How to think Green

by Jen (April 22, 2008)

In celebration of Earth Day, I considered writing a huge roundup of all the wonderful sites where you can get tips for living more green and making your life simpler, cheaper and more rewarding. I also considered writing a big list of tips for being more green. I had a feeling both of those topics would be covered by plenty of other sites, so here’s something I hope is a bit more unique. You can read a million tips on being more green, and follow every single one. But if you really want to be as green as you can get you need to…

Learn to think like country people. They were green before anyone called it “green.” Living green wasn’t a lifestyle choice. It was a necessity that came with being cash-poor - sometimes having land and other resources, but not so much money. They reduced, reused and recycled because it was the only way to get by. That creates a mindset country people learn early on that people raised in cities and suburbs don’t usually have. Here are some tips for learning to think that way yourself:

• Nothing is disposable; everything you bring into your life stays for years. Country people instinctively know how to reuse, reduce and recycle because their background is one of not having money to waste. You don’t buy something unless you can use it. You use it until it breaks. You repair it until it can’t be repaired anymore. And then you break it down into parts that can be reused for something. What you can’t use, a neighbor can. What no one can use anymore can be melted down or given to kids as a toy. Even the remains of dinner get fed to the pets, the livestock or dumped into a compost heap.
• Take care of your “stuff.” You take care of your clothes, the house, your possessions. You clean up spills when they happen and you do maintenance before it’s critical. It’s not the carpet’s job to resist stains; it’s your job to prevent potential stains from setting. You don’t buy new stuff on a schedule, as in “Need a new wardrobe every year” or “Computer’s two years old; time to replace it”. You buy classic clothes that can be worn for years without it looking like you’re stuck in 2003. You buy a computer you believe will be durable, and then you make sure you know how to take care of it.
• Know your “stuff” well enough to care for it yourself - for free. You used to be on your own in the country. You didn’t have service people and repair people to fix everything for you. You knew your house well enough to do basic maintenance. You knew your car well enough to fix it yourself. You did your own taxes. You did your own “landscaping” and called it “planting flowers.” You trimmed the trees in the yard before they could fall on the house, and you knew how to tell if they were dead or not. You knew your stuff, you took responsibility for it, you respected yourself and the things in your life.
• Know the difference between “have to” and “choose to.” You don’t “have to” buy new clothes every year - that’s something we talk ourselves into believing because we want to buy them. You don’t even “have to” buy new clothes because you’ve changed size, because you know how to let clothes out or take them up. There’s nothing like poverty to teach you the difference between “have to” and “want to”, and while I would never wish poverty on anyone in this world of plenty, everyone should learn this lesson.
• Get creative - find solutions that use the stuff you have. Just because everyone you’ve ever known used disposable diapers doesn’t mean you can’t make cloth diapers out of old clothes. Do you really need cable and Netflix? Do you really need your landline phone and your cell? Just because everyone you know has a car for every family member doesn’t mean your family can’t get by with fewer by sharing cars and using public transportation some of the time. When you need something, look around at what you have as if you have no money at all to buy new stuff with, and ask yourself, “How can I get what I need out of what I already have?”

It’s hard to live up to this lifestyle anymore - even in the country. Refrigerators used to last twenty years, but then manufacturers realized they’d make more if they broke down in half that time, so they purposely made them more cheaply. Cars aren’t so straightforward to repair at home now that everything’s computerized. In fact, pretty much everything is made cheaply in China and costs less to replace than to repair. No wonder we’ve become a disposable society with landfills to show for it.

But the mindset is achievable, and it enriches your life by enabling you to be more grateful for what you have, to feel less deprived because the neighbors have something you don’t, and to feel less cheated by the rising cost of everything. Once you’re in the mindset, your usual “I need to buy X” changes to “I need to do X; what do I have that I can use to achieve that?” And being green becomes second nature.

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