7gen Bloc

Anand Giridharadas, in a Sunday New York Times piece entitled "Boycotts Minus the Pain," poses some wonderfully important questions about the role and limitations of ethical consumption. As a lifelong salesman of bath tissue and laundry detergent that aspire to be both sustainable and responsible, it's not surprising that I have my own point of view.

Giridharadas asks which, "problems demand politics and which the mall. Child labor in Vietnam and unscrupulous intermediaries in the coffee trade lent themselves to buycotting. What can the market do about Darfur or health care in the United States...? Have we, with our ethical cars and condoms and carrots, found a way to make markets humane? Or have we rather found a way to make politics bearable to us by turning it into shopping?"

My answer? Neither.

Markets are not humane, and politics is unbearable.

Ethical consumption has an essential role to play in our journey toward a more just and equitable economy. Fair trade coffee and sustainable palm oil make a measurably significant difference in the lives of farmers and their families, in both the environment and economic justice. They will not, however, correct the underlying structural inequity of an economy that fails to charge the full true cost of the things we buy. Because business is able (some would say encouraged) to "externalize" many of these costs onto society, the real price that must be paid for all too many products and services is borne by each of us whether we ourselves consumed the item in question or not. When a international commodities firm, for example, burns down a prime stretch of virgin Indonesian rainforest to make way for a massive plantation of palm oil, it is we the people not the owners or backers of the project who pay the actual cost of the damage that results whether it's biodiversity loss, global climate change acceleration, air pollution, or some other ill caused by the land's conversion from a natural to a synthetic state.

Ethical consumption may lead to a lessening of these ills and to marketplaces that we can participate in with a clearer conscience, but it does not fundamentally address the systemic change the world needs even more. Nor does it ease our political responsibilities. We can buy as many organic bananas as we can eat, but we still need to vote, participate in the political process itself, and actively contribute to the communities to which we belong.

What is required more than better products is a more holistic approach to the challenges we face. This will require that we first achieve an understanding of the common root causes of the problems we're concerned about and then deploy a range of responses in order to identify those that will be most effective at addressing the many diverse problems these root causes create in one fell swoop.

If that sounds complicated, you're right. It is.

Ethical consumption marks the start, not the culmination, of that process. We all need to become informed purchasers of truly responsible products. But there's a critical difference between a "green" product and a "green" company. A few solar flashlights made by a company that burns coal to make energy will not solve global climate change. In fact, I would argue that we don't want to part with our hard-earned dollars to buy such products at all if the profits our purchases create are going to end up funding corporations that stand for values we consider irresponsible and unethical.

Finding and applying the information needed to make these kinds of decisions, however, is both difficult and time-consuming. It may be the only way we can really consume ethically, but getting there is problematic at best, especially when our jobs, families, and homes are already clamoring for attention we're hard-pressed to provide. (When it comes to my own purchasing, I leave it up to the GoodGuide, a wonderful rating organization that does the hard work for me by considering countless points of information and making recommendations about which product choices are the most responsible.)

That leaves us with politics and the job of fulfilling our civic responsibilities, a challenge so complex that I believe it is a primary driver behind the explosion in ethical consumption. Daunted by the task of becoming full and proactive participants in civic life, we seek instead a simpler substitute in the form of responsibly produced goods and services. But we cannot eat or otherwise purchase our way to a new President, health care reform, or badly needed changes in our tax code. For that we need something more.

We need to find a reasonable and effective way to promote the "politics" of a just and sustainable world. This is the task that I believe to be the most important and profound challenge in today's society. On this count, our friends on the "right" may have much to teach us. Through an intricately networked and systemic combination of religious institutions, think tanks, foundations, small town school boards, and local elections, they've successfully driven their values from individual communities onto the national stage.

This needs to be the destination for the ideals behind ethical consumption, which must grow from a product here and a product there into a national movement that ultimately manifests itself not just through more responsibly-produced goods but is reflected in all companies systematically working to exercise positive influences throughout their supply chains and in an economic system that no longer shifts its hidden costs onto the commonwealth.

This is how we need to grow and where we need to go. Having said that, I don't necessarily know how best to get there. I just know that rather than "What should I buy?;" "How can I make it so it doesn't matter" is the question we should all be asking.