LONDON: When Newsnight launched its ‘ethical man’ experiment a couple of weeks ago, with the aim of transforming the life of one of its journalists, Justin Rowlatt, we all knew immediately what ‘ethical’ meant in the phrase. Just as with other ethical makeovers we have seen over the last few years, from the hilariously casual Christa d’Souza in Vogue to the impressively thorough Leo Hickman, there is a clear set of ‘ethical’ goals to be met.

Switch to a sustainable power supply. Get your organic vegetables delivered. Cycle. Recycle. I am as keen as the next Newsnight viewer to go along with those goals, and happily tick the boxes in my own life. I too get a nice warm glow from putting scraps in the compost bin or going to the farmers’ market. I too resolve to do even more and be even better next month and next year. And I can see and admire where the most committed proponents of this kind of ethical living want us to go — all the way to a thoroughly Thoreauvian life lived close to the land that would eventually be embraced by everyone in society. In the ideal progression, as you buy your fair-trade coffee and plant your carrot seeds in your wildlife friendly garden, you would become part of a widespread revolution in the way people relate to the land and the market, and seamlessly move on towards a society in which we would live lightly on the land and gently with one another.

I can see that ideal shining out of the writing and lives of a few people, and admire those who live by it in their carbon-neutral homes. Those few have turned their backs on the lifestyle sold to us in travel magazines and fashion catwalks — a lifestyle that looks so brilliantly bright with its transatlantic flights to glittering beaches and endlessly renewed clothes, but is in fact so dirty and leaves a snail’s trail of filth across the world. Instead, they are embracing a lifestyle that may look a bit grubbier but is in fact a whole lot cleaner, and that decision is an example for us all to ponder.

But it’s important to be honest right now, and say that the way that ethical consumerism seeps into most people’s lives is nothing like that, and does not seem to be taking society as a whole any closer to that ideal. Why is that? For a start, for most of us the ethical label is still a brand among other brands, one you can sport now and again.

This pick’n’mix ethical lifestyle is hardly going to start a revolution. You can eat locally grown broccoli but be unable to resist the imported blueberries beside it; you can buy a Topshop fair-trade T-shirt alongside a couple of dresses that are so amazingly cheap you just can’t imagine how little the women were paid who stitched them.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service