When
it comes to writing about the environment, forget the high horse: Standing on a
DVD copy of An Inconvenient Truth is enough height from which to bloviate about the dangers
of bleached toilet paper and South American produce. These concerns aren't
exactly immaterial to British journalist Fred Pearce, but he begins his trek
through globalization by throwing open his metaphoric closets. Thus Confessions
of an Eco-Sinner: Tracking Down the Sources of My Stuff begins from a place of relative
humility and substitutes travelogue for lecture.
After
Pearce's recitation of the countries of origin for his massage oil and piano
keys, each short but dense chapter chases one item—the banana he ate for
breakfast or the wedding ring he never takes off—back to its country of
origin. Even where such a journey isn't possible, Pearce wrings a trip out of
what little he can discover: When popular British retailer Marks & Spencer
is reluctant to reveal the source of its cotton, Pearce trucks off to
Australia, where cotton wholesalers are more than happy to describe their
efforts to get "premium" labels attached to their wares while simultaneously
going through the worst drought in outback history.
Early
in the book Pearce shows symptoms of becoming an insufferable companion: At one
stop he sniffs at a visiting group of sponsors of a Mauritanian wildlife
preserve, "They had no interest at all in the people… They just came to see
birds. I don't like that kind of environmentalism." But subsequent visits tend
to make him less preachy, and even buck conventional green wisdom: After going
to Kenya to see where British supermarkets get the majority of their beans
off-season, his experience with a local microfarming outfit leads him to
conclude that the cost to the country's GDP would be too high to ignore should
his fellow citizens make the switch to local, greenhouse-grown beans. He
manages not to be too smug about his discoveries either, acknowledging the
benefits H&M; clothing factories have brought to Bangladeshi women and
proudly reselling his son's old cell phone in Dar es Salaam. Perhaps his
endorsement of organic brands and best energy practices are Pearce's way of
atoning for the implicit endorsement of tourism, a major
greenhouse-gas-producing activity. He must have known that describing the last
wild pomegranate orchard (in the mountains of Turkmenistan) would be too
tempting to pass up.