The stories of our stuff

Today we read from "Confessions of an Eco-Sinner," by Fred Pearce. In this book he goes to the source of some of his food, clothing, materials and the energy that he uses most days. We read about cotton production in Australia, the US and Uzbekistan, the three largest producers in the world. In particular we learned about how much water is used to make a tee shirt (33 bathtubs worth!) and the pesticides used to grow cotton (one quarter of all pesticides used on crops in the US). We also read about the plight of the banana and how it is facing eventual extinction from disease unless we find a new source of genetic diversity to build up its resistance to these threats. This lead to more stories about the limited varieties of the foods that we eat and the need to preserve genetic diversity in order to have healthy food supplies. The readings sparked some good discussions about genetically modified foods, the use of animals in research and synthetic versus natural materials for clothing. We will continue to research our stories of the stuff we use (It Costs What?) and these poster projects will be due on Wednesday, December 14th.

Friday we watched most of a documentary called, "T-Shirt Travels" about the used clothing market in Africa. It followed the story of a young man in Zambia who buys a bale of used clothing from the US and sells it in his hometown in order to make a living. It turns out that the number one export from the US to Africa is used clothing and this has had a big impact on the economies of African nations. It follows up on the story of our t-shirts and what happens to them after we drop them off at used clothing places like the Salvation Army or Goodwill. Here is a link to a summary on PBS: http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/tshirttravels/film.html

Here is a link to where you can click on each stage of the travels of a t-shirt as it makes its way from US charity bin to African marketplace:
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/tshirttravels/track.html