsidies, market inequities, technological innovations, Wal-Mart and the World Wildlife Fund all collide.

Pearce's personal case study reads like a travelogue that specializes in the economic, environmental, and ethical dimensions of virtually every aspect of your material life. What's not clear is how an "eco-sinner" might go beyond token gestures and genuinely "repent," whether that's even possible, and even if it is, whether it would make much of a difference for the Malaysian fish farmer or the Chinese factory girl who make subsistence wages to support my Western lifestyle.

The title "Confessions of an Eco-Sinner" had me expecting a different kind of book. I thought Fred Pearce would deliver a sermon about sustainability. But I was wrong. Instead of ecological fire and brimstone, Fred Pearce lets the facts make his argument. And they do, forcefully. This book leaves an impression much more lasting than a sermon.

Fred Pearce tells his tales from traveling the world to track down the sources of his "stuff." Food (his green beans from Kenya), clothing, computer equipment, soft drink cans, cars, oil. He finds out where it all comes from, and once used, where it goes as garbage. These are not happy stories.

The story of the cotton in his blue jeans sticks with me the most. The cotton likely came from near the Aral Sea. Once the world's fourth largest lake, the Aral Sea is now dying. The story, which can be seen in pictures and maps of the region, is heartbreaking.

Starved of the waters of the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya rivers, the Aral Sea has been shrinking for the last 40 years. From the 1930s, the Soviet Union started building huge diversion canals to irrigate vast cotton fields. The plan -- to make cotton a great export earner. This was achieved, and even today Uzbekistan is still a large exporter of cotton.

But the cost in ecological and human terms has been astronomical. The area now suffers constant toxic duststorms. Desert encroaches further daily. The area's people have 9 times the world average rate of throat cancer. Infant and maternity mortality tops all of the former Soviet Union's republics. Respiratory complications, tuberculosis and eye diseases, already high, are still rising sharply.

The book has no pictures, but my interest caught, I found some pictures of the region on the Internet. A fleet of fishing boats sits rusting in the sand, miles from the still-shrinking waters. Yet cotton, a water-intensive crop, still grows nearby fed with irrigation that continues to sap the Aral Sea.

Some of the stories are not so sad. All are told well. This book was, as the cliche goes, hard to put down. Recommended highly for those who want to find out the facts about how sustainable our consumption is, but don't want to hear a sermon.

This is one of those books you don't really appreciate until the end. It is basically a collection of fairly short annecdotes about the author traveling around the world to find out where the stuff he uses comes from and the stuff he discards goes to. At first they seem kind of sketchy and underdeveloped, but as you continue to read, you realize that it's an informative and intersting collection of stories that are both memorable and build into a bigger picture of the global chain of consumption. Of course some stories are dissappointing in that they suggest abusive or undesirable practices, but many others do show some hope. I think many first-world consumers probably don't have a very clear picture of where stuff comes from or where it goes after they get done using it. Among the positive things I took away from this book were the scale of recycling that goes on worldwide, the potential for smart businesses that really give people hope in poor countries, and the positive sides of China's boom. Among the negative things were poor and abusive working conditions in many places, the unsustainability of some types of consumption, and the waste that takes place in some industries. In any case, this is the kind of book that will fill your head with lots of interesting images and give you lots of little examples to quite when talking about issues like manufacturing, importing of goods or recycling. Pearce's previous work on things like water usage and climate change help inform this book, and the extensive traveling he apparently did for this book makes for many interesting examples.

Pearce is one of my favorite writers. He really helps you understand issues of importance to all of us - food, water, global warming - and the writing is captivating. It takes skill to create such fascinating reading from topics which seem completely mundane, such as where your green beans come from ... I intend to give this book to many friends.

We may not want to know what Charles Pearce has to tell us about where our clothes came from, how our coffee and cocoa were picked, or what raising the shrimp for our salad did to the coastal areas of Bangladesh. On the other hand, if we're brave enough to face the facts about our lifestyles and their impact on the planet and our neighbors, we will find this book well-researched and a welcome bright light shone on the dark corners of the global consumption chain.

Pearce provides a quite holistic look at the linkages between our consumption and the Poor World producers who keep delivering what we demand, connecting environmental and economic impacts. And in the end, Pearce doesn't leave us stranded with our guilt--he offers positive ideas for making the most of our troubling predicament.

A few pithy facts:
-1 gold ring required 2 tons of rock mined from a couple miles under the Earth's surface, 30 tons of air pumped down to cool the 120 degree shaft, 5.5 tons of water pumped out of the mine to keep it from flooding, 10 hours of human labor @ $1 per hour, and enough energy to run a house for several days
-Coffee farmers growing Fair Trade coffee for $1.46 a pound in the shadow of Mt. Kilimanjaro asked a visiting Fair Trade buyer: "We'd like to know how much our coffee costs in a coffee shop where you live." Starbucks earns $300 from a pound of coffee purchased for $1.50.
-800 square miles of the formerly mangrove-covered deltas of Bangladesh have been flooded to create shrimp ponds. The shrimp industry is a controlled by mob bosses and shady middlemen. "Mass production of shrimp for export is disastrous." - Khushi Kabir of the NGO Nijera Kabir ("we can do it ourselves")
-To maintain the typical Rich World lifestyle in Roman-times-equivalence would have required an estimated 6000 slaves

"What does chocolate taste like?" - child of cocoa farmer in Cameroon, West Africa

At each location, from a sweatshop in Bangladesh to a waste disposal unit, to coffee, cotton, bean and banana farms, Pearce finds out that things we take for granted are not quite what they seem. By putting a story to some of the things that we think so little of Pearce forces us to look at all of our consumer choices. Even those who consider themselves to have some eco-smarts will learn a lot. Pearce does not judge or preach, he just relays the information in an honest and forthright manner. The result is a riveting, well-written and witty account of the origin of some of the common objects in people's homes.

