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Confessions of an Eco-Sinner: Tracking Down the Sources of My Stuff | 
 enlarge | Author: Fred Pearce
Publisher: Beacon Press
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $14.27
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Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 111551
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 276
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.2 x 1.1
ISBN: 080708588X
Dewey Decimal Number: 333.72
EAN: 9780807085882
ASIN: 080708588X
Publication Date: October 1, 2008
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Condition: Brand new Book, ALL days Low Price !
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Product Description
A global journey to find the sources of all the stuff in one man's life?and its social and environmental footprint
Where does everything in our daily lives come from? The clothes on our backs, the computers on our desks, the cabinets in our kitchens, and the spices behind their doors? Under what conditions?environmental and social?are they harvested or manufactured?
In Confessions of an Eco-Sinner, Fred Pearce shows us the hidden worlds that sustain a Western lifestyle, and he does it by examining the sources of everything in his own life; as an ordinary citizen of the Western world, he, like all of us, is an "eco-sinner." In conversational and convivial prose, Pearce surveys his home and then starts out on a global tour to track down, among other things, the Kenyans who grow and harvest his fair trade coffee (which isn't as fair as one might hope), the women in the Bangladeshi sweat shops who sew his jeans, and the Chinese factory cities where the world's computers are made. 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.
"In tracing the lineage of his "stuff," Fred Pearce's graceful and engaging book illuminates the invisible ways in which our ordinary possessions connect us to workers we will never know and forests we will never explore. Starting at the intersection of environmental threats, excessive consumption and exploited workers, Confessions points us toward a far more nurturing, meaningful and humane future."
?Ross Gelbspan, author of The Heat Is On and Boiling Point
"Required reading for anyone who's ever worn a t-shirt, used a cell phone or computer, sipped a cup of coffee, or taken out the garbage. Pearce travels beyond the carbon footprint of our consumer society to explore the forgotten social footprint, bringing us to the unlikely and sometimes unseemly places where our stuff is born, and where it goes to die."
?William Alexander, author of The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden
"More and better stuff - the promise of our age. But where does it come from and what does it cost, ecologically and in human suffering? Fred Pearce decided to find out and the story is compelling but not pretty. With any luck, this brilliant book will change our insatiable demand for more material goods and guide us, and our planet, to spiritual and eco health."
?Maude Barlow, author of Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World's Water
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| Customer Reviews:
 the complexity of my complicity December 14, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review 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.
Not very deep, but interesting November 22, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review 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.
 Well-written and thought -provoking November 14, 2008
6 out of 6 found this review 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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