Could a bag really save the world?

It's just a bag. All right, so it's a tote bag designed by Anya Hindmarch, the queen of Bagland. A bag that retails for £5 but is now changing hands for up to £200 on eBay. A bag so hot that it was chosen as the official goodie-bag for guests at the 2007 Vanity Fair Oscar-night party. A bag that proclaims, on the cream canvas exterior between its grosgrain trim: "I'm Not a Plastic Bag." But a bag, nonetheless: something to carry groceries in. Not something, one might think, with the power to change the world.

Or is it? Hindmarch's creation is doing much more than making celebrities look good on the streets of New York, Paris and London. It is the must-have fashion accessory of the year - and the most successful endeavour yet by We Are What We Do, a non-profit British campaign group that has set out to change the world with baby steps. Suddenly, those baby steps are turning into a run.

We Are What We Do has published two books since its birth in 2004. The first, Change the World for a Fiver, has sold 750,000 copies. The second, Change the World 9 to 5, released in September, is also recording huge sales. They list "actions" to improve our environmental, community and personal behaviour, such as "Smile and smile back"; "Turn off the tap while brushing your teeth"; and "decline plastic bags wherever possible". And now comes the bag.

We Are What We Do, formed by a community worker, David Robinson, and a financial PR, Eugenie Harvey, initially devised "100 simple, everyday actions that can improve our environment, our health, and our communities, and make our planet and the people on it much happier". But the organisation is not a charity. It is not an institution. It is, say its founders, a "movement".

Its leading lights met Hindmarch two years ago, and told her that the average person uses 167 plastic bags a year, and landfill sites cannot cope. Hindmarch was hooked: "It was before the fever pitch of environmental concern hit the press, and I was so impressed with their outlook, which seemed to be, 'Let's all do a little bit.'"

Hindmarch's "little bit" was to create the bag. "The key thing was to design something that people wanted. There seemed to be three ways through [the plastic bag] problem. You could tax people. You could make it cheaper to use the better bags - biodegradable bags - which I feel is probably the best end solution. Or you could make it cool to act differently and correctly. So I had to make a bag that was desirable."

She's certainly done that. There are only 500 special-edition bags in the world - all, it seems, in the hands of Hollywood A-listers - and the clamour for this latest must-have has hit fever pitch. The rest of us do not have long to wait; the totes will be on sale in the Anya Hindmarch London store and other fashion outlets by the end of the month, and in Sainsbury's in April.

Hindmarch, naturally, carries hers everywhere. And, she says, it is improving her behaviour. "I have just gone out shopping in Paris, carrying my very own Anya Hindmarch 'I'm Not a Plastic Bag' bag, and I have refused nine plastic bags from shop assistants," she said yesterday. "I am somebody who would have described my green credentials as decidedly below average; I've got lots of kids, so I've got a big car, and I travel a lot. But a lot of people doing a lot of small things can make a difference."

Already, a lot of people have been touched by We Are What We Do. Every day, hundreds e-mail the website and thousands more get the books. How has this come about in only two years? How could a website with a few sensible suggestions become a global movement?

David Robinson believes that people in Britain yearn for something that helps them be good. "Thirty years ago, I set up a community project in east London called Community Links," he says. "Then, three years ago, I came across some figures from the Home Office that said that, in a generation, the number of people who were active in their community organisations had dropped from 30 per cent to less than 10 per cent. It was the same trend with political party and trade union membership.

"But there were other ways of looking at it. Yes, people were much less likely to vote, and were much less likely to belong to a political party. But over the past 10 years we've seen three of the biggest mass demonstrations ever. So there were many paradoxes [with the data]. What it came down to was that, as a generation, we didn't want to belong to those formal institutions any more, but we still wanted to make our voices heard."

He'd seen enough. Noticing that corporate brands seemed to be able to elicit great loyalty, to persuade people to behave in certain ways, and to feel part of a community, he set about developing his own brand. "I wanted to create something that would do the kinds of things that voluntary organisations had done in previous generations."

Robinson teamed up with Harvey, and We Are What We Do was born. By striking deals with designers, copywriters and publishers so that they could produce books for minimal costs, and by using the web to market these books for free, Robinson's modest initial project became a global phenomenon.

But how do we know whether it's worked? Millions bought The Little Book of Calm, and the world is as stressful as ever.

