Confessions of an Eco Sinner: Travels to find where my stuff comes from

Description

This book offers the hidden story behind all our everyday things, revealing the cost of well-meaning but muddle-headed thinking. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Ever wondered if declaring support for fair-trade and then chucking Kenyan beans from your shopping trolley to reduce food miles really added up? Or whether the women in Bangladeshi sweatshops really want you to stop buying the clothes from their sewing machines? Or how the system works when you dump stuff but never buy from a charity shop?While none of us should stop trying, it was never easy being green. Mindful of his footprint, Fred goes in search of the source of the cotton in his shirt, the prawns in his curry and the people who grew, mined or made all his stuff in an attempt to discover the true story behind our everyday things. This compelling story of his travels moves green thinking on to a new, more sophisticated plane.

Fred Pearce is an author and journalist. He is married with grown-up children and lives in Wandsworth in London. For much of the time he works from home. But reporting about environment and development has taken him all over the world for publications such as New Scientist, the Daily Telegraph, the Independent, Country Living, Geographical and the Ecologist.

This is a splendid book and will do much good to counteract the comfortable hypocrisy of urban and suburban greens who pretend to 'save the earth' while carrying on business as usual. Fred Pearce goes out and sees the world as well as thinking and writing about it; he is one of the few that understand the Earth as it really is and we must listen to him. * James Lovelock, author of THE REVENGE OF GAIA * Pearce shows us how our greed, and our wilful blindness, are ruining the world in faraway places . . . An excellent book. * Guardian * Sometimes frightening, always enlightening, it will teach you more about other people's lives than you ever thought possible. * New Scientist * Beguiling . . . honest and revealing . . . optimistic . . . A big book for big problems. * Country Living * Follow in his global footprints as you read this compelling, thoughtful, provocative and utterly fascinating book. * CHOICE magazine *