What is green in Denver, Colorado?
When I was studying the get my real estate Eco-Broker designation, a friend sent an email to me about life in the “good old days”. I realized that like beauty, green is in the eyes of the beholder. This blog is meant to educate, supply resources and to be a little thought-provoking.
This is what green meant to me when I was growing up in Denver, Colorado.
Today’s generation blames the older generations for using up the earth’s resources, for not paying attention to the environment, wasting water and energy. But, did they?
Milk, soda and beer came in bottles that were always returned. As a kid, we made our spending money by returning empty bottles. There were no plastic or aluminum cans. The same bottles just kept recycling back on the market.
We lived in the suburbs, so no one walked to the grocery store, but my dad had an MGTD which got many miles to the gallon, my mom a station wagon, but not with a V-8 engine in it.
When my children were born, there were no disposable diapers, we used baby bottles, my children wore hand-me downs, they wore tennis shoes not sport shoes and they walked to school, without an adult.
When I lived in Germany as a teen-ager, my mother took her own grocery bags to the stores. The stores didn’t provide bags for customers. As a result of that experience, she took her own plastic bags back to the store each time to recycle. Re-usable shopping bags are not a new thing, just a new generation.
Very few people had dryers. Everything was dried on a clothes line, using wind and solar power to dry them.
We had a black phone with a rotary dial. The phone company owned the phone and when it broke, they fixed it – for free. We had TV, but just one set and it was black and white. It wasn’t until I had been married almost ten years that we actually had a color TV. No remote, no cable, no DVD players, no TIVO or Wii. We had to get up to change the channel. There were three stations plus PBS. No using much energy in my house for entertainment.
So, what is green? It’s different for everyone. In this blog I would like to share new innovations, some simple fixes for those 50s ranch homes, ideas in gardening and landscaping in the hopes that you can live more simply and comfortably.
