Project Spotlight: Ethical.net
ethical.net is a not-for-profit project building a free, collaborative, online directory of ethical companies of all kinds — from search engines to energy providers to shoe shops — and guides to ethical living.
Hey! What is the origin story of Ethical.net?
Cata started the project after he was left baffled when looking for ethically-made clothes! There isn’t actually much info on companies’ ethics online (besides the ad copy that’s on their own websites), and the research he did find was outdated, locked behind paywalls or hampered by old-fashioned web design.
So we’ve decided to create a home for this information ourselves! We hope that combining our small team’s own research with crowdsourced user submissions and other sites’ reviews, the directory will be able to cover many sectors, and stay always up to date.
What do you hope Ethical.net can achieve?
On a basic level, we want to make it easy to to find out which companies in any given sector are ethical — that is, which companies put people and planet well above profit.
But the ultimate goal of the project isn’t just to get people to buy stuff from more ethical companies. We want to get more people thinking more deeply about the impact their actions have on the world: so we’re working with some super smart ethical practitioners across many disciplines, like Cennydd Bowles of Future Ethics (who also happens to be a Fixathon judge!), David Abram of Wild Ethics and Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh’s monastic community from Plum Village.
How are you using the web to help with the climate issue?
We’re very aware that ethical consumerism isn’t a solution for the breakdown of the climate. So we also want to include guides to reducing your environmental impact in the directory, alongside the ethical company profiles, as much as possible
e.g.:
- “How to Divest Your Personal Finances From Fossil Fuels” will be in the banking and energy categories
- “How to Eat a Planet Friendly Diet” in the food category
- “How to Reduce Your Online Carbon Footprint” in online categories
(These guides will look a bit sexier, with illustrations and animations, once the site proper launches!)
This way, we hope to raise awareness of climate issues among visitors to the site — who might have just stumbled across us after googling something like “Facebook alternative”
How does the climate emergency make you feel and how do you deal with these feelings?
Being sort of obliged to confront it at work every day — when I’m writing the guides or whatever — fills me with quite an oppressive feeling of dread in my chest. I “deal with it” by reading a lot of the absolute bleakest visions of the future (Prof Jem Bendell’s Deep Adaption; Roy Scranton’s Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene), which is probably not a good idea…
Cata, on the other hand, regularly practises mindfulness (guided meditations, attending sanghas, week-long retreats) — which is a much better way of dealing with eco-anxiety!
Have you made any changes within your own life to help with the climate issue?
Thankfully, I was never too much of an emitter anyway (can’t drive, no kids, vegetarian), although I’ve been trying, as much as it pains me, to cut down on cheese since I learnt that dairy is almost as bad as meat, pollution wise.
Are there any problems related to the climate emergency that you think we’re well placed to help solve with software and the web?
I think some knowledge of SEO — like how to boost pages up the search results, and how to write shareable articles — can be really helpful for spreading the message of climate emergency. Critical climate science is often hidden in huge, dry, difficult to read PDFs: take a look at the UX of the IPCC’s data site for example!
What is the biggest challenge you feel humanity needs to overcome if we are to successfully prevent earth’s climate breaking down?
The small matter of beginning a global effort to completely transform the world’s economy, agriculture and culture — in the absence of the kind of clear and immediate threat (like war) that usually motivates human beings to act together in this way…
What do you think is stopping people from doing more to fight climate breakdown?
Many of us in the West don’t understand that climate change:
- will affect us too (and already is)
- will be irreversible
- will get exponentially worse due to climate feedback loops
What advice would you give to people who want to help fix the climate but aren’t sure what they can do?
Cata has some strong opinions he wanted to share on this one!:
“I’d say that looking for a purely technological “fix” is misleading. We need to learn as much as possible about how we got here in the first place (spoiler alert: it has to do with technology), and see what sort of changes we need to make in our lives to reconnect with the natural world, and based on that connection to think of ways we can contribute to healing it. Sitting in front of our computers won’t help much, despite our best intentions.
Also, maybe “fixing” isn’t the best term: “mitigating” or “adapting” may lead to more realistic results.”
Are there any climate projects or movements that have impressed you or you’d like to draw attention to?
Extinction Rebellion, naturally — they’re the only movement talking openly about the possibility of total climate breakdown. And of course Greta Thunberg’s School Strike for Climate/Fridays for Future movement.
A cool online project that Fixathon participants might be interested in is Electricity Map — an open-source project ranking the world’s countries by the carbon intensity of electricity they consume.
Do you have any recommended resources that helped you learn about climate breakdown?
Uninhabitable Earth really is a must-read; if you don’t have time to read the whole book, Wallace-Wells’ initial essay in New York magazine is here.
Honourable mentions go to:
Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? — Bill McKibben
There is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years — Mike Berners-Lee
Finally, what’s your advice to participants of the Climate Fixathon?
To expand on what Cata said earlier: we have to keep reminding ourselves that the earth is a living system, so individual technological fixes can’t save us. Even if this magic carbon sucking tech is invented and scaled in time, the ice will still be melted, the oceans will still be acidified and full of plastic, animals will still be extinct, coral reefs will still be dead and so on and so on… so let’s all try to think as holistically as we can.
The Climate Fixathon is the world’s first online hackathon to help fix the climate. It runs from 2nd-30th August 2019 with more than $10k in prizes to be won. You can learn more and sign up to take part today at fixathon.io.
