Book of the month

I'm currently reading "Confession of an Eco-sinner: Travels to Find Where My Stuff Comes From" and feel so strongly about the message of this book that I'm shouting out to all of you to JUST READ IT! The author Fred Pearce, senior environment writer for The New Scientist, explores the worlds of gold, coffee, and strawberry production; over-fishing in Mauritania, prawn cultivation in Bangladesh, palm oil, sugar, bananas, cocoa beans, and Kenyan green beans grown sustainably although consuming vast air miles…. among many other debates and topics along the way. I recommend everyone who believes they have a social or green conscience to read this. It is a warning shot delivered by a thoughtful writer who examines his own use of products and resources or footprint on behalf of us all. To whet your appetite, here's an excerpt from the introduction:

We live in a charmed world. If we have money, we can buy anything. And the majority of us live lifestyles undreamt of only a generation or two ago. One scientist I met recently told me he reckoned that the average household in Europe or North America has so many devices and such a variety of food and clothing that to produce the same lifestyle in Roman times would have required 6,000 slaves - cooks, maids, minstrels, ice-house keepers, woodcutters, nubile women with fans, and many more. And yet many of the servants are still there. Though now, rather than occupying the attics of grand houses, they are spread across the world, making our machines, growing our food and stitching our clothes. People talk a lot about carbon footprints. But our personal footprints are much bigger than that. And they are social as well as ecological. The trouble is that, in our charmed world, we know little about what our footprints are. It all happens so far away. The people and the pollution that sustain us are invisible to us. I wanted to know more about the hidden world that keeps us in the state to which we have become accustomed. For the past year, I have travelled the world to find out where the cotton in my shirt comes from, the coffee in my mug, the computer on my desk, and much else. To discover who grows or mines or makes my stuff, and where that stuff goes after I have finished with it. I travelled some 180,000km on this journey, visiting more than 20 countries. (Of course, this is bad for my carbon footprint, but you can't learn about the world by sitting at home and logging on to a virtual reality.) It took me 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, and into the bowels of the earth. In drawing up a list of where I should travel, I went through my house to see where everything came from. It was a shock to find how much of a globalised consumer I have become. In the food cupboards there were nuts from Brazil, sardines canned in Portugal, desiccated coconut from the Philippines. In the bathroom was clove massage oil from Zanzibar and citronella oil from China. In my office my computer, printer and phone are made by Taiwanese companies using cheap labour on mainland China; the printer paper came from Slovakia. In my wardrobe, I found shirts made in Mauritius, Morocco, Cambodia and the US. In the front room, there was an Egyptian mat, an Ashanti stool from Ghana, and a wood spirit carved by a colony of artists in Nigeria. I can't say I tracked down the source or destination of all these items. But I went in search of some of the most critical to my life - and I was determined to make the journey about people as much as about ecology. Whatever the downsides of globalisation, one of the upsides is that it connects us with more people from more places. Usually those connections are hidden. So I set off to find them.