The problem is that n-hexane is a potent neurotoxin, and all these people have been exposed. Their hands shake uncontrollably. Most of them can't even pick up a glass. I talk to people whose joints in their hands have disintegrated from working on the line, doing the same motion hundreds and hundreds of thousands of times. It's like carpal tunnel on a scale we can scarcely imagine.

the dormitories are cement cubes, 12 foot by 12 foot. And in that space, there are 13 beds, 14 beds-- I count-- 15 beds. They're stacked up like Jenga puzzle pieces, all the way up to the ceiling. The space between them is so narrow. None of us would actually fit in them. They have to slide into them like coffins.

The official workday in China is eight hours long, and that's a joke. I never met anyone who'd even heard of an eight-hour shift. Everyone I talked to worked 12-hour shifts standard, and often much longer than that. 14 hours a day, 15 hours a day.

And it is constant. They work a Chinese hour, and a Chinese hour has 60 Chinese minutes, and a Chinese minute has 60 Chinese seconds. It's not like like our hour. What's our hour now? 46 minutes? You have a bathroom break, and you have a smoke break, and if you don't smoke, there's a yoga break.

And I say to her, "You seem kind of young. How old are you?" And she says, "I'm 13." And I say, "13? That's young. Is it hard to get work at Foxconn when you're--" She says, "Oh, no." And her friends all agree. They don't really check ages. The outside companies do have inspections. But the workers told me Foxconn always knows when there is going to be an inspection. So what they do then-- they don't even check ages then. They just pull everyone from the affected line, and then they put the oldest workers they have on that line.

And along the edges of each enormous building are the nets. Because right at the time that I am making this visit, there has been an epidemic of suicides at the Foxconn plant. Week after week, worker after worker has been climbing all the way up to the tops of these enormous buildings, and then throwing themselves off, killing themselves in a brutal and public manner, not thinking very much about just how bad this makes Foxconn look. Foxconn's response to month after month of suicides has been to put up these nets.

And I'm involuntarily reminded of a Google News alert that popped into my inbox a few weeks earlier about a Reuters photographer who was taking pictures not at the Foxconn plant, but near the Foxconn plant. And Foxconn security went out, scooped him up, and beat him before releasing him.

The Foxconn plant in Shenzhen has 430,000 workers. That can be a difficult number to conceptualize. I find it's useful to instead think about how there are more than 20 cafeterias at the plant. And then you just have to understand that workers told me that these cafeterias can hold up to 10,000 people. So now you just need to visualize a cafeteria that seats 10,000 people. I'll wait.

So far, no country has decided to use this international law to help Congo end slavery, but the tools are there.

For the poor South, it was cotton and iron ore that carried the “resource curse,” and kleptocratic and racist local governments moved quickly to stabilize and legitimize their control. Whether it was sharecropping or peonage slavery, the result was great riches for a white elite, and an ongoing degradation of the land and destruction of the vast Southern forests.

The Second Congo War is the modern world’s greatest forgotten war. Raging from 1998 to 2003, and overshadowed on the global stage by the events of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent “War on Terror,” it involved eight countries and about twenty-five armed groups. By its end 5.4 million people were dead, a body count second only to the two world wars.

It is the great forgotten genocide of the twentieth century. One witness was an African-American journalist named George Washington Williams. He coined the phrase “crimes against humanity” to describe what he saw.

We also have to understand that slavers—who don’t adhere to those laws and treaties—are a leading cause of the natural world’s destruction. And to stop them, we don’t need more laws. We need to end slavery.

Well, we know environmental change is part of the engine of slavery. The sharp end of environmental change, whether slow as rising sea levels and desertification, or disastrously sudden like a hurricane or a tsunami, comes first to the poor. I’ve seen men, women, children, families, and whole communities impoverished and broken by environmental change and natural disasters. Homes and livelihoods lost, these people and communities are easily abused. Especially in countries where corruption is rife, slavers act with impunity after environmental devastation, luring and capturing the refugees, the destitute, and the dispossessed.

The profits generated when we go shopping flow back down the chain and fuel more assaults on the natural world, drive more people toward enslavement, and feed more goods into the global supply chain. Round and round it goes— our spending drives a criminal perpetual motion machine that eats people and nature like a cancer.

The peace and order of the graves surrounding ancient churches was suddenly marred by images of slave children shaping and polishing the stone that marked those graves.

This debt bondage is illegal, but illiterate workers don’t know this, and the bosses are keen to play on their sense of obligation, not alert them to the scam that’s sucking them under.