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the complexity of my complicity Dec 14, 2008 (6 of 6 found this helpful)
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.
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Not very deep, but interesting Nov 22, 2008 (6 of 6 found this helpful)
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.
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Well-written and thought -provoking Nov 14, 2008 (6 of 6 found this helpful)
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.
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Forceful from facts, undiluted by opinion Jun 27, 2009 (2 of 2 found this helpful)
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.
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Well-balanced and full of surprising information. Mar 26, 2009 (1 of 1 found this helpful)
A very entertaining and educational book. The author does a good job of not lecturing. He tosses out lots of facts, figures and observations, but lets the reader decide what it all means. And what to do, personally, about it. If anything.