Buy now, Pay later: an insight into ethical consumerism

With the planet dying of consumption, can a shift in our shopping habits save the day? If only it were that simple, sighs Jess Worth.

When I was growing up, I remember my parents used to drink something called ‘Campaign Coffee’. Its name was always accompanied by a slight shudder because it was: a) quite expensive and b) pretty foul. Heroically purchased by a committed clique of clergy, NGO workers and the ‘loony left’, it was one of the very first attempts at trading with the Majority World in a way that was less exploitative.

Things have definitely changed since then. ‘Ethical’ shopping is all the rage these days. Consuming with a conscience – once seen as the preserve of beardy-weirdy tree-hugging freaks and barely registering on the radar of corporate execs and politicians – has suddenly burst noisily into the mainstream. You can now buy a more socially or environmentally responsible version of just about anything: clockwork mobile phone chargers, organic anti-wrinkle cream, recycled silk designer handbags, solar-powered bird baths…

Green shopping websites abound. Ethical consumer guides are dropping out of the most surprising magazines. Fair trade coffee tastes good these days, there’s an abundance of brands to choose from and you can drink it in Starbucks in 23 different countries, or – if you live in New England – even in McDonald’s.

Earlier this year Nestlé launched a fair trade coffee line. In May, long-time animal-tester L’Oréal (also part-owned by Nestlé) bought the Body Shop. In June, pile-‘em-high sell-‘em-cheap pioneer Wal-Mart announced it is switching much of its fruit and veg to organic. Ebay is even setting up a special ‘artisans’ site’ for fair trade producers. Welcome to the moral mainstream!
Green futures

The so-called ‘ethical consumerism’ phenomenon is nothing new. I expect that, like me, many NI readers have been boycotting Nestlé – and other notorious transnationals – for years. I also suspect that, given you are reading this magazine, many of you also partake in the more positive pastime of trying to buy things that don’t cause harm to people and the planet. Depending on your circumstances, this could include buying fair trade and organic food and drink, supporting local independent shops and farmers’ markets, buying energy-efficient appliances, or shopping online for sweatshop-free clothes.

But we seem to have reached a tipping point. Although ‘ethical’ sales still only account for a tiny part of the global economy, analysts and companies firmly believe the future of retail will be green, and are rebranding and repositioning themselves accordingly. Rob Harrison from Ethical Consumer magazine has been charting this trend: ‘The big companies have moved into the ethical market defensively. They seem convinced it will become dominant in developed economies – there’ll be a broad ethical mainstream with most players guaranteeing basic ethical standards, with a super-ethical niche sitting on top.’

So what are we to make of this enthusiastic encroachment on to ‘our’ territory by the brands we love to hate? Are we witnessing the final triumph of progressive values over naked corporate greed? Should we junk the boycott and start buying Nestlé’s fair trade coffee in order to encourage them to do more? Are consumers becoming the de facto regulators of industry, curbing corporate abuse more effectively than any government has yet managed? Is this part of the answer to the world’s problems?
A dangerous diversion

We should certainly celebrate where we have got to. Those of us who have been campaigning for years against grinding global poverty, corporate carnage and ecological meltdown have started to win some important arguments. But though sustainable shopping is becoming big business, we shouldn’t pop the organic champagne corks just yet.

For a start, we should be wary of the claims being made. Irish rocker Bono, ever the self-appointed spokesperson for charitable causes, recently pontificated that: ‘Shopping is politics. You vote every time you spend money.’

The view that you can spend your way to a sustainable world is echoed in much of the ethical shopping sector’s marketing. New Consumer, which purports to be the ‘ultimate ethical lifestyle magazine’, enthuses that: ‘creating a world that works for everyone has never been easier. It lies in your simple shopping decisions and lifestyle habits!’ Steady on now. It would be great if this were true; but it isn’t.

In fact, what ethical consumerism can accomplish is limited in many different ways. Of course no-one wants to undermine the hard work, dedication and real progress of the many pioneers who have made consuming with a conscience possible. What they have achieved is amazing. But if we do not face up to the limitations of a consumer-driven approach to solving the world’s problems, openly debate the contradictions and shortcomings that are becoming increasingly clear, and refocus our attentions on collective political action, we risk heading down a very dangerous diversion that takes us away from the route towards genuine global justice.

