Are you tired of green tips? Tired of being told, by yet another eco-guide, that you should stop drinking bottled water, use a reusable bag, reduce meat consumption and walk more. Have you grown weary of the superficiality of much of the eco-movement's advice and crave a bit more depth? Well, crave no more, Confessions Of An Eco-Sinner: Tracking Down The Sources of My Stuff by Fred Pearce is the hot new green book on the market.
British author and journalist Fred Pearce, decided to move beyond just whining about reducing his carbon footprint and investigated where his stuff comes from and where his waste ends up. The result is a riveting, well-written and witty account of the origin of some of the common objects in people’s homes.
A casual conversation started it all when a scientist explained that the average European or North American household had so many devices and such a variety of food and clothes that to produce the same lifestyle in Roman times would have required six thousand slaves – cooks, maids, minstrels, ice-house keepers, woodcutters, etc. This statistic got Pearce thinking about carbon footprint, but also about his personal carbon footprint that he describes as both social as well as ecological. He set out to discover the hidden world that keeps us in the state we have grown accustomed to.
In Confessions Of An Eco-Sinner, he treks the cotton trail from a cotton shirt he buys at a local shop to the drought-torn Australia which is trying to grow the water-hungry cotton crop. The 1,500 cotton farms in Australia use more water than the country’s 7 million householders. World cotton production is more than 25 million tons a year. Pearce writes that the average t-shirt, “...which weighs about half a pound, requires about 3 ounces of fertilizer, a tenth of an ounce of the active ingredient in pesticides, and between 500 and 1,800 gallons of water, or upwards of thirty bathtubs of full. For one T-shirt".
He follows prawns, from his weekly Indian prawn curry, to the prawn farms in Bangladesh where more than 55,000 tons of prawns are exported each year. The demand for prawns and space requirements for the prawn ponds has displaced the mangrove swamps and even the Bengal tiger. One local NGO working to get better treatment for the underpaid prawn farmers explains that, “...sustainable shrimp is a myth. Mass production for export is disastrous.”
At each location from a gold mine to a waste disposal unit to coffee, cotton and banana farms he finds out that things we take for granted are not quite what they seem. This is a brilliant, informative book that encourages people to dig a bit deeper and find out more about the stuff they take for granted.
Hands down, the best green book of the year.
Order this book on Amazon.com Confessions Of An Eco-Sinner
Visit: http://www.fitzhenry.ca/
Publisher: Fitzhenry & Whiteside
276 Pages
GreenMuze.com Rating: 
Show/Hide comment form
