Book Review: Ninety Percent of Everything

Ninety Percent of EverythingInside Shipping, The Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, And Food on Your PlateBy Rose GeorgeMetropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2013Science fiction fans of a certain age (you can spot them easily enough: they’re the ones who are nauseated rather than enraptured by The Hunger Games) might look at the title of Rose George’s new book, Ninety Percent of Everything, and flash back to her previous book, 2008’s The Big Necessity. Those fans will instantly recall sci-fi great Theodore Sturgeon’s wonderfully crabby “revelation” that “ninety percent of science fiction is crap – but then, ninety percent of everything is crap,” and some of those fans will have read George’s paradoxically delightful earlier expose on the globally overwhelming problem of human excrement. The new book’s title almost makes it sound like a sequel.Then you get to the spirited 13,500 words of the book’s subtitle, and all becomes clear: in this latest work, George is dealing not with metaphorical pessimism but with actual reality – a reality in which ninety percent of everything around every one of her readers is shipped to those readers from somewhere far, far away. The new book is about the largely unseen world of international shipping, and the text goes into even more detail than the subtitle.It’s another fantastic read from George, who early in its pages looks at strangers and plays a “numbers game”: count the visible possessions of that person that are only available through international shipping. Headphones? Headphone wires? Books (paper in another, ink in a second, printing, often done by slaves, in a third)? Clothing (material in one country, actual stitching in another, almost universally done by slaves)? Computers (components in one country, assembly, by slaves, in another)? And those are just the accoutrements a passerby can see – that person’s home will be equally full of items shipped long-distance, as George puts it:

But who looks behind a television now and sees the ship that brought it? Who cares about them men who steered your breakfast cereal through winter storms?

She learns all about those men by shipping out as a supernumerary (essentially, living cargo) on the Maersk Kendal – giant Danish cargo ship that will take her 9,288 nautical miles and show her as much of the world of international shipping as it’s even moderately safe to see. The Maersk sees its share of bad weather, although nothing truly harrowing by high seas standards. And the Maersk isn’t captured by pirates, its crew held as hostages or simply hosed overboard (big cargo vessels like the Maersk are often taller than a city office building – the fall is lethal, regardless of water or sharks). George lives to tell the tale, in other words – no small feat in the lawless world she so accurately describes:

In practice, the ocean is the world’s wildest place, because of both its fearsome natural danger and how easy it is out there to slip from the boundaries of law and civilization that seem so firm ashore. TV crime dramas now frequently use ports as a visual shorthand for places of criminal, suspicious activity. I don’t know why they don’t just go out to sea. If something goes wrong in international waters, there is no police force or union official to assist. Imagine you have a problem while on a ship. Who do you complain to, when you are employed by a Manila manning agency on a ship owned by an American, flagged by Panama, managed by a Cypriot, in international waters?

Nevertheless, it’s a world of ceaseless caravans. More than one hundred thousand cargo ships ply the world’s oceans. In 2011, American ports took in nearly 2 trillion dollars in trade. Thanks to innovations in cargo packaging, storage, and unloading, the scale of international shipping now dwarfs anything the world has ever seen – and dependency has risen accordingly:

Hardly any nation is now self-sufficient. In 2011, the United Kingdom shipped in half of its gas. The United States relies on ships to bring in two-thirds of its oil supplies. Every day, thirty-eight million tons of crude oil sets off by sea somewhere, although you may not notice it.

Too much of George’s book busies itself with colorful scene-setting (the personalities of the Maersk’s crew, the drabness of the food, etc.), but perhaps this is the only way to sugar-coat such a dire subject for popular consumption. The evils of cargo shipping are dutifully represented in these pages but not dwelled upon – this is a museum tour, not an angry expose.The racket made by these enormous shipping vessels has turned huge swaths of the world’s oceans into acoustic deserts, and the vessels are responsible for even further environmental devastation, in the form of massive oil slicks. The sheer bulk of the industry – and all those millions of large, stackable, featureless shipping crates – has allowed the human slave trade to flourish on an unprecedented scale. And potentially far worse than any of these iniquities is the fact that less than 5 percent of this constantly-moving 90 percent is ever inspected at any of its many ports of call. If you live in any of the United States’ 360 major seaports, you’re almost certainly no more than 10 minutes away from a crate full of screaming, crying human slaves who’ve had no sunlight or sanitation for months – but you might also be no more than 10 minutes away from a crate full of former Soviet nerve toxins bought on the thriving black market and set with a timer. Or that crate might contain a slowly destabilizing nuclear bomb, which can be detonated by a cell phone signal from the other side of the world.These enormous vessels like the Maersk sit in port cities all over the world stacked as high as Niagara Falls with containers no one inspected upon loading, no one monitored during transit, and no one inspects upon docking. As Rose George makes clear in her engaging and disturbing book, it’s not so much practicality as decadence that sets those ships in motion, and decadence never wants to draw the needful conclusions. Many of those conclusions are explicit in Ninety Percent of Everything – printed by slaves and shipped across the world though it was.