As the environment crisis deepens, there has been a welcome tendency within a minority (although only a very small minority yet) in some of the richest countries and communities of the world to take a frank, honest look at their own lifestyles. Two questions increasingly being asked are: To what extent can this lifestyle be compatible with the protection of environment? To what extent are ecological costs being shifted from the rich to the poorer countries in an increasingly globalised world? The journalist and author, Fred Pearce, has made a remarkable contribution to this effort in his book Confessions of an Eco Sinner ~ Travels To Find Where My Stuff Comes From (Eden Project Books, Transworld Publishers, 2008). Pearce is a London-based journalist and author who writes regularly for the New Scientist, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent and The Ecologist. To write this book, Pearce travelled to more than 20 countries to ascertain the social and ecological costs involved in the production and trade of the various goods used by him in his daily life. Origin of a ring Pearce has traced the likely origin of his gold ring to the biggest gold mine in South Africa. He has discovered the startling fact that "it took 2 tonnes of rock, blasted from the earth's crust, hauled 2 kilometres and more to the surface, ground up and treated, to provide enough of the metal for my 10-gram ring. On top of that, making my ring required 5 tonnes of water, 30 tonnes of air pumped underground to keep the mine cool, enough electricity to run a large house for several days.' Coming to his food, Pearce traces the prawns in his curry to Bangladesh. He writes, "Prawn farms stretch from Khulna to the Bay of Bengal. In the past three decades, they have largely replaced the old landscape of mangrove swamps interspersed with small farms. The swamps once protected large amounts of wildlife, including the famous Bengal tiger, and acted as a nursery for fisheries. As the landscape has been transformed, a whole social system has disappeared. Once there were rice paddies and mangroves, with creeks full of fish, ducks in the yard, and cattle and bird life and grazing pastures ~ much of it on commonly owned land available to the poorest as well as the richest. Now there is only private land and prawn ponds. The pastures are gone and the rivers are almost empty of fish. Millions of rice farmers have been bundled off their land often illegally, by big landowners anxious to maximize their prawn profits. A quiet terror has spread across the delta, with musclemen responsible for dozens of murders and rapes and hundreds of injuries. During the previous decade, fourteen local newsmen had been murdered in the area.' Then tracing the cotton in his clothes to Uzbekistan, Pearce discovers that the huge imports are being grown in massive monocultures in an ecologically destructive manner. On the one hand, the natural river flow to the Aral Sea remains disrupted so that the fourth largest inland-sea cannot be revived. On the other, the health of the people suffers badly. Rainfall has declined and the region is increasingly ravaged by dust storms. An estimated 70 million tonnes of dust from the exposed seabed blows across the land each year. It carries a cocktail of salt and pesticides include DDT and lindane (a synthetic insectide), which are banned in Western countries but still poison the air here. Many children are born deformed. Lastly, coming to the various gadgets which have become such an essential part of modern living, Pearce makes the startling discovery that a typical mobile phone today weighs only around 75 grams, but taking its many ingredients from earth required the mining of 30 kilograms of rock. In addition, manufacturing the chips requires several hundred litres of water, and the energy that probably comes from burning several tons of kilograms of fossil fuels. Tantalum is the key element needed by many new gadgets, above all by mobile phones, laptop computers and digital cameras. As the world got hooked onto mobile phones, the demand for tantalum soared. By some estimates, the provinces of Kivu and Ituri in the Congo contain 80 per cent of the world's tantalum reserves. In those provinces some rebel military leaders were already involved in a vicious civil war. When tantalum prices soared, they realised they could make fortunes out of the ore. Amnesty International says that mining paid for a war that claimed hundreds of thousands of civilian lives and subjected millions of others to a catastrophe. The data published by Fread Pearce focuses on the wider issue of how we can move to a sustainable lifestyle. Clearly there are obvious limits up to which the production of material goods can be increased without destroying the course of nature. A government supported study in Sweden concluded some time back that only about one-tenth of the existing world population can be supported at the standard of living that exists in Sweden. What happens to the remaining nine-tenth of the population? If they persist in chasing the attractive norm set up by one-tenth of the population, an environment disaster is the most likely outcome. The contemporary living pattern of developed countries has become possible due to their acquisition of an unjustly high share of the world's resources. This became possible due to the biggest ever phase of imperialist rule and exploitation which lasted from the early 16th to the mid-20th century. Most of the developed countries have acquired huge economic benefits at the cost of the developing world and the indigenous people within the developed bloc. They were almost wiped out in several countries. The plunder has actually continued right up to this day in new forms which are less obvious but whose reach is quite extensive. However, the developing countries today do not have any colonies which they can plunder. If the elite of these countries still persist in pursuing the living pattern of developed countries, they are likely to end up colonising and plundering a section of their own people, giving rise to new tensions in the process. Gandhi's view Mahatma Gandhi summed up the crisis with a simple yet profound statement. He was asked whether he would like India to emulate Britain after freedom. Gandhiji replied that if such a small nation like Britain had to plunder such a large part of the earth to gain its existing wealth and income, a nation of India's size will probably have to colonize another planet to make a similar achievement and in any case this achievement based on invasion and plunder will not be desirable. Recently the Human Development Report stated that the existing development pattern of industrial countries is not sustainable and something different is necessary. "Replicating the patterns of the North in the South will require ten times the present amount of fossil fuels and roughly 200 times as much mineral wealth. And in another 40 years, these requirements, would double against as the world population doubles. The lifestyles of the rich nation will clearly have to change. The North has roughly one-fifth of the world's population and four-fifths of its income, and it consumes 70% of the world's energy, 75% of its metals and 85% of its wood. If the ecosphere was fully priced, not free, such consumption patterns will not continue. A major restructuring of the world's income distribution, production and consumption pattern may therefore be a necessary precondition for any viable strategy for sustainable human development.'