subject: Ethical Gifts for Conscience Salving Presents [print this page] Ethical Gifts for Conscience Salving Presents
It's hard enough trying to choose a decent present for someone, without having to worry about where it came from as well. Fortunately, the modern world has been blessed in recent years by a consumer trend towards ethical gifts items that have a traceable provenance, and can be proved to have been produced, sourced and imported for a fair wage. That trend, as trends will, has had the effect of ramping up the actual amount of places where a person can buy ethical stuff meaning, these days, that there's no excuse not to.
So what kind of things can be sourced ethically? The short answer is "anything". There's pretty much an ethically sold version of almost every trinket, item of clothing and even household goods: so actually finding something a particular person would genuinely like shouldn't be a problem. It always used to be: it was all very well trying to buy ethical gifts, but when those gifts were almost exclusively indeterminate things made from the wood of a tree with an unpronounceable name, they weren't exactly received with rapturous thanks.
No longer the case, thank goodness. Presents for the ethically minded giver and receiver (note that should be everyone, there's no excuse) cover the gamut of Stuff: from high end fashion to super-useful tools and domestic whatnots. Producers and retailers alike have realised that ethical gifts no longer have to be confined to a decoratively challenged niche market. Everyone wants them, and the more areas that can be ethically guaranteed the happier everyone will be. Happier to spend their money, that is and that, of course, is the real bone for the importers. It's just a very happy chance that the spending public have finally aligned their consciences with their wallets which mean that in order to get into those wallets, producers and importers have had to grow a sense of responsibility.
There's a rather lovely side note to this, which is that the little struggling business who used to try and do right by the Third World, with its gloriously talented crafts men and women, are suddenly not struggling any more. A wonderful example here: Saffron Winds, whose policy of only sourcing, importing and selling quality, and ethically produced stuff has begun, from this sea change in public attitudes, to bear proper fruit. Ethical gifts abound on their site, and hundreds like it: a public hungry to catch up with its own newfound sensibility is snapping the stuff up like hot cakes.
It is good news, this, for the buying public and the providing nations alike. After years of corporate subjugation, both buyers and sellers are suddenly finding the communal guts to stand up and be counted. The naysayers are vanishing in clouds of muttered excuses while the moral majority, heads up and wallets out, is clamouring for more.
