Footprints: Me and My Stuff part1

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 six thousand 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 élite, 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. My purpose in writing this book was to discover the hidden world that keeps us in the state we have become accustomed to. I have done that by exploring my own personal footprint. I have traveled the world to find out where the cotton in my shirt comes from, the coffee in my mug and the prawns in my curry, 4 Confessions of an Eco-Sinner the computer on my desk and 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 ave 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 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 footprint I will also have tracked down some of yours.

I estimate that I traveled more than 110,000 miles 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 rain forests 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.