The problem with the concept of ‘ethical consumerism’ is that it’s something of an oxymoron. The dictionary definition of ‘consume’ is ‘to destroy by or like fire or disease: to cause to vanish’. A consumer is ‘a person who squanders, destroys, or uses up’. So we may be trying to do it in an ‘ethical’ way (what’s ‘ethical’ is of course subjective, but let’s not even go there right now) but often we are still engaged in a destructive activity.

Shop till we drop
And consumerism is indeed destroying the planet. The fatal flaw in treating consumer-led growth as the main indicator of economic success in industrialized countries is that it assumes infinite growth is possible, and doesn’t take into account environmental and social limits. As a result, we are already well into the red, ecologically. The oil, water, land, soil, clean air and mineral resources we depend upon are under severe pressure or actively running out. It would take more than five planets to sustain the world’s current population at US consumption levels. Climate change, which is directly caused by human overconsumption, is already upon us and we in the industrialized world need to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 60-90 per cent to have any hope of averting its worst effects.

We need to change the entire structure of our exploitative, wasteful, resource-intensive economy; and that includes buying much less stuff. Of course, purchasing more sustainable versions of the things we actually need has to form part of the solution. No-one’s arguing against low-energy lightbulbs (unless they are being used to offset short-haul air flights, that is).
But so much of the ethical consumption boom focuses on luxury goods: fair trade roses grown in huge hothouses next to Kenya’s Lake Naivasha, sucking up precious water resources and then being air-freighted to Northern supermarkets; pointless gadgets such as solar-powered cappuccino whisks; silver cufflinks handmade in Mexico, screaming ‘gilt without the guilt!’. Their main impact is to make the shopper feel good – ‘I’m doing something for the planet!’ – without having to change their lifestyle one bit, while the companies laugh all the way to the bank.

This frustration is keenly felt by British environmentalist and writer George Monbiot. ‘We all deceive ourselves and deceive each other about the change that needs to take place. The middle classes think they have gone green because they buy organic cotton pyjamas and handmade soaps with bits of leaf in them – though they still heat their conservatories and retain their holiday homes in Croatia. The people who should be confronting them with hard truths balk at the scale of the challenge. And the politicians won’t jump until the rest of us do.’3

Corporate self-defence
In fact, the rapid conversion of big business to all things ethical is not just about exploiting a lucrative new market and making efficiency savings – it is also a self-preservation strategy. As the science of climate change and evidence of shocking corporate practices in the Majority World have become undeniable, the writing is slowly materializing on the boardroom wall. How to avoid being broken up, regulated, eco-taxed, boycotted? Be one step ahead of the game and show you’re doing the right thing without the need for governments to resort to any extreme, potentially profit-curbing measures.

‘Our customers know that, if they shop at M&S, we’ll have done all the hard work for them,’ explains Mike Barry, head of corporate social responsibility at UK department store Marks & Spencer. ‘They’re interested in ethical issues, but they just want us to get on and manage them... What we’ve done is look at the market research, the focus groups, the way the media is playing it, the way the NGOs are playing it, and then transected all those issues. We’ve worked out what customers are beginning to tell us, anticipated it, then gone out and given them what they want.’

This is what is known as ‘choice editing’ and it’s the new industry buzzword. Quite simply, unethical options are removed from the market, ‘edited out’ by the company, reducing consumer choice in pursuit of the greater good. How do you stop people buying energy intensive incandescent lightbulbs? Just don’t offer them as an option to consumers. It’s as simple as that.

The problem is that this approach relies on the company to really do what is most ethical, which from time to time will inevitably contradict what will make them money. So it’s possible that the best option for the environment would be not to buy a particular item from Marks & Spencer at all, but to buy it second-hand, or maybe borrow it, or even – are you sitting down for this? – to go without it completely. Given that the company exists to sell stuff, it’s hard to imagine ‘don’t buy this’ appearing as one of the edited options.

The voluntary nature of ‘responsible’ business is another severe limitation. How do you enforce it? How do you know whether what you’re being told is true, or just ‘cleanwash’? One of the depressing things about researching this magazine has been the discovery that, as soon as you scratch the surface, almost nothing is as ‘ethical’ as it seems, especially if you look at the whole picture rather than squinting through specific ‘environment’ or ‘labour’ or ‘fair trade’ lenses.

Chipping away the ‘cleanwash’
It turns out that the boom in organics, far from boosting small-scale sustainable farming around the world, is industrializing the sector, squeezing the small farmers out and watering down organic standards.
Fair trade is increasingly driven, not by the needs of poor producers, but the demands of big business. ‘When fair trade cotton came on the market, you couldn’t get the bloody stuff,’ reveals Paul Monaghan, head of ethics and sustainable development at the Co-operative Group. ‘M&S went out and bought the whole lot. When fair trade roses came out, Sainsbury’s got them. We were all fighting over the roses.’

