Ethical consumerism is a kind of linguistic nexus, where the jargon of the green movement intersects with the specialist terminology of the scientific community. Recent debates on sustainability have foregrounded expressions which were new to me, even though some of them have been traded in technical circles for decades.
One such term is food miles, coined nearly 20 years ago by Professor Tim Lang of City University in London to quantify the distance food travels from cultivation and production to end-user. The phrase predates the more familiar carbon footprint that seeks to assess energy expended and pollution caused.
An associated concept is virtual water, a measure of the total amount of water necessary for production of goods or services. Also known as embedded or embodied water (as it has been absorbed and is hence invisible), this can represent 10,850 litres for a single pair of jeans weighing 1kg. Virtual water can be further broken down into green water, the rainwater evaporated during the process; blue water, the volume of surface water used, and grey water, the amount of water polluted as a result.
Tim Lang challenges the prevailing orthodoxy that privileges consumer choice and consumer sovereignty, resulting in members of the buying public having to exercise ethical judgements on these issues in the supermarket aisle. Lang’s alternative is for retailers and/or government to practise choice-editing, in other words judiciously limiting the range available before the consumer is presented with options.
Footprint, incidentally, has become a verb, and you can use online modellers to footprint your own local authority or employer, but the damage they inflict and the spaces they occupy are now more trendily called their footfall. On a global scale, activists practise eco-tracking, following manufactured or recycled goods along the supply chain and around the globe to assess their impact on the environment. A new phenomenon is the locavore or 100-mile dieter, an environmentally aware individual who sources their food only locally, within a 100-mile radius or foodshed (by analogy with watershed).
Meanwhile - we hope - government and the retail giants between them are striving to set what the experts call omnistandards, although some dismiss their efforts as greenwashing - making gestures towards ecofriendliness for PR purposes.
Send your favourite buzzwords, jargon or new and exotic usages to tony.thorne@kcl.ac.uk
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