Pearce - Confessions of an eco-sinner travels to find where my stuff comes from

We live in a charmed world. If we have money we can buy literally anything. And the majority of us live lifestyles undreamed 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.

I started thinking about that statistic. The scientist's point was that we now rely on machines and cheap energy to do the things that servants would once have done for an elite, while the rest of us went without. But of course it is not that simple. For one thing there are ecological consequences. We gouge out the Earth to find the materials to make those machines; and the cheap energy to run them is polluting our planet and warming our climate. 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, growing our food, making our machines 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 want to change that. The purpose of this book is to discover the hidden world that keeps us in the state to which we have become accustomed. I have done that by exploring my own personal footprint. I have travelled the world to find out where the cotton in my shirt comes from, the coffee in my mug, the prawns in my curry, the computer on my desk, the phone in my hand, and much else. To discover who grows or mines or makes my stuff, and where that stuff goes after I have finished with it. And to find out whether I should be ashamed of my purchases and their impact on the planet, or whether I should be proud to have contributed to some local economy or given a leg-up to some hard-pressed community.

I have tried not to pick and choose my journeys too carefully. I simply took those that sounded potentially the most interesting. And certainly I made a point of not changing my way of living to avoid any embarrassments. These are true confessions. And I hope that in tracking down my footprints I will also have tracked down some of yours.

I estimate that I travelled some 180,000 kilometres on this journey, visiting more than twenty countries. It took me to the end of my street and the end of my planet, 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, to the summits of mountains, the Arctic tundra, the fishing grounds of the Atlantic and into the bowels of the Earth.

Along the way, I met an amazing cross-section of the more than 6 billion people with whom we share this planet. They included a handful of the richest and many of the poorest. It set me wondering as much about the past and future of our species as about the past and future of our planet. And, you may be surprised to learn, it left me with some optimism, about humanity and the huge potential we have to run our world better.

It is easy to be horrified by all the weirdness of humanity. The remote jungle tribes and urban sects, the horrible regimes in North Korea and Burma and elsewhere, the fanatics and the fantasists, the warlords and hoodlums, the obscene wealth of the super-rich and the abject state of the super-poor and those struck down by AIDS.

But in my travels I mostly found the commonplace billions of ordinary people, mostly poor but not starving; mostly ill-educated but not uneducated. The resulting book is a kind of chronicle of humanity as represented by the people who grow and make and dispose of the things that I use and consume in my daily life.