The geographical distribution

The geographical distribution area is identical to the drier zones of Mexico with a maximum

precipitation of up to 1000 mm/year. These precipitations, however, are very unequally distributed over the year and mainly occur in the four summer months as heavy thunder showers. The rest of the year is dry. The majority of Coryphantha spp. grow in regions with less than 600 mm/year precipitation, i.e. dry and very dry zones, but the marginal areas of distribution are located in moderately humid regions. Summer in the whole distribution area is very hot, but in the wintertime short cold periods and nightly frosts are not unusual, mainly in the north.

The world’s simplest land plants

The world’s simplest land plants do not have

flowers or seeds. Instead, they reproduce by

releasing tiny cells called spores. Spores are

far smaller and simpler than seeds, and they

spread by water or on the wind. Seedless plants

include liverworts, mosses, and horsetails,

as well as all the world's ferns (see pages

30–31). Unlike seed plants, a seedless plant’s

life cycle alternates between two distinct plant

forms: one that produces spores, and one that

produces sex cells (sperm and eggs). Sometimes

the two plant forms look similar, but often they

are completely different, both in size and shape.

A Lodestone for My Journey

Helmet on. Belt w eighed down with emergenc y oxygen pack. The steel doors shut, a bell sounds from far below, and the cage descends. Very slowly at first. Then suddenly faster. Within fifteen seconds we are traveling at nearly 40 miles an hour down a shaf t into the earth. The cage rocks slightly but keeps on descending longer than you can, believe. Somewhere in the dar k beside us, another c age shoots past in the opposite direction, hurtling to the surface and full of rock. Soon we have gone down deeper than the Grand Cany It gets warmer. Every 100 yards—every six seconds—the temperature rises by a degree. Down at the bottom of the shaft, almost three miles below the earth’s surface and deeper than the ocean floor, the rocks are at more than 120°F. The muggy air is at twice the pr ssure of the sure face air. And radioactive. Scientists have found microbes down here in the dar k whose onl y source of energ y is the radiation from the earth’s core. Gradually the lif t slows and halts with a r eassuring c lunk. The doors open and w step out into the earh’s crust. I switch on the lamp et on my helmet and peer around at the rocks. Three billion years ago,
they were the grav elly deposits of a r iver delta. All sor ts of metals were washed down from surrounding mountains that have long since
eroded away. And some of those metals accum ulated in the grav el beds. One metal in particular accumulated here. And, as a result, this tunnel leads through the heart of what is by a huge margin the richest goldfield on Earth. The West Witwatersrand goldfield in South Africa is also the deepest workplace on the planet.Welcome, says myguide, to Driefontein mine. I am here to find out wher e the gold in my w edding ring came from. It is the one thing I neer take on; the one thing that c me with me every step of the way on my journeys to find my global footprint. As I step out into the Driefontein tunnel, I look again at it. My wife and I bought our bands of gold bac in the summer of 1979,in a jew keler’s shop on the S trand in central L ondon. We still hav e the receipts. They cost £50 each. Where did those r ings come f rom? In theory, every piece of gold can be traced back to an individual mine. The gold has its own chemical fingerprint because of the impurities that come with it as it leav s the earth. But in practice, gold in jewelry e is usuall y c ast f rom a range of sour ces, and my r ing defies finger printing.

Footprints: Me and My Stuff part 3

In drawing up a list of where I should travel to make this book, I went through my house one day to see where everything came from. It was a shock to find how much of a globalized consumer I have become. When out shopping, I am always the person holding back from a purchase, asking whether I really want it, whether I am being ripped off, or deciding I just can’t be bothered to carry it home. And yet, over a lifetime and a couple of trips to the grocery store, it is amazing how much stuff I have, and from how many places. The food cupboard was an obvious place to start. There were nuts from Brazil and bottles of sparkling water from Scotland; sardines canned in Portugal and anchovies put in a jar in Spain; Italian chopped tomatoes and French mayonnaise; oatmeal from Lancashire and mustard from Dijon; coffee from Tanzania and Marmite from Sussex and soup from a farm in Cambridgeshire. There was mango chutney from India and caster sugar from Mauritius and desiccated coconut from the Philippines.

