"Where does this stuff come from?" For everyone who has asked this question about computers or clothing or coffee beans, this book gives the answers. Author Fred Pearce has researched the sources of a couple dozen common goods in order to deliver this book's analysis on where things we use and eat come from and what the social and environmental consequences are of their production and use.
The sections on food are particularly damning, revealing how choices of cuisine inadvertantly help fund unsavory groups and undermine the local cultures in which they originate. The rest of the book is equally dispiriting, revealing a commodified world where there are no limits to the hunger for resources and no remorse for the exploitation of those who service the consumption. Absolution for these sins won't be found in purely green behaviors, Pearce contends, but in actions that preserve ecosystems without further impoverishing the poor. “We need fairtraders, not green patriots," he explains. "We need to maximise our positive social footprints as well as to minimize our negative ecological ones. But we can do it.” A leading British science writer, Pearce is a former news editor at New Scientist, an active journalist and author of five other books, including With Speed and Violence, When the Rivers Run Dry, and Earth Then and Now. |
 Confessions of an Eco-Sinner |
Coffee farmers growing Fair
Trade coffee for $1.46 a pound in the shadow of Mt. Kilimanjaro asked a
visiting Fair Trade buyer: “We’d like to know how
much our coffee costs in a coffee shop where you live.”
Starbucks earns $300 from a pound of coffee purchased for $1.50. Cambridge Forum C-SPAN2 |
