What is this 'ethical living' anyway?

Well, first of all, I don’t know. The closest I think I can come at the moment is a loose description: I think ethical living is to be aware of how you live. Further to this, it is to take action to improve the way you live and to lessen any negative impacts resulting from the actions you take. In brief then, perhaps it’s to act on your awareness.

It’s sort of overwhelming to begin with. To think through the ethical consequences of every decision you make or don’t make; exhausting actually. The wonderful thing is though, that, once you start, you’ve already gone twice as far as you’ve gone before. Say for example, you’ve never chosen the Fair Trade Coffee because it’s 10p more expensive. The day you spend that extra 10p because you realise that ‘fair’ is actually a very important word, you’ve literally doubled your ‘ethi-score’.

Enough preaching. My work for today will be to find 3 useful ethical websites.

1. ethiscore (linked to ethicalconsumer): these website provide information on the companies behind the brand names and will help you make an ethical choice when you next buy a new pair of trainers.
2. The Environment Agency: the environment- ahh! This website will guide you through everything you need to know about doing your bit, it’s particularly good on local knowledge.
3. Amnesty International: we all know about Amnesty International and its work protecting human rights worldwide. This site will keep you updated on all the recent news and teach you what you can do to help.

To blog or not to blog...?

Forget that. Blogging these days is about as commonplace as blowing your nose. The real quandry comes when you actually start to put fingers to keyboard; what shall I blog about?!

I've spent a few days thinking about it and looking at other interesting blogs. I know I want to blog on something fairly specific, something I'm interested in (and will remain interested in) and something that's topical.

To cut a long story of umm-ing and ah-ing short, I'm going to blog on 'ethical living'. While happy to admit I'm not entirely sure what I mean by that, I have every confidence its true meaning will surface once given the arms and legs with which to do so.