Don't Buy - the only ethical choice?

Is ethical/green/sustainable consumption is an oxymoron?

Since the 1970s, consumers have been told to 'reduce, reuse, recycle', yet these alternatives are often based on ways to reduce specific harms rather than presenting a serious challenge to consumer capitalism by reducing consumption per se. Most consumer information has been focused on encouraging consumption and alternatives are limited to reducing packaging, food miles etc. Little attention has been given to rejection of entire groups of consumer products and the mass consumption ethic. Most attention has been directed at boycotting particular brands such as Nike and Nestle in an effort to force companies to change their unethical practices. Not buying whole groups of products is the most ethical option and a real alternative to the potentially shallow and ineffective option of 'sustainable' consumption.

It is not a matter of trying to distinguish the ‘best of a bad lot’ – sometimes there are no ethical alternatives – so the only option is not to buy. There may be, for example, no ethical dairy products. There may be no ethical reasons for buying king-sized sheets, plasma televisions and bananas in Victoria.

Instead of trying to ascertain the merits of particular brands – whether products are actually organic, free-range, fair trade, the ethics of the company producing it (or its parent-company), how and where it was produced, it is perhaps simpler not to buy at all. Until governments get serious about labelling products to provide real information and until marketers stop co-opting ‘informative’ terms such as ‘eco’, ‘green’, ‘sustainable’ and ‘free-range’ in an effort to prey on consumer insecurities, consumer’s real power lies in not buying. Is McDonalds’ ‘Rainforest Alliance’ branded coffee an example of the company finally taking heed of consumer demands for ethical alternatives? Perhaps, but McDonalds – it wasn’t your coffee that was destroying rainforests – it was your beef production. Supermarket ‘Green Bags’ are still made out of plastic with very limited useful lives. Now consumers who have been convinced to ‘do the right thing’ pay for bags with brand-names on them. Are ethical alternatives just obscuring the real issues and obscuring consumer choice?

What do you think?