A global journey to find the sources of all the stuff in one man’s life—and its social and environmental footprint

Where does everything in our daily lives come from? The clothes on our backs, the computers on our desks, the cabinets in our kitchens, and the spices behind their doors? Under what conditions—environmental and social—are they harvested or manufactured?

In Confessions of an Eco-Sinner, Fred Pearce shows us the hidden worlds that sustain a Western lifestyle, and he does it by examining the sources of everything in his own life; as an ordinary citizen of the Western world, he, like all of us, is an “eco-sinner.” In conversational and convivial prose, Pearce surveys his home and then starts out on a global tour to track down, among other things, the Kenyans who grow and harvest his fair trade coffee (which isn’t as fair as one might hope), the women in the Bangladeshi sweat shops who sew his jeans, and the Chinese factory cities where the world’s computers are made. It’s a fascinating portrait, by turns sobering and hopeful, of the effects the world’s more than 6 billion inhabitants—all eating, consuming, making—have on our planet, and of the working and living conditions of the people who produce most of these goods.