In some jars at the back, I found dried basil from Egypt and sage from Turkey; arrowroot from Thailand and allspice from Jamaica; lemongrass from Malaysia and alangal from China; mace from Grenada and saffron from Spain. We still haven’t got through the bag of white pepper I bought years ago in the market at Kuching in Borneo. Then there were walnuts from China and papadoms from Mumbai, cloves from Indonesia and oregano from Turkey, vanilla from Madagascar and cardamom and ginger from India. Not to mention Spanish olive oil and Italian pasta; Iranian dates and bay leaves from . . . well, an overgrown bush in our back garden, actually.

In the fruit bowl, I found grapefruit from Florida, mandarins from Argentina, bananas from Costa Rica, nectarines from Spain, and apples from New Zealand. On the counter, I found bread made from Gloucestershire flour, honey made by Mexican bees, and marmalade made by my wife from Seville oranges. There was beer brewed by monks in Belgium, by men in pullovers in Dorset, and by Britain’s oldest brewery, amid the hop fields of Kent. There were several bottles of my favorite peaty malt whiskies from the Hebrides, and some untasted spirit from the Netherlands that we have had for two decades. The fridge contained red peppers from Holland

and Parmesan from Italy, as well as “the world’s largest selling cheese brand,” manufactured on the edge of Bodmin Moor from Cornish

milk; cucumbers from Essex and a lettuce from Cambridgeshire. The butter and margarine could have come from anywhere. In the bathroom, I found clove massage oil from Zanzibar, citronella oil from China, and tea tree oil from trees grown in the Australian outback, plus a lot of bottles of various lotions and medicines from the Body Shop that don’t declare where they came from. In my office, I have a rather nice leather briefcase my wife gave me for Christmas one year. It was made in Chennai, India, by Dilip Kapur, a child of the weird religious eco-city known as Auroville. My computer and printer and phone are all made by Taiwanese companies using cheap labor on mainland China; the printer paper came from Slovakia. A random check of the books on my shelves shows they were printed in England and India, Hong Kong and Denmark, the United States and Italy.

Around the house, there are spoils from many of my previous reporting trips. I have a Panama hat from Ecuador and a Russian silk scarf; a Chinese paper dragon, an Alaskan plastic polar bear, and a caiman made from a Brazilian substance rather like rubber; a tiny metal Buddha from India, a job lot of Soviet Lenin badges, a small warthog made of scrap metal from Tanzania, several Japanese fans, and a hand-carved wooden platypus brought back from Queensland by my daughter. In my wardrobe, I found shirts made in Mauritius and Indonesia, Morocco and Cambodia, the United States and Hong Kong. Not to mention a couple of colorful numbers picked up on travels in China and Ghana that I have never worn. Then I found a rather threadbare pullover hand-knitted by a woman I met in the Falkland Islands, a Japanese kimono, Russian army fatigues—and a hat made out of plastic bags by an old woman in a shantytown in South Africa. In the front room there was an Egyptian mat, an Ashanti stool from Ghana, and a wood spirit carved by a colony of artists in Nigeria. In the back room there was a mat from Jordan, and a mahogany stool we removed from a flat we once rented. A clay recorder and a tambourine are the only survivors of a batch of arty objects I bought for virtually nothing in Mexico in 1984. In the hall I have a cowbell from the Auvergne in France that I use as a dinner gong. Frankly, our furniture is a bit rudimentary, picked up here and there. But we do have a kitchen table that came from a Victorian workhouse somewhere in Battersea, a gate-leg table, possibly even older, that was a wedding present from my father, and a solid beech desk in my office. We also have a piano. It was made in London in the 1890s by a company called Philips, Cambridge & Co., which is absent from contemporary lists of bona fide piano makers. Our piano tuner said it was not worth tuning anymore, but he tuned it anyway. here seems to be some disagreement about whether the wood is rosewood or mahogany. But there is no doubt that the keys are ivory, probably ripped from central Africa at the height of the greatest slaughter of the elephant ever seen. During the 1890s, Britain imported 550 tons of ivory a year, at a cost of some fifteen thousand animals.

