Green
Green used to be a color; now it is a movement. The design trades are falling over themselves to use the latest green products with the smallest carbon footprint. Al Gore and the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. All good stuff to finally pull environmental awareness into the mainstream. Side note: The first Green Party, read more here.
Not very long ago, I lived in a very rural location in a fifty year old trailer with a well and a septic system on an acre plot boarded by a stream and a tree farm. The eight years I spent living there put me in touch with the rhythm of the seasons and the utter dichotomy of the ferocity and fragility of the environment. Waiting out a draught when dependant on a well is scary. Shoveling my way to civilization after a blizzard was an epic cardio workout. High winds wiping out a power line would shut down my heat and water pump. My neighbor/landlords taught me how to conserve and recycle just about everything because everything is finite.
Presently I live in a sub-destruction. [My term for hastily built developments where the land has been raped so people can live in the "country". I moved here because this is where my heart found my mate.] Here, lights burn 24/7 outside of garages, lawns gets chemical baths, the top soil has been stripped and sold by the builder, huge piles of mulch surround saplings depriving them of water, refrigerator doors hang open while all of the groceries are put away, and the kitchen tap runs while the phone is answered. Am I exaggerating? NO! Unfortunately, I am not. And I have learned that this is not the place to try to be helpful by gently pointing out that the grass does not need to be watered when it hasn’t rained for a month. “Well, I can’t have it turn brown!”
What I have done to bring a bit of the rural life to my new “country home” is to plant a veggie garden in my back yard that I plan to expand every season. I hired my former landlords to remove the saplings in the front yard and plant healthy crab-apple trees. The saplings have found a new home back on the farm. Countless cubic yards of good topsoil have been spread by my shoulder and leg power to make a good home to flowers, shrubs and grass. Yes, I shoveled and spread topsoil that I mixed with manure by the wheelbarrow load across the front lawn and grass-seeded it as soon as the winter broke. And I watered it until the grass rooted, I’ll never need to mass water it again. When the dandelions tried to take over my new lawn, I used a weeding fork and pulled them out, one-by-one and put them in the wooded area to decompose. Teaching by example, not by lecture, seems to be more effective. By mid-summer I had become the go-to lawn question girl.
Green is a great color and, hopefully, a great movement that will survive beyond its current “hot” status.