Catherine Fieschi, the director of the think-tank Demos, believes that results in this area are hard to quantify. "What kind of impact are we talking about?" she asks. "What these kinds of things do is to raise consciousness. And in that respect, something like [We Are What We Do] can make changes over time. That's how we have to see it. People have given up on mass politics. And this [movement] articulates the belief that what you do personally matters. It has majorly positive, but extremely subtle, results. The immediate impact is negligible. The long-term results can be significant."

Fieschi also argues that, as much as having an impact of its own, We Are What We Do is a marker of a greater trend away from "grand narrative" politics. "This is about how people want to engage," she says. "One of the things about this phenomenon is that you are connecting with people, but you are connecting with people anonymously. Through networks like these, people now feel very connected to others they have never met."

What is also striking about the manifesto of "actions" collated by We Are What We Do - for which the website took hundreds of suggestions from contributors - is that it is very similar in feel to statements made recently by David Cameron's Conservative Party. Both organisations, for example, have suggested a little bit of love and attention (hug a hoodie) combined with a bit of environmental concern (roof-top wind turbines). And both quote Mahatma Gandhi's slogan: "We must be the change we wish to see in the world." We are seeing a new politics - personal, practical, pick'n'mix. It is little surprise, then, that We Are What We Do now has the ear of Whitehall and the media.

"When we started in 2004," Harvey says, "these issues were the domain solely of the liberal broadsheets. Now, we're seeing The Sun, the Mirror, The Daily Telegraph getting involved... Five years ago, people would have approached plastic bags as an entirely green issue. Now, it's part of a range of behaviour that is not seen as left-of-centre, weird behaviour, but as mainstream, normal behaviour. If you like, it's the difference between campaigning naked against fur down Oxford Street, and making more discreet changes about not wearing fur at all."

Now, the Government wants in. Indeed, one of We Are What We Do's "most exciting developments" is a collaboration with the Department for Education and Skills that will be launched in May - a national competition for British schoolchildren to provide ideas for the third Change the World book. One copy of that book will then be given to every school in the country.

It's not just politicians who want a bit of the magic. Sir Richard Branson, as part of his drive to boost Virgin Atlantic's environmental credentials, has agreed to a "huge communication project" with We Are What We Do. An in-flight publication will, Harvey says, engage "in a very head-on way with the fact that people are flying, and they wish to make a difference".

The bag, the book and the website are bold projects because they want individuals to make the difference. They assume our basic goodness, and our wish to belong to something bigger than ourselves. We Are What We Do could not have picked a better time to try: as the film An Inconvenient Truth and the RED campaigns have shown, good has never been more fashionable.

But are the motivations of all the stakeholders in this bright venture clean? It does nobody any harm - particularly not corporate giants such as Sainsbury's and Virgin - to talk a good game on green issues. And, as the Downing Street e-petition website shows, the Government loses nothing by seeming to listen. The buck stops with us. Can we learn to be good?

Jonathan Bartley of the Ekklesia think-tank says: absolutely. "There has been a total shift in how people think about [their behaviour] now," he says. "There is, for example, a classic second-century text where a pagan asks, 'What is it to be a Christian?' and Diognetus, instead of replying with a set of beliefs, replies with a set of actions. The early Christians had a very good understanding that we have to walk the walk; that there was a good way to live. Now people in [everyday life] are starting to rediscover that."

We Are What We Do is, of course, a secular organisation, but the parallels between Diognetus' doctrine of praxis and the movement's ideas of doing good are clear. But the question remains: can we only behave well when we are encouraged by a beautifully packaged book, or an Anya Hindmarch bag?

"Of course, this is a highly desirable fashion item," Harvey says. "But it is coupled with an issue we read about every day in the newspapers. That is very much the ethos of We Are What We Do. If you make doing good attractive, achievable, desirable, successful, people are not silly - they'll do it.

"One of the first thoughts that we had here is that people really do want to make a difference, but they're overwhelmed by the information and the scale of the problem. If you break it down into simple, digestible, easy-to-do actions, they'll do it. That's what the book was about. The bag is the next step: to enable people to perform that action, and deepening their connection to it."

So the bag, however desirable, won't change the world on its own. There are only so many un-styrofoamed, loose-packed, locally sourced apples one canvas tote can carry. But, Harvey says, there is no limit to the number of changes its owner can effect.

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