What does it mean to be green?

What is “green“? What does it mean to conserve? This is an e-mail that was sent to me that I thought was interesting and puts a different spin on the idea of “being green”

In the line at the store, the cashier told an older woman that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren’t good for the environment. The woman apologized to her and explained, “We didn’t have the green thing back in my day.”

The clerk responded, “That’s our problem today.  Your generation did not care enough to save our environment.”

He was right — the older generation didn’t have the green thing in their day.

Back then, they returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over.  So they really were recycled.

They walked up stairs, because escalators and elevators weren’t in every store and office building. They walked to the grocery store and didn’t climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks.

Back then, they washed the baby’s diapers because they didn’t have the throw-away kind.  they dried clothes on a line, wind and solar power really did dry the clothes.  Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters. If they were lucky they had one TV, or radio, in the house — not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen, not a screen the size of the state of Montana.

In the kitchen, they blended and stirred by hand because they didn’t have electric machines to do everything for us. When they packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, they used wadded up old newspaper to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap.

They used a push mower that ran on human power.  They exercised by working so they didn’t need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity. They drank from a fountain when thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle. They refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor.

Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service. They had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances and they didn’t need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest pizza joint.

We approach building homes with the same common sense that the older generation approached “the green thing”. We do what makes sense to make your home the most energy-efficient and comfortable it can be so that you don’t need to think about changing your lifestyle to be green. Your home will naturally be more comfortable and use less energy.

Charlie Kattnig – Apache Creek Builders- Serving Pueblo, Colorado and surrounding areas. 719-251-3003