Seven Green Lessons From our Elders

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception

 

 

Here are seven lessons we can borrow from our elders that are easy on the wallet, and have significant environmental impact. Perhaps more importantly, they are easy to implement and relevant to our modern lifestyles — no extolling the virtues of riding a horse to work! (Text: Heather Gunther)

 

 

Kick the bottle

“Why in the world would I pay money for water in a bottle when there is perfectly good water coming out of my kitchen tap ... for free?” I can just hear my late grandfather, whose frugality was legendary in my family, asking that question with confused sincerity. For some eye-opening stats on the waste created by the bottled water industry, visit the American Museum of Natural History.

 

Let it all hang it out

Before the clothes dryer became a standard appliance in every American household, your grandmother simply took advantage of a sunny day, some rope or cord, clothespins, and voila! No cost, no maintenance, no carbon footprint. Clothes dryers have come a long way in energy efficiency over recent years, but the average home clothes dryer has a carbon footprint of about 4.4 lbs. of carbon dioxide per load of laundry. According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, “the biggest way to cut the environmental impact of cleaning clothes is to stop using a clothes dryer.”

 

Grow local

Last spring, the Obama family's decision to plant a kitchen garden at the White House garnered so much attention that you would have thought it was an off-the-wall publicity stunt. But the house garden concept has been around for many years, and local food had a reserved spot on our grandparents' menu. The benefits of growing your own fruits and veggies are numerous, and you can't get more local than your own backyard.

 

'Rain, rain, don’t go away'

Here's another commonsense green lesson to take away from our grandparents' time. Rain is free. We pay for water. Why not collect free rainwater and slash the water bill? A rain barrel will save most homeowners about 1,300 gallons of water during the peak summer months. Also, diverting water from storm drains can alleviate stressed water systems and conserve limited resources, especially if you live in an arid climate. For an easy primer on rain barrels and how to make your own, check this out.

 

Brown bag it

Eating out used to be an occasional event for older generations, often reserved for birthdays or anniversaries. Nowadays, the average American eats out about four times a week and spends nearly $3,000 yearly in take-out food, according to Restaurant.org. The waste created by take-out packaging alone is enough to make you think twice, but when you factor in the money you can save by eating at home or by bringing your own lunch to work or school — in a reusable container, of course — you can see why your grandma eschewed eating out on a regular basis.

 

Game time

When our grandparents were younger, playing card games or board games was a popular form of entertainment. As a little girl, I remember spending hours playing gin rummy in my grandmother's kitchen, with my handful of cards tucked in an aluminum foil box because I couldn't hold all my cards. In comparison to electronic gaming systems like Wii, Nintendo or Xbox, cards and board games provided hours of entertainment with little on the environment or the wallet.

 

Buy less

Anytime you buy something, you (and the environment) are paying way more for it than just the sticker price. There is the cost of resources used to make it, advertise it, transport it, maintain it, and inevitably, to dispose of it. The amount of stuff our grandparents bought on a regular basis pales in comparison to the overindulgent spending habits of our generation. For a great reminder for the next time you grab your wallet,  read this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Below are actual comments of regular folks -

 

These are not just things our grandparents and great-grandparents did in the past. This is a way of life, simple, sufficient, satisfying. 

 

Get back to the basics. Farming ... raising our own food. Then we will know exactly where it is from and that it is free of chemicals. I feel my grandparents were so blessed to live when they did. We have gotten so far away from the basics. Good hard work. Not sitting in front of a computer afraid to get our hands dirty. That is what is wrong with the younger generation. Use the land like it was meant to be used.
 

With the economic situation, people need to learn to go back to basics. My grandparents lived and survived in Depression Era Nebraska. They were Amish who left the community to go on their own. We ate home cooked fresh garden produce, ate chickens from the backyard coop and drank FRESH RAW MILK from the State Farm that was located south of our community for dairy products. No government control on food. People today, have totally lost touch with reality.

I raised my 4 sons on a very small income. They never went hungry. Had warm clothes and a roof over their heads. I was a stay at home mom. I was very lucky to be able to be one. Things were tight but, we were happy. I made a 20 dollar bill last 2 weeks for gro. 4 sons eat alot and a husband to fed. I hung my clothes out. Made most of my food from scratch. We had alot of beans, potatoes and cornbread. We planted a garden. Had milk goats and chickens.

 

Amen to your thoughts! I was raised in Europe and did the same things! Now in my 60's and in a new country (America), I went back to the old ways. I grow my own food, get watercress at the creek, dandelion in the fields and water at the spring. I can, dry and preserve my veggies, let a neighbor hunt on the land I own in exchange for meat (deer) and I am healthier and happier than a lot of people!

In the good ol' days, raw milk was widely known cause infant sickness and death. It wasn't until the early 20th Century that pasteurization of milk had caught on. As a result, fewer babies caught things like undulant fever (brucellosis) and tuberculosis. Sure the folks milk cows and had fresh dairy on farms, but a lot of them cooked the milk on the stove first to prevent sickness.

You are right about the government since I have been doing research in Psychology and law, you would not believe the laws and how they make it just for lawyers big business and government. I am converting my farm back to the old days everything done here just like the Indians and look what the government did to them. Too bad the people can not get together anymore and get the government under control.

During the late 1800's and early 1900"s the population in the United States exploded. The nation had to increase food production to keep up with the demand for food, including milk to feed the growing number of infants and children, especially those of immigrant families. Numerous dairies popped up around the urban centers, and many of them were run by unscrupulous business people whose main concern was profit, not product safety. 

