I pinched this but it is so true.
ok hold onto ur pants….read it….Anyone over the age of 35 should read this…..
Checking out at the grocery store recently, the young cashier suggested I should bring my own grocery bags because plastic bags weren’t good for the environment. I apologized and explained, “We didn’t have this green thing back in my earlier days.” The clerk responded, “That’s our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment for future generations.
” She was right about one thing — our generation didn’t have the green thing in “Our” day. So what did we have back then…?
After some reflection and soul-searching on “Our” day here’s what I remembered we did have….
Back then, we 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 repeatedly. So they really were recycled. But we didn’t have the green thing back in our day. We walked up stairs, because we didn’t have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn’t climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks. But she was right. We didn’t have the green thing in our day.
Back then, we washed the baby’s nappies because we didn’t have the throw-away kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy gobbling machine burning up 220 volts — wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our early days. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But that young lady is right. We didn’t have the green thing back in our day.
Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house — not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of Scotland. In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn’t have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used wadded up old newspapers to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap.
Back then, we didn’t fire up an engine and burn petrol just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn’t need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity. But she’s right. We didn’t have the green thing back then.
We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull. But we didn’t have the green thing back then.
Back then, people took the bus, and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service. We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we 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.
But isn’t it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn’t have the green thing back then?
Please pass this on so another selfish old person who needs a lesson in conservation from a smarty-pants young person can add to this 🙂

Apparently several paragraphs were killed in the making of this thread…..

😉

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eScDfYzMEEw[/video]

mleh

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/datablog/2011/jul/21/uk-household-energy-use

A StonerGraph Corporation Production

8)

Thing is life was more green then.

Now everything is disposable etc, not sure who to blame, so we have to make an effort so commerce etc doesn’t shaft the planet.

so we have to make an effort so commerce etc doesn’t shaft the planet.

Yes, sometimes I wonder if it’s worth posting relevant videos.

There’s nothing wrong with the plnet. The planet is doing fine.

Adjusted for renewables contributions. Even more mleh.

Excellent graph. Though, if we all went back to living like previous generations but keeping current technology we’d use far less.

My brother got a new TV recently. A big, pleberian thing. When switched on, it uses 44W which is half what those people at the left hand end of Stoner’s graph would have had burning on the ceiling of every room.

UK, or everywhere ?I’ve now read yr link 🙄
I’m surprised by the last 5yrs stoner – whyzat then ?
(is reduced space heating = not using the CH as winters are too warm ??)

I should think A rated appliances and home building regs on insulation are probably starting to have an effect on average energy consumption/person.

I havent graphed the household impact though. Since we have more households and more people per household that may add to the efficiency too.

I’m afraid you’ve got to go way further back than 35 years to get to the utopia your vapid quote refers to.

Also we did know about this stuff “back in the day” I am 50 and have known about “the green thang” since I was a kid

I am 50 and have known about “the green thang” since I was a kid

Well, you are always the exception to the rule, TJ.

The ‘green thing’ has been around since there was something for it to stand in opposition to.

Inversnaid by G M Hopkins

John Muir

Rachel Carson

wow what a shit thread. I hope you posted this from your iphone 4s whilst driving your 2.8 litre tdi audi at 90mph down the motorway with headlights on and air con on full blast during the day.

You know full well previous generations have **** up the planet…i wont argue that current generations are indeed doing the same. Some of us dont talk **** about it all day long and acutally do reduce our carbon footprint.

The fact of the matter is, all of the recylcing done in old days didnt cancel out the ghaslty damage old cars did to the environment pre catalytic converter days and various other environment saving devices. Not to mention leaded petrol. mmhmm tasty.

For the OP:

http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/anyone-started-a-thread-they-wish-they-hadnt

😀

We were more green when we were cavemen.

I use 100W incandescent lightbulbs, cos they’re three for a pound down Steve’s Bestsellers in Chrisp St market, and normal ES bulbs can’t be used with dimmer switches and the ones that can are like twelve pounds each or something. And I can get thirty six incandescent bulbs for that price. Which would probbly be a lifetime’s supply tbh. And the ES one woon’t last anywhere near that long anyway.

In my day we didn’t form sentences like Americans. I never went to a ‘store’ I went to a shop. I didn’t buy soda, I bought fizzy pop (with pocket money not an allowance). I’ve never been ‘a couple’a blocks’, we went round the block on our Grifters and Raleigh Burners… with spokey dokeys on!

Things have a habit of changing but staying the same, s’progress innit? 😀

The whole premis of that cut and paste thing seems fatally flawed, it drones on about how life was so much naturally greener, then fails to acknowledge that it was us*, not the yooth and their ‘green thing’, that brought about the current state of affairs.

