A Life Stripped Bare: My Year Trying to Live Ethically

No, not me, Leo Hickman. I remember making my second visit to the Eden Project in Cornwall in August 2005. The first time was when it first opened. If you have never been there, I would recommend it, should you ever be in Cornwall. It is a most impressive ecological experiment constructed in the wastes of an old china clay quarry. Even if you have not been there, you will recognise the biomes, the two giant greenhouses which replicate the environments of temperate and tropical zones. Well, no visit to a place like that is complete with out a trip to the book shop to round the day off. This is where I chanced upon A Life Stripped Bare: My Year Trying to Live Ethically by journalist Leo Hickman. The book documents his journey from his 'mange tout' moment, that is his epiphany when he realised that his supermarket green beans had been air freighted at great expense from Kenya just so so that he could have out of season veg in London. Hickman responded to a challenge to live ethically by having three ethical auditors visit his home to talk to him about how he could live more ethically and exposed the dark secrets lurking in his cupboards in the process. The book was a great eye-opener for me and is a superb read for anyone questioning western lifestyles in this year of Living Simply. Hickman traversed the whole gamut of ethical living; the dilemma of whether to buy Fair Trade or organic, to buy import or local, ethical investments, composting, the disposable vs terry nappy debate, natural or synthetic furnishings, natural cleaning products, travelling carbon neutral, voluntary work and anything else that you can think of. What I loved about this book is that it wasn't a fundamentalist rant on the subject, it was a relatively ordinary bloke and his family trying to do their bit and the heartening thing is that some things worked really well and some things just didn't work at all for them. But it was all washed down with a healthy dose of humour. Surely this is an encouragement to us all to have a go.

A Life Stripped Bare is available from all good bookshops
(ISBN-10: 1903919614, ISBN-13: 978-1903919613)

The Guardian's Ethical Living Site featuring Leo Hickman