Grandma's greener than you [View All]

[earth mom]

Grandma's greener than you

For all the hype about being eco-conscious today, seniors could teach the young about walking the walk rather than just talking the talk.

By Laura Vanderkam

Until I learned about feed-sack dresses, I thought I was living a green life. Let me explain: Like many Americans, I try to be environmentally conscious when I can. My family's fall cuisine has centered on the apples we picked at a local farm and, out for a celebratory dinner recently, I ordered a grass-finished steak. While my flirtation with chlorine-free diapers was short-lived, my new baby does own organic cotton PJs.

Then I read 85-year-old Gail Lee Martin's recent memoir, My Flint Hills Childhood. During the Great Depression, she reports, companies began selling feed and flour in colorful sacks, knowing full well that cash-strapped consumers would turn the material into children's clothes. In her Kansas town, "we traded sacks with our neighbors and relatives until we had the required yardage" for dresses, she writes. Hers was far from the only family reusing what was possible — not because recycling was hip but because the family lacked the means to do anything else. Nonetheless, the result was the same: a lower-impact lifestyle than most of us buying organic pajamas can fathom. Indeed, as the current economic doldrums spark interest in tales from other downturns, I'm learning that anyone who lived through the Great Depression saying "use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without" has far more green credibility than the rest of us. We could learn a lot from these heroes for the planet in America's senior centers — though the economy would be in deeper trouble than it is if too many of us lived as they lived.

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This idea of wasting nothing is tough for modern Americans to get our heads around. Raised in a consumer economy in which every problem requires a product, we tend to think "going green" means buying something. Indeed, marketers have found that people will pay more for green products, and so "green" has become synonymous with luxury. Think the Rafael Pelli-designed Visionaire condos in Manhattan,rather than, as Valarie Swanson reports of her late grandfather, Lou Reichel, who was born in 1919 in Columbus, Ohio, building an entire house — from the door knobs to the cabinets — out of materials he got at a swap meet. As her grandfather would say, "Old doesn't mean trash." It meant clean it up and use it again.


Of course, with the average American family spending annually $6,443 on food, $1,801 on apparel and services, $8,604 on transportation and $2,835 on entertainment, the economy as we know it would tank if consumers lived as "green" as our grandparents did. And so it behooves us to believe that an eco-trip to the Galapagos Islands is more environmentally conscious than that oft-mocked American habit of not owning a passport and staying put, or that driving a Prius gives you green cred when the greenest option is not to own a car. But we shouldn't fool ourselves that we're doing better by the earth in this enlightened, relatively abundant age. Between feed-sack dresses and organic PJs, I think the sack fashions carry the day.

http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2009/10/column-grandmas-greener-than-you.html

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