Buying right ... a 'pox on the planet' says Monbiot. Photograph: David Sillitoe
A couple of weeks ago I was sitting in a lecture hall in Leeds writes Bibi van der Zee listening to three men: Benedict "Newbury" Southworth head of the World Development Movement; our very own George Monbiot; and an extremely passionate man called Mark who is one of the organisers of next month's Climate Change camp - all talking to us about rising up and take direct action against climate change.
I can't remember how the discussion moved on from our general consensus that climate change was bad and we were good, but all of sudden George and Mark were, as one, laying into ethical consumerism, or, as George poetically describes it, "people buying bits of soap with leaves in".
And now George is having another go at us in his Guardian column: apparently "green consumerism is becoming a pox on the planet". Could it not perhaps be seen as a useful signal to politicians about what we want? (That's the question I asked them all after their speeches.) Mark explained to silly little me that it was "a very weak signal".
On behalf of anyone who has ever stood in a supermarket looking at an organic chicken, thinking "can it really cost £13?" - and gritting their teeth to buy it as your household budget splinters into a zillion pieces - for every commuter who has ever held up a queue of caffeine-cravers by demanding a fairtrade latte, for everyone who has ever clenched every nerve in their body in order to ask the bank clerk if they have an ethical screening policy... my blood boiled.
But what makes it all the more annoying is the fact that George and his friends have a point. We may be talking up a fine ethical existence but the reality is different. Take a Which study last month that showed "bank customers were keen to be green". Apparently four in ten Which members said they would be willing to accept lower interest if their bank invested ethically. Even more encouragingly the ethical finance sector was worth £11.6bn last year. Yet trading in UK-listed companies on the London Stock Exchange totalled £2,385 bn in the first nine months of 2006. After an extensive period of pencil chewing, I calculate that £11.6bn is only about 0.4% of that amount.
So perhaps the actual impact of so-called ethical consumption is negligible. But the people doing it - the ethical consumers (what a horrible title) - are on your side, for God's sake. They may be on a far earlier stage of the long journey into greenness, but they're going in the right direction. Remember, in certain parts of the UK, using a beer trap to catch slugs instead of pellets, or asking for English strawberries instead of Spanish ones can be seen as weirdy-beardy radicalism. There's a possibility that the man buying sheep's wool insulation this week will be chairing a meeting on saving his local wood next week. Why not have another go at Exxon instead?
