Email has played its part. A mere click on the keyboard rewards with the warm feeling that we have helped find a child orphaned by the bombings in Pakistan, or freed a political prisoner in Burma, to name just two that have come my way recently. It is not enough to forward the email then sit back on an ever-spreading behind. Real activism means active steps for one of the real global change drivers, such as Reprieve, the campaign against the death penalty that Anita was due to become chair of this autumn. There, lawyers who could make thousands defending asbestos or soon-to-be divorcees turn their talents to preventing the noose tightening around the necks of the innocent, or people with a mental illness or learning disability. It might come as a shock: to change the world, you actually have to do something.
But I don't just mean go to a concert. No need to carp that those travelling to the London and New Jersey events in Live Earth in July were calculated by the Guardian to have generated 5,600 tonnes of greenhouse gases (the equivalent of 7,270 people flying across the Atlantic), to wonder what effect they would actually have. What did they think? Buy a ticket and up goes the yellow bob-a-job sticker? Global warming - tick. Job done. After Live8, the number of people who felt passionately about world poverty actually fell. Why? Well the polling suggested that most of them thought that "they" (governments, those responsible, maybe even just the grown-ups) were now dealing with it. But activism crucially means doing something yourself, not leaving it to others.
The other side of this kind of dependency is the hideous recognition that people in Britain are never more engaged and electrified than when complaining and opposing. Nothing stirs their adrenaline more than a decent bout of nimbyism. Opposition to the building of houses, the siting of waste plants, the implementation of parking schemes and school allocation policies energises people. But ask them to make a positive contribution to finding a solution and you hit a wall. What's the government doing, they say? Alexei Sayle had a wonderful joke: "My dad shat himself last week. And the council still haven't been round."
What Anita Roddick stood for was personal action. That's what we will be celebrating at her memorial today at Central Hall in Westminster under the banner "I Am an Activist". Never a purist, she engaged. Business and politics didn't frighten her. The compromises on the way to solutions she embraced as a necessary part of the process of change. She realised that getting involved to make the world better means getting your hands dirty. It doesn't mean buffing your halo by protesting and then leaving others to find the messy, imperfect solutions at the end of a long road of change.
She opposed animal testing. But she didn't just get a placard: she started the Body Shop. In small ways we can all follow her example. OK, press that reply button, forward that petition, go to that concert, but just don't let us delude ourselves that that is action. Anita used to say: "Do something. Anything." She was half right. Her life was more than just doing anything. She engaged. She was a real activist. A citizen.