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

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.

I love this book. It did a great job making me think about all of my consumption of stuff on both an environmental and humanitarian aspect. I'm always a sucker for a well-written book with a good message. Maybe we should consume less stuff, more mindfully and more competely...then feed it back through the chain instead of burying it in a landfill. I love the ending. It gives me much hope that NOW is the time and we are the generation that can and WILL save not only this planet, but our own species as well.

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

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.

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.