Confessions of an Eco Sinner: Travels to Find Where My Stuff Comes From
by Fred Pearce
400pp, Eden Project, £12.99
Real England: The Battle Against the Bland
by Paul Kingsnorth
304pp, Portobello, £14.99
Both of these books tell you something shocking about the world - that it is being ruined by very powerful forces. Each tells you a different part of the same story. I advise you to read them both.
At first, I thought that Fred Pearce's book would be the more shocking. He looks at his stuff - the food he eats and his possessions - and traces these things back to their source. These are the things we eat, too, and our possessions. Mostly, if you buy the stuff, you wouldn't want to know about the source. The closer you get, the uglier it looks.
For instance, Pearce likes eating curry. "I have often wondered," he says, "where the prawns in my Saturday night curry come from, but I have never got a straight answer." It turns out they come from a part of Bangladesh near the Bay of Bengal. So he goes there, and finds a whole area that has been devastated by prawns. Or rather, by our appetite for prawns. The old landscape of small farms and mangrove swamps has been replaced by a vast monoculture of prawn farms. As Pearce points out, this is bad for wildlife - tigers, he says, are being replaced by tiger prawns.
But this is just the start. This system is hugely corrupt. Prawn farming requires good irrigation, and those who control the water expect payouts from the farmers. If not, they cut the supply off. There are also prawn thieves, a prawn mafia, prawn oligarchs and prawn slaves. There are lots of beatings and rapes. Prawn dealers in Bangladesh operate in roughly the same way as drug dealers - they trample on people, because there is so much money to be made. It's our fault. We eat the prawns.
Tracing his trousers back to their source, Pearce discovers that they were also probably made in Bangladesh, by women who get paid about £15 a month. These women are crammed together in shacks in Dhaka, the capital. Conditions are, by our standards, dreadful. In some ways, it could be argued, the women are better off than their rural mothers were. They have a tiny bit of economic independence. But what does this actually mean? Pearce notices a cheap bag hanging up in someone's house. On the bag it says "Gucci". "It was a fake, of course," says Pearce. "But unlike their mothers and sisters back in the village, these women had heard of Gucci. They aspired."
This, in a way, is the key to Pearce's whole book. He goes to the Uzbek cotton farms that supply the Bangladeshi seamstresses, and finds corruption and mayhem. He goes to China to trace our mobile phones, and finds more corruption and mayhem, and an industry based on dangerous chemicals; he also finds out that the process of getting these dangerous chemicals is a catalyst for wars in Africa. And he wonders where his wooden furniture comes from, and discovers that it probably comes from an illegal logging plant in the far east, where the rate of deforestation is appalling.
He tells us many things in this vein. Recycled glass is used to make roads - it's not as green as we think. And if you think palm oil, the next big thing in biofuel, is a green product, think again. To grow the trees that produce the oil, we'll have to destroy huge tracts of rainforest.
But it's the Gucci bag that stuck in my mind. We're ruining the world because we're trying to encourage economic growth, and the way to do this is to encourage aspiration. In the west, we are rich and aspirational. In other words, we are greedy and insecure. And now, as Pearce shows us, people in Bangladesh are starting to be aspirational, too. Soon they'll be greedy and insecure. Then they'll want their own sweatshops. The demonic process will continue.
Pearce shows us how our greed, and our wilful blindness, are ruining the world in faraway places. Paul Kingsnorth, on the other hand, shows us something that might be even more shocking. Our greed, he says, has blinded us so much that we are trashing our own neighbourhoods. Of course it's no worse, morally speaking, to wreck England than it is to wreck Bangladesh or Uzbekistan. It just requires a greater degree of wilful blindness.
Kingsnorth travels around England, assessing its ruin. He points out that he is a literary descendent of William Cobbett, who wrote Rural Rides in the 1830s. Cobbett believed that England was being damaged by a force he called "the Thing" - basically the industrial revolution. Kingsnorth shows us just how big the Thing has become.
Pubs are being ruined by vast brewing companies. Town centres are being stripped of their individuality by predatory supermarkets. Retail parks and shopping plazas are destroying communities. Kingsnorth meets people whose lives are being blighted by bland corporate values - the stallholders and publicans and shopkeepers whose jobs are hanging by a thread. Meanwhile, the Thing looms - the grinning corporate culture of "leisure", and expensive cups of coffee, and apartment complexes, and piped music, and apples that are all the same size.
"Although things are officially better," says Kingsnorth, "unofficially we feel worse." And why are we allowing this to happen? "Because we must grow," he says. "We must develop, and regenerate, and push forward. We must consume and profit and invest, and the end goal, while unclear, must not be discussed, and must certainly not be questioned."
Two excellent books, then. Pearce shows us how the Thing has spread into the far corners of the world. Kingsnorth shows us how it has come back home to devour us. And we thought we'd get away with it!
· William Leith's The Hungry Years: Confessions of a Food Addict is published by Bloomsbury
is the idol of the BAL and its supporters
almost killed journalist
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