‘Lifestyle’ magazines revel in the feelgood factor.
Apparently the fair trade labelling organizations were put under so much pressure to deliver these new products that corners were cut and compromises made. They began to certify huge privately owned flower plantations rather than small co-ops, and certifying only the way the cotton is grown as fair trade – allowing the shocking possibility that, further down the supply chain, a garment made from fair trade cotton could be put together in a sweatshop and still marketed as ‘fair trade’ to oblivious consumers…

We know flying food around the world is environmental idiocy, but there are ethical issues raised by its more sustainable alternative – shipping. Seafarers are some of the most brutally exploited and abused workers in the world.
And what about the people who work in sectors not currently influenced by consumer power? Communities devastated by copper mines in Peru, palm oil growers in Indonesia thrown into jail for forming a union... The sources of their suffering are ubiquitous ingredients in Northern consumer goods. Must we really rely on NGOs to orchestrate costly campaigns on each and every one in order to mobilize consumer power to reform them? This is far too circuitous a route to bring about change.

Sugar coating on a bitter pill?
Of course there are many visionary people around the world who are really trying to make alternative business models work – and it’s worth taking the time to seek them out. For example, one of the first fair trade companies, Cafédirect, has two Southern coffee and tea producers sitting on its Board. They recently issued ‘ethical’ shares for investors to buy on the understanding that they would not require the company to maximize profits at the expense of its values – an unheard-of stipulation in most of the corporate world.

But by and large, producer power is conspicuously absent even in the ethical business arena. Consumer power still rules and Northern consciences seem to be the main beneficiaries of ethical consumerism so far. Indeed, it is difficult to find much that has been said and written about the phenomenon amongst Majority World commentators. Those I have spoken to have been dismissive. ‘It’s sugar coating on a bitter pill that can prevent us from focusing on real structural issues,’ argues Indian activist and academic Anuradha Mittal, a fierce critic of ‘corporate social responsibility’ initiatives that mask the misdeeds of the companies who signed up. It’s just a way for ‘middle-class NGOs to get a piece of the capitalist action,’ declares Firoze Manji from African social justice network Fahamu.

Others see this as yet another way in which the poor are being disenfranchised. If exercising consumer power is the way to bring about political change, then if you are not a consumer, you are excluded from the process. This is equally true within rich countries, where the ethical marketplace is largely a playground for the middle classes. If shopping is politics, then the rich and privileged get to hog all the votes.

Drowning out the mood music
So as a means to change the world, the ethical consumerist approach is a blunt and imprecise tool. It is most effective when used collectively and strategically. Fair trade would not have got into the public consciousness – and the supermarkets – without dedicated campaigning by thousands of people in their local communities. Many small producers in the Majority World are certainly benefiting even if they are a drop in the ocean compared to those whose livelihoods have been jeopardized by the trading system as a whole.

But if we give ethical consumers too much power, if we believe that the moral issues are black and white, if we get seduced by the idea that the market will respond to our ethical and environmental concerns, adapt accordingly and somehow the woes of the world will be solved, then we are making a huge mistake.

The mistake is partly to trust the market and ignore the central role governments must play in ending unsustainable patterns of consumption. Surely an important tool in curbing corporate abuse is to regulate against it. Governments can use taxes and other economic instruments to reshape economies and control markets, and can introduce and enforce ethical and environmental standards. Trade will not be made fair, paradoxically, by buying fair trade.

Governments must engage with changing the international rules that currently regulate it. None of these things are easily done, but we won’t achieve them by going shopping.
Perhaps an even bigger mistake is not to face up to the scale of change that’s required. Surviving the multiple impending catastrophes that our throwaway lifestyles have triggered will involve a seismic shift in the way we live our lives.

We must move away from limitless consumer-driven growth and towards a sustainable, low-carbon model that meets everyone’s needs through more connected communities rather than gleaming shopping malls. Sometimes our most ethical shopping choice will be to buy nothing; to embrace the idea that less can be more. But this is the one message that is not coming through clearly – from NGOs, governments, business and the media. And this particular eco-bullet is one we now have to bite.

