How ethical are you?

Would you eat meat, or use cosmetics, if you were actually made to watch the animal cruelty that brought the meat to your plate, the makeup to your face? Perhaps you do unwittingly. Is your pension fund invested ethically? Or do you unwittingly support businesses that you really don't want to? 

But how do you sort out the vast array of information around, often conflicting? How do you find out whether your own purchases and investments are ethical?

Perhaps Ethical Consumer is the answer for you. It's a brilliant magazine, which can be subscribed for as a hard copy magazine that plops through the post, or as an online information source. And either way it's brilliant!

And at the moment they are running a campaign against Amazon, urging us all to boycott it until it pays its fair share of tax.  

But what is the alternative? Of course I love people to buy my books, and Amazon is such an easy way to do it! But I am pleased to see that Ethical Consumer does suggest alternative suppliers for all the stuff that Amazon sells - and for books they suggest News From Nowhere. Its homepage describes itself as 

Liverpool's Radical & Community Bookshop

not-for-profit · a worker's co-operative · committed to social change

Now that's my kind of book shop, 

and I'm thrilled to see that it includes my own first book in its listings!! 

OK it's a shameless plug, but I did plug Ethical Consumer first!!

I wish all my readers a very Happy New Year for 2013

Why we shouldn't create money out of nothing!

So pleased to see that something I have written about in some detail over the years - and forming a chapter  of Healing This Wounded Earth - that is, the flaws in our economy and in particular the dangers of creating money out of nothing - is now part of a campaign which is gathering some momentum - thank you Positive Money for bringing this to a wider audience:

"Positive Money believes that the root cause of many of our current social, economic and environmental problems lies in the way that we allow money to be created." 

YES!! Good luck with your continuing campaign.