Sounds like a big old milk bucket of government (or possibly Dairygold) rhetoric right there. My family has drank raw milk from our milk cow for year without getting sick. And we never boil it. We just use clean milking practices. I suppose you think that millions of people die every year from taking vitamins and eating whole foods and organic vegetables too unless they cook them till there are no nutrients left in them. 

 

There were industry lobby-ists back then when they were having problems with tainted milk. Not just large dairy either, whiskey brewing firms also had their fingers in the cookie jar. Many whiskey breweries had "factory farms" next door, where they kept crowded, poorly tended dairy herds. The cows were usually fed the waste mash from the brewery. The mash sludge contained alot of water, but little nutrition, so the cows produced large quantities of milk, but it was of poor quality.

My Grandma told me that before the Great Depression nobody ate the chicken wings! It was considered waste, as well as the liver and giblets all of it was thrown away. So if it were not for the Great Depression who knows how long we would have had waited to have wings with our football!

 

Not true. In Europe, and no doubt in many parts of the US as well, people understood the value of what they had, chicken wings and the giblets were cooked in different ways. Some of the recipes for chicken livers are very old but the wealthy who did not cook their own food until the Depression hit, would not know of this unless they had connections to the old country or farm friends.

 

Years ago, folks raised their own meat, chickens, cows and pigs. Often, they would kill a chicken for a Sunday dinner. Big events were planned over a year's time. Grandma and Grandpa were more respectful of life. When meat was on the table, portions were smaller. Many times there was vegetables and cornbread. Difference is, we eat meat everyday and take it for granted.

 

Just as in the latter 1800's - out-house, coal-oil lamps, wood cook-stove -we lived in the Texas hill country and went to a very small town on a Saturday, once per month where we traded eggs and butter for things we could not grow our-selves and lived off the land ... I loved living that way and still use kerosene lamps with a garden and fruit orchard, I still have an old Ice-box that holds a 50 lb. block of ice and a summer kitchen.

 

I am a city kid who loved visiting my grandparents in Oklahoma there they had little creeks to play in, horses to ride and watching my Grandma get ready to make ice cream by a hand cranked gismo which made the best ice cream ever.

We can still do these things. Nothing better than sheets and pillowcases hung in the sun to dry. Makes clothes last longer when they are air dried. My mother told me about the early 50s when she had five children. There were no yard sales. The neighbors, on one Saturday each month, put 'used' clothes and toys on their back porches and the mothers went from house to house choosing what they wanted for their own children. My mother grew up in Upper New York during the depression. Her father built their house.

 

Yes, I also played red light, jacks, hide and seek, roller skating with a clamp on the skates. We had a good time and did not know we were poor and had no TV, only a radio.

 

I spent every summer at my Grandmother's house where she had chickens and some ducks. She sold her eggs and a chicken or two. It was my job to pluck the chickens after they were dipped in boiling water for a couple of seconds and then collect the feathers for other sewing projects.bShe had apple trees and made the best apple pies using chicken fat for the pie crust, they were the best ever.

 

Thanks for the tip about the chicken fat in apple pie! Been saving it and this sounds great :)

 

If all the "green" activists would take a look at some of the older people these days, they would see how they pale in comparison to these folks. My grandma did every thing in this article. She had a healthy amount of money but chose to live very frugally. Until she was in her 90's she had a huge garden and fruit trees, summers were the best because of all the fresh fruit and vegetables; what she did not share, she exchanged with neighbors or ate; and preserved what was left for later. She used and reused everything. 

How blessed we are to have such a heritage! My parents even packed our food for our road trips, no fast food stops, just roadside picnic tables. What joy! I raised my children like that, but it got lost in translation on my grandchildren. My Grand kids go ballistic when they see the Golden Arches. They don't want what's in the bag. No eye contact or conversation because they are making eye contact with something electronic and talking to it ... sigh.

 

We rarely went to the doctor. If you went it was cause Grandma and Grandpa's stuff didn't work. Sore throat - horehound candy; chest cold - mustard plaster (the adults got Jim Beam); headache - massage and ice cubes; sprained ankle - hot pepper plaster. Grandpa had the herb garden, Grandma had the flowers. She never bought a gift for anyone - for women it was flowers, for men it was spearmint or horehound candy; for kids it was bean bags.

 

My Grandparents had a victory garden of sorts in their long slim back yard. They lived in a townhouse and the back yard was as wide as the house and long and slim. My Grandma planted all sorts of finds along the back fences on either side of the house.  She had such diversity as Poppy plants, tomatoes, and Night Blooming Roses. I can remember as a kid thinking it was magic when the flowers bloomed.

Do you remember how nice clean fresh linen smelled from outside?

Chores were total house cleaning with mop and bucket - 'mop' was an old towel - on hands and knees. Dishes always done by hand, plants watered, dusting whether it was needed or not. Unless it was pouring out, you were out of the house to make up games, or play the classics - jump rope, kick the can, ball games. If allowed to go down to the neighbors, you had to walk, which was at least 1/4 to 1/2 mile away, no big deal.

 

PEOPLE ATE DINNER AT HOME AND CONNECTED, NOT AT FAST FOOD JOINTS. THAT'S WHY OUR CHILDREN ARE OVERWEIGHT!!!! THEY HAD BACK YARD SWINGS AND PLAYED JUMP ROPE, REMEMBER HOP SCOTCH, CHINESE JUMP ROPE ?????

 

Our grandparents (or great-grandparents) — children of the Great Depression — could teach us a thing or two about going green on a budget. "Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without," recalled one elderly woman when asked about what she learned as a child during the Great Depression.

 

Their carbon footprint was uber-small — they used less water, less fuel, created less waste and imported fewer goods than we do. They took these actions out of necessity as opposed to our modern-day desire to help the planet, but the ecological impact is just as powerful.