I will provide a brief example of one of his stories. This is the story he starts with, the story of his wedding band:

Pearce treks the gold trail from the wedding band on his finger to a goldmine in South Africa. Driefontein mine shaft 7, 3 miles underground, is the deepest workplace on this planet. In 1970 his wedding band cost him $50. The ecological cost was: 2 tons of rock (1 ton per 5 grams of gold) blasted from the ground and carried up more than 2 miles, 5.5 tons of water, 30 tons of air pumped underground to keep the mine cool, cyanide, zinc, mercury, and other chemicals for extraction of the gold, and enough energy to run a house for several days. He also goes on to detail the social cost of gold mining. His ring cost 10 hours of human labor at just $1 per hour. Yet the danger to the miners is difficult to include in the equation. Driefontein mine shaft 7 is a very productive mine shaft. And so the miners dig deeper and deeper to get more gold. The deeper they they dig the more dangerous, the hotter and more radioactive the mine becomes. (This part reminded me of the Mines of Moria from Lords of the Rings. Of how the dwarves dug so deep that they awakened the Balrog of Morgoth... Yes, I'm a nerd.) Rockfalls, fires, and other accidents cause death on a regular basis. The miners live in squatter camps near the goldfields and lead dreary lives. AIDS is common among them, with prevalence rates as high as 35 percent. Hollywood showed us what a "blood diamond" is. But what about blood gold?

Judging from the title of the book and the cover image, one would assume that this book is written for the environmentalist. The choice of the title is unfortunate in that the contents of the book tell another and more far-reaching story. Pearce's personal journey reads like a travelogue that specializes in the environmental and ethical dimensions of many aspects of our material lives. This book is written to open our eyes to the fact that we of the West are all "eco-sinners."

What is even more alarming is that the our irrational desires for material goods are spreading across the globe. For instance, a female sweatshop worker he meets in Bangladesh owns a fake Gucci bag. It would appear that we are trashing the planet because we are trying to encourage economic growth, and the way to do this is to encourage aspiration. In the west, we are already rich and aspirational. But as the third world catches up with our levels of prosperity, how will we cope? The system we are in requires servant labor. Even the sweatshop laborer, a poor young woman living in a small hut with five other women, buys a product of sweatshop because of its' label. Our Western lust for material goods is spreading and infecting people across the planet.

Perhaps this book can be invaluable in attacking the disease at the source. Perhaps if we realized the true cost (social and ecological) of our everyday products we would care for them more, make them last longer. After reading this book I personally have become more conscious of the purchasing decisions I make. After learning the true cost of a cotton t-shirt I feel wrong buying one, no matter how cheap it is. For the first time I visited consignment boutiques and learned the joy of thrift shopping. Perhaps I am not saving the world with my consumer decisions, but I will try not to make things worse.

This is a great book because you learn a great deal of surprising information yet it's delivered in an entertaining style, chock-full of travel stories and anecdotes. All is not as it seems in this global jaunt in search of the source of our stuff. There will be surprises in here for well-meaning eco-types who want to do the right thing, they should definitely inform themselves better with this book. I loved When the Rivers Run Dry and now Fred Pearce has delivered again.

A marvel of a book, written by a true journalist.
The authorial command shown by Mr. Pearce harkens to our very well-paid
greats, such as the travel curmedgeon Bill Bruford, Buford, something like that, those pithy, wry, gifted story-tellers of our most revealing truths - only this is about the greatest lie of all, that there is something like "green capitalism" or "sustainability" when we have loosened such a collective gouging and ramming and flooding and discarding upon this mortal coil. Pearce is a professional reporter, funny but not demonstrative, who dares to travel to see where much of the stuff comes from that he, in his relatively modest isle abode, possesses.
You will enter in a phantasmorgic excursion into the primordial slime that gurgles beneath our western affluence, from the dying Aral Sea to raped Africa to barges of stinking refuse motoring up the Thames, and like the best sociology, this sane reportage will have the very fibers connected to your body quivering - what the hell did we get ourselves into?

If you ever wondered where the stuff you use comes from, the next best thing to you getting on the plane and tracing them is reading this book. It is well written and gives a lot of valuable information about what goes on outside our known world.

Yes, it's gimmicky that Fred Pearce tracks back the things in his house to the places they came from. But this book is incredibly compelling, easy to read, and has a lot of surprises even for someone like me who thought they knew a lot already about where things come from.

All of Pearce's books I've read are among my favorites, but I think this one is his most accessible, and will be most compelling to a general audience. Everyone who can afford this book is deeply embedded in the network of stuff flying around the planet to serve our needs and wants and whims, and should have some inkling of how things reach the store shelves, and what happens to our stuff when we're done with it and we toss it.