Giving With A Conscience – Why Ethical Gifts Make The Best Presents

Shopping is a problem. Anything a person buys these days tends to have come at some appalling cost, either to the environment or to the people who made it. Giant chains, supermarkets and multinational conglomerations have squeezed normal economies to the point where virtually nothing can be paid for without someone, somewhere, being swindled: and big labels tend to come with big prices for the people in developing countries who are being paid in handfuls of spare change to work in dangerously overcrowded factories and workshops. It’s a climate that has provoked a pretty strong reaction from people fortunate enough to exercise a little choice over what they buy, and where. Ethical gifts – presents that are bought as much for the good they do as for what they are – are, as a result, very much on the rise: big names are out, and big hearts are in.Ethical gifts can, of course, be anything as long as that thing is ethically sourced – i.e. its provenance is trackable and it can be proved that nothing unfair happened to either environment or worker in its creation. In practice, ethical gifts tend to have a certain defining style: because ethical gifts usually raise awareness of conditions in certain parts of the world, they’re generally “typical” of those areas.Fair trade designer coffees and foods, ethnic clothing, bags, incense and perfumes are your usual fare, when it comes to ethical gifts: things that impart beauty to the mouth, the nose, or the eyes; things that bring a little exoticism into the home: and, most importantly, things that can be proven to have helped poorer people, or endangered wildlife. Some of the most original ethical gifts don’t even take the form of objects. A person can “buy” a tree in a rainforest, say, or a dolphin: the money from these ethical gifts Air Swimmers is pumped into whatever charity is responsible for the welfare of rainforest trees and/or dolphins, while the gift’s recipient is “given” the glow of knowing that their gift is helping a part of the world that really needs it. Other ethical gifts will either come as ethnically identifiable things, like sarongs or handbags – or even “recycled” art, a form of trade angry bird particularly popular in African countries, where trash like beer cans gets turned into objets that end up in Western homes. With all ethical gifts, physical or ideological, the source is the important bit. What ethical gifts do is channel the money air swimmers spent on them away from unethical corporations. Any gift is ethical as long as the money spent on it doesn’t continue to support slavery, or cruelty to animals, or unfair pay, or resource depletion.That sounds like a pretty tall order, but it’s surprisingly common. So the next time conscience pricks at the wallet, take time to consider. Ethical gifts could be a way of giving the beautiful things one naturally wants to give one’s loved ones, without the guilt that often goes with it.