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 food
behind their doors? Under what conditions-environmental and social-are
they harvested or manufactured? Veteran science journalist Fred Pearce
set off to find out, and the resulting 100,000-mile journey took him to
the end of his street and across the planet to more than twenty
countries..
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Pearce deftly 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 Confessions
of an Eco-Sinner, Pearce
surveys his home and then launches on a global tour to track down,
among other things, the Tanzanians who grow and harvest his fair-trade
coffee (which isn't as fair as one might hope), the Central American
plantations that grow his daily banana (a treat that may disappear
forever), the women in the Bangladeshi sweatshops who sew his jeans,
the Chinese factory cities where the world's computers are made, and
the African afterlife for old cell phones. 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..
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Confessions of an Eco-Sinner
Tracking Down the Sources of My Stuff
by Fred Pearce
Beacon
Press,
2008
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