Confessions Of An Eco-Sinner

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Fashion | Grocery

A short, snappy look at the cradle to grave journey of everyday items (Source: Ellen 2009 link).

It’s a fascinating portrait, by turns sobering and hopeful, of the effects the world’s more than 6 billion inhabitants— all eating, consuming, making — have on our planet, and of the working and living conditions of the people who produce most of these goods (Source: Anon 2008a link).

Pearce has written a book for the ecologically and socially minded. He has travelled some 180,000 km to over 20 countries to research it; investigating the origins of products, and crucially the human conditions surrounding them – actually walking the walk and finding the answers to his own curiosity about things. He describes the research, which took him a full year, and the resulting book, as ‘an odyssey to track his personal footprint’ (Source: Murray-White 2008 link).

At first glance, this title appears to be another in the current onslaught of ‘green’ books. However, journalist and author Pearce extends his exploration from the ecological to the social and economic implications of our ‘stuff.’ By choosing several categories of possessions – food, clothes, beer cans, and garbage – and seeking out the origins or hunting down the resting grounds of each, Pearce sets off on a journey crisscrossing the globe (Source: Hammond 2008, p.110 link).

Pearce boards lots of jets for his 100,000-mile consumption quest, mostly to African and Asian countries where our low-cost labour force lives. He conducts revealing on-the-ground interviews with factory owners, managers and the underpaid workers who live what many of them perceive to be a step up from rural poverty (Source: Grant Black 2009 link).

The purpose of this book is to discover the hidden world that keeps us in the state to which we have become accustomed. I have done that by exploring my own personal footprint. I have travelled the world to find out where the cotton in my shirt comes from, the coffee in my mug, the prawns in my curry, the computer on my desk, the phone in my hand and much else. To discover who grows or mines or makes my stuff, and where that stuff goes after I have finished with it. And to find out whether I should be ashamed of my purchases and their impact on the planet, or whether I should be proud to have contributed to some local economy or given a leg-up to some hard pressed community. . . . I estimate that I travelled some 180,000 kilometres on this journey, visiting more than twenty countries. It took me to the end of my street and to the end of my planet, into the African rainforests and the Central Asian deserts, to Bangladeshi sweatshops and Chinese computer factories, to the brothels of Manila and the slums of Rio, to the summits of mountains, the Arctic tundra, the fishing grounds of the Atlantic and into the bowels of the Earth (Source: Pearce 2008, p.4).

First I wanted to find a new way of telling some familiar environmental stories, to find a new audience among people who don’t want to read about issues in the abstract. So I thought a personal journey to find out about my own footprint on the world would be one way of doing that – a way of connecting our lives with the things that environmentalists worry about. And secondly because I did want to know about where my stuff comes from. None of us really knows in these days of globalization. One scientist told me when I started work that if we lived in Roman times and wanted the lifestyle we have today, we would need about 6000 slaves: growing and cooking our food, making our music, running the stables full of horses for our travel. . . . We like to think that all these things are done by machines these days. But actually there are lots of people round the world making and growing things for us. It’s just that we don’t know who they are. So I set out to find out. That meant not just finding out about my environmental footprint, but about my social footprint, too. . . . I had about a year working hard on the research. A few of the journeys had been done before that. Finding where our oil comes from, for instance, and fish in West Africa. But mostly I did it in a series of journeys after talking to retailers and suppliers and persuading them to give me the details about the supply chains. Some of even the simplest things like a pair of cotton socks had amazingly complicated journeys. So I had to follow. . . . One of the biggest problems was the supply chains for major commodities. For instance, as I say in the book, I never did manage to get very firm links about how cotton travels round the world. I visited cotton farms in several countries, like India and Australia, and they all told me they believed that their cotton ended up in British clothing. But the big commodity companies, like Cargill, who buy the cotton and then sell it on to clothes makers, don’t tell anyone where their cotton is coming from. They are like huge spiders in the middle of a web (Source: Anon 2008b link).

Stories like those told by Pearce show how difficult it can be to determine where the balance should rest between home-grown foods and trade-based aid. If we could pull a rabbit out of a magic hat, the answer would be to create a balance that works for the prosperity of farmers in both the developed and developing worlds. It just seems that magic hats are very hard to find (Source: Clement 2008 link).

While very interesting, I found this book lacking in the bigger picture of what is wrong with over consumption. The author paints a picture where our problems can be solved with the right mix of biofuels and ingenuity and doesn’t take on the fact that the problem is that we live in a consumerist society where people buy too much crap that they don’t need because companies make a huge profit out of doing so (Source: AJ 2009 link).

What is the Western reader and consumer to make of all this? There’s no point in simply feeling bad, particularly when information is so complex and difficult to obtain. The answers are rarely clear or easy. (Several times, Western companies who trumpet their ethics admitted to Pearce that they really couldn’t track the sources and destinations of their products.) But it’s good to keep looking and trying different strategies, one by one, with little steps that – if we all were to make them – might add up to a lot. . . . I think the best thing one may say about this book is that it is refreshing. You learn a lot without feeling in the least burdened or discouraged (Source: Loftus 2008 link).

When it comes to finding ‘answers’, Pearce is as much at a loss as any despairing Green zealot. He falls back upon the treacherous first-person plural, an inclusive ‘we’ which brings together an ‘international community’ only when intractable problems are to be faced. When the rewards of the world are distributed, the gulf between ‘us and them remains. Having vigorously evoked a world using up its resources at a rate that defies replacement, he makes a leap of faith, assuming human unity in the presence of the threat to survival (Source: Seabrook 2008 link).

Most of all I think this particular book is important because it changed several things about the way I operate as a consumer. I’m trying not to demand rubbish for cheaper prices and I’m prepared to pay more for good produce. … I’ve got a greater appreciation for how much rock gets mined and how much water is consumed to provide me with a t-shirt or a gold ring. Everything comes from somewhere … and sometimes it’s surprising exactly where that is (Source: Clark 2010 link).

Since I read it I have found myself hesitating over everyday purchases – cups of coffee, clothes, books. It has left me wondering – somewhat helplessly – about the impact of my purchase, and about how I can compare one product against another when neither tells me where it’s from (Source: Steeds 2009 link).

The most telling thing about this book is that it has prompted me to review how I actually consume items. It’s made me think about where my food and clothes come from. The thing is, if more consumers changed their buying habits, if more consumers questioned companies on where their products were sourced and what they were doing to help promote a fairer existence for workers, then people’s lives in far corners of the world would improve. But that’s unlikely to happen, because as we wonder around the aisles of supermarkets, we do not look these workers in the eye, and we remain unmotivated to change our ways (Source: Newton 2010 link).

My aim was to encourage people who care about their impact on the planet to think a bit more, to question some easy nostrums, and to give them some information for making decisions. And of course I hoped to find some readers thinking about green issues in their lives for the first time. So it certainly wasn’t aimed at starting campaigns or anything. And it hasn’t! Actually hearing that you are using the book in the way you describe is absolutely the kind of thing I hoped it would be useful for (Source: Pearce 2010 link).