Our individual consumption choices and patterns often have far-reaching ecological consequences, as Peter Dauvergne's excellent study begins by noting, although it is difficult for most people to comprehend how the many individual consumer choices they make can combine to produce the aggregative harm that observers often attribute to them. Some of this is due to willful ignorance on the part of consumers who prefer not to know how their choices affect others, perhaps informed by tenaciously held ideological beliefs that consumer behavior is genuinely private and properly preference driven, rather than social and political in consequence and by nature, as other contributors to the critical literature on consumerism maintain.

While Dauvergne implores us to “become more responsible consumers” as part of a larger remedy to the variety of consumption-related problems he identifies, his focus is squarely fixed upon the causal role of political economy, rather than ethics, and the most pervasive obstacles he identifies are the opacity and complexity of commodity supply chains in a globalized economy and the informational deficits resulting from the control of science by those who elevate profits above the public interest. In short, we cause ecological harm through our consumption, not because we are bad people aiming to transfer the costs of our affluence onto unwitting others but because those costs are obscured from our view by economic globalization, and the experts on which we ordinarily rely for information about product safety mislead us into thinking our choices benign.

Dauvergne's trenchant analysis of what he terms the “shadows of consumption,” or those global environmental externalities produced by current patterns of commodity production and consumption, calls attention to damaging “effects that few of us ever see—or want to see” and yields valuable insights into the political and economic structures in which they are rooted (p. xi). Eschewing the apocalyptic rhetoric of ecological limits discourses, as well as the moral and cultural critique of anticonsumerist social movements, the complex “mapping” of ecological shadows that emerges from his case study approach offers diagnoses of current eco-ailments that are impressively wide-ranging in scope and rich in context and detail.

Readers of the book already know that automobiles kill people, that leaded gasoline is hazardous, and that clubbing baby harp seals is cruel, and will be disappointed if they hope that its author will adjudicate old disputes about how to allocate blame for such atrocities among producers and consumers. His primary aim is, rather, to explore why these harmful consequences are so surprisingly resilient, frequently defying our efforts to control their effects and indeed sometimes exacerbated by the very means that appear on the surface to mitigate them. Before we can effectively address such problems, we must adequately understand them, and so it is appropriate that the bulk of the book is devoted to the latter imperative while the final chapter is reserved for the author's “musings,” intended to “begin a conversation” about sustainable consumption. (Authorial modesty aside, these recommendations are sophisticated, well grounded, and wide-ranging, and should be commended for avoiding the simplistic remedies and polemical tone that is characteristic of much existing critical work on consumption and the environment.)

We do not need a complete map to understand consumption's topographical highlights. A comprehensive analysis of its multifarious causes and effects would require many thousands of pages and lifetimes of research, given the complexity of the global economy as well as the social and natural environments in which it is housed. Dauvergne instead offers five case studies that together illuminate the origin and evolution of major and minor commodities, the social and ecological costs of their ongoing consumption, and policy means by which those costs might be reduced. All five cases—of automobiles, leaded gasoline, refrigerators, beef, and the fur of harp seals—offer some ground for optimism about the prospects for harnessing innovation or mobilizing democratic politics on behalf of environmental health and safety. But each also warns of how incremental improvements can sometimes enable and often be overwhelmed by new or intensified problems associated with rising consumption.

Significant advances in automobile safety, fuel economy, and pollution control have made passenger cars cleaner and safer than they were a generation ago, Dauvergne's first case effectively suggests, yet personal automobiles now kill more people, consume more resources, and emit more pollutants than ever before. To understand this, we must look beyond the simple facts that more people now own cars and drive them greater distances than before, since these are merely the products of actions and inactions by key players in government and industry that deliberately entrenched the car culture in American life and exported it abroad. By making this point through a scrupulously researched and compellingly presented case study, Dauvergne invites the reader into the historical narrative and institutional analysis from which this heuristic judgment emerges, offering a fascinating descriptive account of both the promise and perils of global environmental politics. The cases are well chosen and illustrative of a wide range of other consumption issues, and together offer a critical view that positions itself in between the unguarded pessimism of environmental doomsayers and the naive Pollyannaism espoused by champions of economic globalization.

Books of this sort typically lack a constructive recipe for positive social change capable of responding to pervasive environmental and political challenges, and it is here that Dauvergne's work is particularly strong. Many of his proposals for global economic regulation are familiar ones: higher standards for exported commodities, precautionary approaches to new technology, full cost accounting, and the redirection of economic incentives away from waste and toward sustainability. But his recommendations do not stop with regulatory reform, as many do, and his pragmatic endorsement of solutions that work and principled defense of “balanced consumption” improves upon the apolitical or one-dimensional remedies to be found elsewhere. Global political economy operates in a sphere that is simultaneously near and far; its proximity to us is emphasized by our inability to extricate ourselves from contributing toward and being victimized by its insidious effects, while its distance from our individual and collective agency is reinforced by our futile efforts to control either dimension of those effects.

The root causes of the many consumption-related global environmental problems are everywhere and nowhere, as is perhaps best captured by the image of a spectral entity that can only be tracked by following the shadows that it casts upon the world. By tracking those shadows and seeking their light-blocking sources, however, Dauvergne provides an edifying glimpse into what is casting them and points the way toward letting more light through to others.