Doing Good Business

How do you know how ethical your products are? You're a small business - perhaps only one or two people at first - and you buy items from abroad. You can't afford to travel to the place where they're manufactured, but you're assured that they're ethically made. You've seen pictures, videos, maybe even talked to people over Skype.
Perhaps it's a little like the animal fat in five pound notes. You could argue that it's too small an amount to make any difference. You could say it's a small price to pay for innovation. But to many, it's a taint. The whole is spoilt.
How can you possibly know that your product has not been made using child labour? Or do you justify this by the fact that a hundred and fifty years ago we did the same in England, in the cotton mills, in the coal mines. Do we impose our progress on everyone else or do we convince ourselves that small transgressions are an inevitable part of industrialisation?
You accept that health and safety won't be the same in a developing country, but where exactly do you draw the line? If the factory that makes your product doesn't have the same standards, can you be specific about the rules that might be relaxed? Will you be comfortable that there is a greater chance of physical injury? Respiratory disease? Repetitive strain? Do you convince yourself that the increase in standard of living is worth the human cost, because we did for a long time. We don't now.
Do you know what is floating in the rivers next to the factories? Heavy metals? Banned pesticides? Microscopic fragments of metal and plastic? In the eddies of the river and the tiny tornados of the air, what unknown toxins are filtering into the fabric of your product?
How thick is the air that circulates around the factory? Air that twenty years ago was rural and is now urban. Air where oxygen has been displaced by carbon. Air that was once so free from colour it was hard to imagine anything actually being there, but is now so thick that it is the only thing you can see.
Can you find any water that is the blue of the sky forty years ago? That luminescent, forever blue that painted the landscape. Or is life lived in black and white, degrees of intensity of greyscale.
People walk their binary lives of home and work. They dream of cars. Perhaps they should dream of the purity of the land, the water and the air.