Pick up almost any commonly used product and you won’t be surprised to find that it was made in China. It is here that 90 per cent of your Christmas decorations are made, 29 per cent of color television sets, 75 per cent of the world’s toys, 70 per cent of all cigarette lighters and probably every T-shirt in your closet. The hard drive for your iPod mini was made in the city of Guiyang. Located in China’s poorest province, Guiyang is more noted for its poverty than for making state-of-the-art one-inch hard drives. Working the assembly lines, China’s youthful peasant population is quickly abandoning traditional extended-family village life, leaving the monotony of agricultural work and subsistence income behind for a chance at independence.

When you stand at a distance, consumerism can look pretty attractive—all the nice shiny cars and houses and clothes and plasma TVs and so on. But when you get up close and look at our overworked dysfunctional families, the waste streams of our products, the wars our greed is fostering, worldwide environmental degradation, toxic metals in the breast milk of Eskimo women, birth defects in the children of the mothers who assemble our electronics in China, then you start to see that our consumer lifestyle is not so pretty.