*Before you say it, yes I know ‘us’ doesn’t apply to you 🙂

when I were a lad, we fixed things that broke, it just wasn’t given the term ‘green’

Shame we can’t use some of the austerity of yesteryear with the technological advances of today.

Yup, petrol was leaded, but when I was young very few people had cars. People (generally) worked locally and got trams, buses, cycled or walked to work.

Schoolchildren were absolutely not driven to school. You went on holiday in this country, usually to the nearest seaside (by bus or train).

Most bottles were recycled, you used to get a penny back if you took them to the shop. Clothes were more expensive but lasted longer and you had fewer. Fewer people kept up with fashion.

Although we heated with coal or coke (bad, but that’s all we had) we did not have heat in the bedrooms and homes were cooler than they are now. Washing was dried on the line.

We bought biscuits from big tins at the shop, you bought them by weight, and they put them in a paper bag. You could get broken biscuits, cheaper, but delicious!

Meat came from a butcher, not wrapped in expanded polystyrene and cling film in a supermarket. You bought eggs loose, veg from a greengrocer, certainly no out-of-season veg airlifted from Mexico or The Gambia. Little or no packaging.

If we had any food waste it went in a bucket and the pig man came round and took it away (for pigs).

The rag and bone man came round with his horse and cart and took away old furniture, clothes and bones (made into glue – the factories stunk to high heaven). There was never much to give him though.

Modern technology is amazing, and I feel very privileged to have lived from a time where we had one black and white tv and no telephone to now. Amazing. However, we have got very complacent and wasteful and this needs to stop.

Oh, got a bit long hasn’t it? I’ll stop.

I should think A rated appliances and home building regs on insulation are probably starting to have an effect on average energy consumption/person.

The problem is that the more efficient we make stuff, the more we consume. For example, we keep our homes far warmer than we did 30 years ago.

A paradox first noticed by a chap called Jevons in the 19th century.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Why is it that if I use five carrier bags for free I am killing the planet?

Yet if I use five carrier bags and pay 5p each everything is OK?

Does the 25p get spent on environmental projects? or is it just more profit for the shop?

Why is it that if I use five carrier bags for free I am killing the planet?

Yet if I use five carrier bags and pay 5p each everything is OK?

Does the 25p get spent on environmental projects? or is it just more profit for the shop?

It’s a tax on the lazy.

I repeatedly use the same carrier bags for free.

I use the carrier bags to pick up my dogs poo (responsible dog owner), I can get approx. 10x the amount of sh1t in them than council supplied bags.
My efficiency knows no bounds, if it saves just one childs life, it’ll keep the smug bank in credit for at least 6 months.

I think it all went wrong with the baby boomers

Miketually – tax yes, lazy, no successive governments turned us in to the wasteful, long distance commuting, nuclear family based consumerist society we are.

Have a read of this:

It gives you an idea of how the change from the society described by Karinofnine turned into the one we live in today.

I for one don’t want to lug around pockets full of old carrier bags just for the smug middle class pleasure of thinking I’m saving the planet while the plebs don’t care. That is just part of the problem that was created by breaking down traditional British society.

A few years ago I went into a Marks and Spencer store with my own carrier bag. The girl at the ‘pay here’ desk, wouldn’t allow me to use it, so I asked her to call the manager, she too wouldn’t allow me to use it. So I asked them to let me just carry my goods away with the receipt under my arm. This wasn’t allowed either, so I took the bag, emptied the goods 3 seconds later and left the shop bag on the end of the counter. Nowadays they postitively want you to use your own bag.

Glad things have changed.

I repeatedly use the same carrier bags for free.

Free carrier bags are ace. Ours get re-used as dog poo bags, shopping bags, waterproof liners in my cycling bag, binbags, lunch bags. One bag will do most of these jobs in our house before finally wearing out and being retired.

I’ll be sad when they are outlawed and I have to start paying for them.

Have a read of this:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Family-Kinship-East-London-Pelican/dp/0140205950

I’ve got a copy of that actually! jolly well have not read it since uni, mind. 😳

Modern technology is amazing, and I feel very privileged to have lived from a time where we had one black and white tv and no telephone to now. Amazing. However, we have got very complacent and wasteful and this needs to stop.

I grew up in a small flat which utilised a communal heating system. There was an electric bar heater which we never used really.

I’m trying to think of electric devices we actually did have.

No telly.
Small battery radio.
Hoover.
Iron.
No fridge until I was about 7 or 8, and then it was a s/h one we got for five pounds I think.
Maybe a couple of bedside lamps.
Tape recorder/player run mostly on batteries.

I genuinely can’t remember anything else.

