ABSTRACT
When I first started teaching economic geography during the 1980s it was commonplace to begin an introductory class by asking the students to think about the geography of the clothes they were wearing. Students turned to each other and the tactile experience of pulling back the shirt collar connected the students personally to the course in a way the syllabus could not. The shoes ‘Made in China’ and the shirt ‘Made in Sri Lanka’ led easily into a discussion of economic globalization and of living and working conditions around the world. The students read the opening pages of Global Shift (Dicken 1986) and we were away. What is striking to me in retrospect is how little time we spent thinking about the resources from which the shoes and shirts were made, the chemicals used to turn a shirt sparkling white, the flow of waste water from the leather tanning factory, and the energy and pesticides expended in cotton fields. The material foundations and environmental consequences of economic activity, flows of energy, water, materials and waste, were if anything, less visible for me and the students than the social conditions and geography of production and consumption.