There is other stuff whose legality and morality I wonder about. Somewhere in a cupboard I have two small bags made of sealskin, given to me on a trip to Siberia. We own Burmese teak salad bowls and apartheid-era South African salad servers. Some garden furniture is of dubious provenance, though the stone lion on the lawn is a guaranteed chunk of Cotswold limestone, as carved by my wife’s cousin. And the veneer on our kitchen units looks terribly like a piece of illegally logged timber from New Guinea given to me by Greenpeace. I also got to thinking about the stuff that leaves my house. What happens to the contents of my trash can, for instance? Where do our drains empty? Do the things I put in recycling bins really get recycled? I can’t say I was going to track down the source or destination of all these items. It would be a life’s work and I have a life to lead. But I was going in search of some of the most critical to my life—and I hope some of the most interesting. And from the start I was determined to make the journey about people as much as about ecology. Whatever the downsides of globalization, one of the upsides is that it connects us with people from many places. Usually those connections are hidden. But I was off to find them.

Me and My Stuff part 2

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 Myanmar 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.

So, before I continue with the story, I thought I would stop a moment and describe our strange species, Homo sapiens, which has so peremptorily taken over this planet. I drew up a list of things that describe more than a billion people, what we might regard as the mainstream of humanity. I was struck by both what we share and what divides us. So here we are.

A billion of us drive, for instance. Another billion of us have mobile phones. A billion of us can speak English, and another billion eat rice every day. But a billion of us do not have flushing toilets. Some of us share a number of these attributes. But humanity is like a giant version of one of those Venn diagrams, with interlinking circles showing how we differ and how we are the same. A billion of us live in shantytowns, or have access to the Internet, or are Indian, or support a soccer team, or live less than a mile from where we were born, or drink coffee, or have a TV in our home, or cannot support our families. A billion of us have moved from a village to the city, or

are Muslims, or have high blood pressure, or use contraceptives regularly, or depend on fish as our main source of protein, or wear sneakers, or are illiterate. A billion of us too are agnostics, or cook with firewood, or have a bicycle, or have heard of Muhammad Ali, or keep chickens, or have a debt with a moneylender, or never consume dairy products, or own T-shirts, or have no electricity.

Collecting these statistics gave me a hugely kaleidoscopic image of Homo sapiens. The rainbow race. A billion of us have ridden a bus, or are malnourished, or go to school, or have no running water in our houses. A billion of us are under ten, or are circumcised, or wear jeans, or have a fridge, or smoke cigarettes, or carry the TB bacterium, or eat bananas, or possess some gold, or take annual holidays, or go to the cinema, or pay rent to a landlord, or live on less than a dollar a day. A billion of us drink coke, or will get divorced, or have heard of David Beckham, or are Catholics, or will live beyond our sixtieth year, or are overweight, or are Chinese, or eat bread daily, or get less protein than a Western domestic cat.

But I promised this was going to be a personal journey. So let me introduce myself and, more importantly, my stuff. I am a journalist, in my mid-fifties, with a wife and rown-up children. I live in Lon6 Confessions of an Eco-Sinner don and work from home. Most days, I commute to the back bedroom each morning and turn on my computer. But I report about the environment and development around the world. And to do my job, I also travel a lot. This is bad for my carbon footprint, but I really

don’t believe you can learn about and report on the world by sitting at home and logging on to a virtual reality. The world is much more bizarre and unexpected, and often much more joyful and positive, than you would imagine from reading about it and seeing it on the news. And I found that especially true while following my global footprint. I really did sometimes find that my footprint could be a virtuous one.

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.