I’ve just done a quick count and there’s over twenty devices I’ve got dotted around my flat, not to mention a few chargers for ‘phones, MP3 players, drill, etc. About 6 or 7 mains power tools. So over thirty different pluginnable things. In a small flat.

when I were a lad, we fixed things that broke

I’ve grown up having to. However, stuff today is so ‘disposable’. My less than 4-year old wardrobe is broken, and it’s so crap ittul just get thrown away as it’s not worth repairing. Just cheap chipboard rubbish. Furniture used to outlive people. Now it does not in any way even outlive a hamster. 🙁

Furniture used to outlive people. Now it does not in any way even outlive a hamster.

I’d like to see a wardrobe you buy when you get your first home, it follows you throughout your life and then you get buried in it. Or burned. Or maybe someone else gets it.

Actually, the most ungreen thing I own is my body. It uses up a whole load of non-replaceable stuff during it’s brief period on earth and then it consumes more resources to get rid of it. I’d really like to see an effective way of using my meat for better use. Maybe feeding cows or fertilising crops. I’d love to be able to power public transport for a while.

I’d like to see a wardrobe you buy when you get your first home, it follows you throughout your life and then you get buried in it. Or burned. Or maybe someone else gets it.

I’m thinking of just asking the layndlord to cover materials costs, and building my own. I guarantee I can build something far, far better and stronger than that piece of shit, and probbly for less money, too.

I have actually made a couple of bits of furniture. Got a nice little bedside cabinet my neighbour really likes (he saw me making it), and wants me to make one for him. Only MDF, but far tougher than any chipboard rubbish. Made entirely from a piece of salvaged MDF some builders had thrown out.

I won’t use that B+Q one-coat paint again though, that was a mistake. It’s too soft, and has yellowed noticeably in just a few months. 🙁

But isn’t it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn’t have the green thing back then?

Wtf? Is that the excuse for all that crap? Dear me. Talk about utterly over-simplifying to try and make a smart arsed point.

Firstly, the current generation laments certain decisions taken by many different past generations, and mostly not your gran’s, and not just household ones. Previous generations are the ones who invented mass transportation that ran on fossil fuels; they stripped it out in favour of personal transportation; they redesigned our cities so we needed personal transportation; they spewed incredible amounts of pollution into the air without a second thought (ever hear of pea souper fogs that were so bad thousands of people simply couldn’t breathe and died? That was the 50s iirc); they raped the world’s natural resources thoroughly; they destroyed the natural world wholesale; they exploited their fellow human beings both in the same country and abroad.. I could go on.

We have been making enormous progress on the whole, as a race. The addiction to consumer goods is modern, yes, but our parents and grandparents didn’t indulge because of a high minded sensitivity to the planet’s issues. They just couldn’t afford it. If they could have, they would. I believe that eventually we will overcome our greed (we have to) so if/when we get there we that generation will be the first to deny themselves every indulgence EVEN THOUGH they could afford it.

That will be good progress when it comes.

Furniture used to outlive people. Now it does not in any way even outlive a hamster.

*sigh* that wardrobe cost the equivalent of many hundreds of pounds. It did not cost £30 from Ikea, and consequently most people could not afford it.

We can afford far far more than past generations. This, believe it or not makes our lives better. Many of us own homes and their contents, we don’t have to move from digs to digs our whole lives with eight in a room. We can afford shoes, nice bikes, clothes, washing machines.. anyone remember going to laundrettes? It was only the expensive furniture that got passed down. The packing crates and logs millions of people used to sit on didn’t get passed down, funnily enough.

I can’t stand this kind of ill informed thinking being posted as some kind of profound truth simply because no-one else can be bothered to think either.

god damn you industrial revolution………we could still be a mainly agrarian society with an early death age, massively high infant mortality, rampant disease, little education, famines, no organised schooling, no unions…….you maniacs with your push for furthering the human species

molgrips – Member
I believe that eventually we will overcome our greed

What makes you belive this?

because molgrips is an idealist/envirozealot and they never have a grasp of basic human nature.

the only way to save the planet (not that it needs saving it’ll all sort itself out eventually and has been subject to far greater environmental shifts) is to get rid of the filthy parasitic organism that is breading out of control which is us.

but apparently if we all deny ourselves that nice car and buy one powered by a battery that is still charged by burning dinosaurs in a power station that will magically all make it better.

Or we could actually just consume less.

I strongly believe the consumerist society makes people less happy as too many people spend so much time striving to earn to buy stuff.

This is a part of why we have such an epidemic of mental health issues. i don’t meant a return to the agrarian society of 200 years ago – the constance striving to consume damages us. We do consume a lot more per head now as well as there being more of us. a less consumerist society would be happier – but we have to break generations of conditioning