Grandma’s Green Recipes
By Jackson Kern
We oftentimes turn to the wisdom of the ages when seeking direction and guidance in our lives. Why not when going green?
Here are two trends of previous generations which have often been neglected in favor of less eco-friendly alternatives.
1) Although certainly not unheard of, the presence of home gardens is much reduced today in comparison to years past. A resurgence of home gardening is positive for the green movement for a number of reasons. The first is that a sustainable cultivation of homegrown fruits and produce liberates consumers from dependence on large-scale agro-business. While this is not always the case, such mega-farming enterprises often negatively impact the environment with their patterns of land use and their utilization of herbicides and pesticides. Home growing often eliminates the need for these harmful chemical agents, thus promoting your own physical health along with that of the ecological environment.
Aside from all of this, home growing entirely eliminates the fuel consumption (and resultant release of carbon into the atmosphere) that is a necessary step in delivering all goods from afar. For those long winter months away from the growing season, we have the option of canning and freezing our yields. Compost piles are a strong compliment to home gardening, providing at once a green place of disposal for much of our waste and a source of potent, organic fertilization for our gardens.
2) Our parents and grandparents inhabited a world which was marked by much less plastic. Plastic is harmful because it is petroleum-based and is not biodegradable; unlike paper packaging, for example, our plastic waste will be around for many years to come.
There are several approaches we can adopt to reduce the presence of plastic in our world (and in that of our children). As always, we must begin with small steps. One large source of plastic waste is grocery store bags. We can implore our supermarket chains to revert to an age of paper-only grocery sacks. We could also move one step further and collectively encourage them to do away with grocery bag provision altogether. The obvious effect of this is to force shoppers to bring their own multi-use bags. In the interim period, grocery stores could impose a small fee on grocery bags. Some stores have also allowed their customers to use cardboard boxes and crates received from their suppliers which would otherwise be recycled.
Consumers can also shun products which are excessively wrapped and packaged, and write letters to firms' management asking them to adopt more eco-friendly packaging practices.
Posted by on 10/20 at 02:19 PM