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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 British supermarkets; pointless gadgets such as solar-powered cappuccino whisks; silver cuff links handmade in Mexico, screaming 'gilt without the guilt.' Their main impact is to make shoppers feel good-I'm doing something for the planet!-without having to change their lifestyle one bit.

If we get seduced by the idea that the market will respond to our ethical and environmental concerns, adapt accordingly, and the woes of the world will be solved, then we are making a huge mistake. This ignores 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 regulate it. None of these things are easily done, and 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 lifestyle has triggered will involve a seismic shift in the way we live. We must move away from limitless consumer-driven growth and toward a sustainable, low-carbon model. Sometimes our most ethical shopping choice will be to buy nothing.

We should not be obsessed by whether we as individuals are consuming as ethically as possible. It's important and rewarding to do what we can, but 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 reengineering of the economy in a meaningful way.'

Ethical consumerism offers attractively simple answers when these do not exist. Buying a different brand of detergent is easy. Effecting social change is hard.

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 more ambitious than getting fair trade kumquats onto the world's supermarket shelves.

Excerpted from New Internationalist (Nov. 2006). Subscriptions: $44/yr. (11 issues) from Box 819, Markham, ON L3P 8A2, Canada; www.newint.org.

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