We should not get too obsessed by whether we as individuals are consuming as ethically as possible. It’s important and rewarding to do what we can, but the achievement of moral purity is an impossible dream in such an imperfect world. As Andrew Simms from the New Economics Foundation puts it: ‘Ethical consumerism is mood music, rather than a re-engineering of the economy in a meaningful way. It feels palliative – a passive observer, not an active agent of change. We’ve got to get away from the passivity of being defined as consumers, and start making things happen.’

Ethical consumerism offers attractively simple answers when these do not exist. Buying a different brand of detergent is easy. But effecting social change is hard. Becoming more politically engaged with the impacts of everything we do in our lives is daunting. But this rise in ethical concerns is a huge opportunity, showing that more and more people are willing to act on the most pressing issues facing the planet. The challenge now is to find a way to harness and channel all this energy into something far more ambitious than getting fair trade kumquats on to the world’s supermarket shelves.

The Importance Of Alternative Energy Sources

One of the biggest challenges the human race faces today is finding and using alternative energy sources. The push for means of generating electricity has been around for over 100 years, but when oil and coal-fired generators produced power inexpensively, the world put the search for alternative energy sources on the back burner for a number of years.

We cannot procrastinate any longer, however, as many of the earth's natural resources, such as oil, are depleting.

A Short History Lesson on Alternative Energy Sources

The need for an alternate energy source was rekindled in the 1970's with the oil shortage that created lines at gas stations and produced critical shortages throughout the United States. The search for alternate power generation is not limited to finding new ways of powering vehicles, as supplying cheap power for homes and industries is a continuous endeavor. There have been many advances in the search for alternative energy sources, but the price of the power produced still remains too high.

Wind, water and sun are touted as renewable energy resources with claims that once the technology is perfected, making it more cost effective, they can replace the need for oil and natural gas to turn turbines in the generation process. Even geothermal power production is one of the alternate energy sources being researched.

The Source Of The Energy Depends on The Location

For many people the switch to alternative energy sources is a matter of finding the type of alternative power that works the best in their particular geographical location. Persons who live in areas that have limited exposure to the sun for example, may not be too excited about using solar panels to supply power. When the sun goes down for an extended number of days, the town can go dark.

In some of those areas, wind is not a problem as it seems to blow nearly every day. Using wind power to turn turbines to generate electricity can work there, but may not work in other areas that experience less windy conditions. Another of the alternative energy sources, hydropower uses the power of rivers to turn generators, but the cost of the infrastructure to get power to the people from the generator may still be high for long range use.

With the three major alternative energy sources continuing to be researched and advanced, the need for an answer to out problem becomes more evident every time a person receives their electric bill, or fills their car with gas.

The resources that we have left on the planet are running out. Do your part to keep educated on the latest changes in technology and any up to date with the issues at hand to learn what you can do to help solve the energy crisis.

Learn how you can save money and the planet by visiting: http://www.learntomakebiodiesel.com/

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Madison_Greene

Injustices by Shell Oil are the focus of 'Nobel Prize' for the Environmental Movement

On Monday, 23 April 2007 William Corduff, a lifetime resident of Rossport, a sparsely populated farming community in North Mayo County, Ireland was awarded the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize in recognition of his resistance, along with his local community, against Shell Oil’s illegally-approved pipeline through their land.

What is significant about this award is that it once again, awards community resistance against Shell Oil.

On two previous occasions Shell Oil was the focus, first in Nigeria, when Ken Saro Wiwa received the Goldman Environmental Prize in 1995 and then in 1998 when Margie Richards was awarded the prize for her work in Louisiana, in the United States.

In 1998 Bobby Peek, a resident of Durban, received the award for his work with the south Durban community, resisting multinational corporations in south Durban, where Shell Oil operates the biggest South African oil refinery.
groundWork (Friends of the Earth, South Africa – www.gorundwork.org.za) and the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance (SDCEA – www.sdcea.org.za) have been part of the global Shell Accountability Campaign because of Shell Oil’s activities in south Durban which have resulted in Shell Oil’s pipelines leaking more than one million litres of petrol under community homes.

The Shell Accountability Campaign was started in 2002 with the release of the book ‘Riding the Dragon’ which documents Shell Oil’s impacts globally.
Since 2002, the Campaign has grown to include community groups from four continents and non-governmental organisations such as Friends of the Earth International and, in the US, Global Community Monitor and Environmental Health Fund.

Shell Oil planned to start off shore gas production in 2003 near Rossport, bringing toxic, unrefined gas ashore at Rossport via a high pressure pipeline stretching six miles to a refinery which was to be constructed in neighbouring Bellanaboy. Despite objections by many Rossport citizens, Shell was granted permission by the Irish government to run the pipeline across the property of more than two dozen farmers and landowners.

