INCONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION

The Environmental Impacts You Don’t Know You Have

By Tatiana Schlossberg

This book careens and skitters across the landscape of its topic, which means I now know a number of interesting things I didn’t know when I picked it up: Netflix uses up 15 percent of all the internet bandwidth on earth; shoppers return 35 percent of the goods they buy online, which is as much as six times more than when they shop in stores; producing polyester for clothes emits as much carbon dioxide as 185 coal-fired power plants; a single fleece garment can shed 100,000 plastic microfibers in one washing.

There are lots of these factoids in “Inconspicuous Consumption.” Tatiana Schlossberg, who used to cover climate and environment for The New York Times, has not done a great deal of original reporting — the book includes accounts of just a few short trips. But she has scoured the internet for pretty much every scary and fascinating statistic on her subject that you can imagine, and her time has been well spent. You come away from her book with a stronger sense of the sheer largeness of the human enterprise — the number of us now consuming, and the overwhelming effect of all that volume.

[ This book was one of our most anticipated titles of August. See the full list. ]

So, for instance, cashmere used to be a relatively rare luxury item. But the Chinese began to see an opportunity for an export market, and soon Inner Mongolia was surging in population — of herders, but mostly of goats, from five million in 1990 to 26 million in 2004. Those goats, in turn, have overgrazed much of the region’s remarkable grasslands, turning them into desert. “To put it more simply: More goats to meet increasing demand ... means there is more grazing, and therefore more desertification, so the goats are undernourished, which makes their hair coarser, causing the supply of high-quality cashmere to shrink, causing the herders to breed more goats to try to meet the demand for better cashmere, and on and on forever until, once again, the world collapses in on itself like a dying star.”