I was thinking today. I had a lot of time to do that as I was stuffing envelopes for hours, which is a fairly mind-numbing task. I'm unemployed at present so I have been filling part of my time by spending a day a week at the offices of Crisis, the charity for homeless people, working with the community and events fundraising team. I consider myself to be quite lucky in my life and what I have. Lucky enough to feel that I should put something back into society. I strongly believe that our society should not have homeless people. After all, we live in one of the world's richest economies so why do we still have street homelessness and 'hidden homeless' numbering around 380,000 people?

So, my thinking was along the lines of: what is ethical living? If you ask someone if they invest ethically, you usually mean do they avoid arms manufacturers, the tobacco industry, animal testing and so on. If you ask about ethical living, then you might get the "I buy Fairtrade products" answer, along with organic fruit and veg and possibly even the odd organic cotton t-shirt. But, should ethical living be more than that? Should it be about respect for each other, not only our immediate friends and neighbours, nor just the people in London or the UK. Should it mean having a respect for the life of every single person on the planet? That might seem a bit far fetched, I mean I'm not that sure I can impact greatly upon Tibetan monks, for example. However, why is that we are happy to live our lives, light bulbs ablaze, central heating up high, all that food wasted every week (you've heard it on the news it must be true), the 4x4 on the drive when one third of the world's population has no access to electricity and another third has only limited access? Is that ethical? And should we be trying to limit the growth of third world economies through capping their carbon emissions?

The Green/Ethical question was going round in my head (along with worrying visions of envelopes and wonderment at the lack of imagination of church names) following the recent Panorama programme about The Ethical Man: a reporter from Newsnight. It seems he had been told to "go green or else" and "to live ethically" for a year. However, the programme really did seem to concentrate on carbon footprints and less on what you might think of as the 'ethical' issues. But then, there are overlaps, aren't there. Reduce carbon emissions (give up your car say), less global warming, sea levels don't rise quite so high and the inhabitants of low lying islands won't have to leave home so soon. Buy Fairtrade and help put some investment into communities that can develop their standard of living, improve schooling etc. Buy organic and reduce the amount of expensive chemicals used to grow our food. Eat less meat and feed more people directly from plant sources. Save your used postage stamps and pass them to a charity that can sell them on (there are still stamp collectors out there!). We have a lot to share if we think about it. It's also there to be wasted too. Sadly.

Green thoughts, ethical impact?