In response, William Corduff and his neighbours began a grassroots campaign to rally the support of their fellow Rossport residents in challenging the pipeline. In June 2005, after refusing Shell access to their property, William Corduff and four other men were jailed. Known as the “Rossport Five,” they were released after spending 94 days in jail.

William Corduff:
“The bottom line is we will not lie down. We can not. There is too much at stake. We’d have to leave our homes if we were to accept this. We have to protect ourselves, because no one else will.”

You can also watch video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLpDmh4BU8w

Permaculture explained

There is an old saying: 'Civilised man has marched across the face of the earth and left a desert in his footprints.' (Carter and Dale, Topsoil and Civilization, p.6)

Today, worldwide, on land once rich with natural vegetation, we see deserts denuded of their topsoil, deserts of salt-encrusted soil from years of irrigation, deserts due to widespread deforestation having altered the regional climate.

The problem from a permaculture perspective has been a lack of design. Agriculture, from its invention and reinvention from some 10,000 years ago onwards, has generally involved a crude process of clearing the wilderness and establishing a cycle of digging or ploughing, then seeding with a few useful species, primarily grasses,then harvesting the crop to feed humans and livestock - and the cycle begins again year on year until the land is exhausted - after which a new area of wilderness is cleared.

Perhaps humans devised this system after surviving for a million years or so by hunting and gathering, and learning that regular firing of the undergrowth encouraged fresh sprouting pioneer species which were more nutritious for people and the grazing herds we hunted than did the stable, mature forest.

The solution from a permaculture perspective is to introduce design into agriculture in order to create permanent high-yielding agricultural ecosystems, so that humans can thrive on as little land as possible, thus leaving as much land as possible as wilderness, if necessary helping the wilderness re-establish itself. This visionary global mission is encapsulated in the word 'permaculture', a shortened form of 'permanent agriculture'.

In order to implement this global vision, we need local solutions, because every place on earth is different in local climate, land form, soils, and the combinations of species which will thrive. Not only does the land and its potential vary from place to place, but so do the people vary in their needs and preferences and their capacities. Every place and community requires its own particular design. Hence at the local level, permaculture designers often refer to permaculture as being about designing for 'permanent culture'.

The global vision can be lost sight of in the nitty-gritty of 'permanent culture' designing for local sustainability. But the vision is vital and can inspire us to keep going in the face of obstruction and apathy.

Bill Mollison explainsBill Mollison explains why freeing land for wilderness matters even for those who think only people matter:

'Even anthropocentric people would be well-advised to pay close attention to, and to assist in, the conservation of existing forests and the rehabilitation of degraded lands. Our own survival demands that we preserve all existing species, and allow them a place to live.
We have abused the land and laid waste to systems we need never have disturbed had we attended to our home gardens and settlements. If we need to state a set of ethics on natural systems, then let it be thus:

Implacable and uncompromising opposition to further disturbance of any remaining natural forests, where most species are still in balance;

Vigorous rehabilitation of degraded and damaged natural systems to stable states;

Establishment of plant systems for our own use on the least amount of land we can use for our existence; and

Establishment of plant and animal refuges for rare or threatened species.

Permaculture as a design system deals primarily with the third statement above, but all people who act responsibly in fact subscribe to the first and second statements. That said, I believe we should use all the species we need or can find to use in our own settlement designs, providing they are not locally rampant and invasive.

Whether we approve of it or not, the world about us continually changes. Some would want to keep everything the same, but history, palaeontology, and common sense tells us that all has changed, is changing, will change. In a world where we are losing forests, species, and whole ecosystems, there are three concurrent and parallel responses to the environment:

CARE FOR SURVIVING NATURAL ASSEMBLIES, to leave the wilderness to heal itself;

REHABILITATE DEGRADED OR ERODED LAND using complex pioneer species and long-term plant assemblies (trees, shrubs, ground covers);

CREATE OUR OWN COMPLEX LIVING ENVIRONMENT with as many species as we can save, or have need for, from wherever on earth they come.

We are fast approaching the point where we need refuges for all global life forms, as well as regional, national, or state parks for indigenous forms of plants and animals.

While we see our local flora and fauna as "native", we may also logically see all life as "native to earth".

While we try to preserve systems that are still local and diverse, we should also build new or recombinant ecologies from global resources, especially in order to stabilise degraded lands.'

Bill Mollision, Permaculture: A Practical Guide for a Sustainable Future, p.6

Permaculture in PracticePermaculture is about creating sustainable human habitats by following nature's patterns." It uses the diversity, stability and resilience of natural ecosystems to provide a framework and guidance for people to develop their own sustainable solutions to the problems facing their world, on a local, national or global scale.

It is based on the philosophy of co-operation with nature and caring for the earth and its people.

A system of design"Maximum contemplation; minimum action"

Permaculture is about thinking before you act.

Permaculture is not a set of rules; it is a process of design based around principles found in the natural world, of co-operation and mutually beneficial relationships, and translating these principles into actions.

This action can range from choosing what you eat, how you travel, the type of work you do, and where you live, to working with others to create a community food-growing project. It's about making decisions that relate to all your other decisions; so one area of your life is not working against another. For example, if you are planning a journey, consider other tasks that can be completed on the way to your destination (combining a trip to the leisure centre with buying food on the way home, for example).

It means thinking about your life or project as a whole system - working out the most effective way to do things that involves the least effort and the least damage to others, and looking for ways to make relationships more beneficial.

It is essential to observe your surroundings before making choices. Taking stock at the beginning of a project (whether it be building a house or planting a window box) of the available resources in terms of time, materials, skills, money, opportunities, land etc, and thinking about how these resources can relate to each other is a useful basis for designing a sustainable and effective system. To take the example of a garden - careful observation over the course of a few months can give information about the sunniest spots, the path of a neighbourhood fox, which areas are sheltered from the wind. Such information is not always immediately available, but can ultimately be very important.

A key feature of the design process in permaculture is "zoning". This is about placing things appropriately in relation to each other, and works on the principle that those things which require frequent attention are placed closest to the home. It is about using time, energy and resources wisely, which can be as simple as planting your most used herbs nearest to your kitchen, or as complex as planning a community.

Ethics and Principles"If we want to move on and create sustainability and a more fulfilling quality of life, the best way to do this is to understand the nature of the world and to live harmoniously and creatively with it - to understand that we are a part of the web of life, not separate from it."

Permaculture embodies a system of ethics and principles that we aim to put into practice. These focus around sustainability and fairness, and are generally divided into three main categories:

Earth CarePermaculture as a design system is based on natural systems. It is about working with nature, not against it - not using natural resources unnecessarily or at a rate at which they cannot be replaced. It also means using outputs from one system as inputs for another (vegetable peelings as compost, for example), and so minimising wastage.

People CarePeople care is about looking after us as people, not just the world we live in. It works on both an individual and a community level. Self-reliance, co-operation and support of each other should be encouraged. It is, however, important to look after ourselves on an individual level too. Our skills are of no use to anyone if we are too tired to do anything useful! People care is also about our legacy to future generations.

Fair SharesThe fair shares part of the permaculture ethic brings earth care and people care together.

We only have one earth, and we have to share it - with each other, with other living things, and with future generations.

This means limiting our consumption, especially of natural resources, and working for everyone to have access to the fundamental needs of life - clean water, clean air, food, shelter, meaningful employment, and social contact.

Permaculture does not provide prescriptive solutions to the problems facing the world - nobody is going to demand that you put an herb spiral in the bottom left corner of your garden, or wear only hand knitted recycled non-bleached organic fair trade clothes. It is about allowing you the freedom to observe your surroundings, and make decisions that will work for you, in your situation, using the resources you have.

Self-Reliance and Community Sufficiency "We try to empower people to take control of their own lives. If you can see something needs doing, then give yourself permission to do it"

Permaculture seeks to foster the skills, confidence and imagination to enable people to become self-reliant, and to seek creative solutions to problems on a global or local scale. While the individual has a part to play, in most places it is not realistic for an individual household to provide for all of their own needs in terms of food, clothing, work etc, and the emphasis is more on self-reliance and increased sufficiency within the community, rather than individual self-sufficiency.

In practice, this does not mean each person growing enough food to feed themselves in their back garden; it means that as many as possible of the inputs for a community (food, skills etc) come from within that community - perhaps in the form of community food growing schemes, Local Exchange and Trading Systems to exchange skills and produce etc.

Permaculture means different things to different people. One person may interpret it in a practical sense in terms of growing food, perhaps, while another will focus on a more spiritual side. This diversity is important; it helps to keep a sense of balance, and encourages people to share their resources and knowledge with others.