THE GREENING OF GRANDMA
We’re all guilty of treating the Earth badly, so let’s fix the mess together
The story goes like this: A young supermarket cashier is chastising an elderly woman for using plastic bags to carry her groceries.
“I am sorry,” the older woman says, “but we didn’t have the green thing in my day.”
“That’s the problem,” says the cashier. “Your generation didn’t care enough to save our environment for future generations.”
Ah, but what my generation did, the elderly woman replies, was recycle milk bottles, use cloth diapers and clothesline. What we did was watch our one television while wearing hand-me-downs. What we did was mail packages without bubble wrap, drink water from the tap, cook unprocessed food instead of getting takeout, and ride a bicycle to school.
What we did was manage without fast food, fast fashion, fast cars, cellphones and every other imaginable industrialized convenience and electronic diversion that created the disposable lives we lead today.
Oh, and while we’re at it, we would have been taken out behind the wood shed if we had littered.
The older woman had, in fact, lived a life of green.
I am of an age where I have shared much of that women’s “green” history — the cloth diapers, paper not plastic, tap not bottled. And, not bragging, but I have never owned dishwasher. In fact, for much of my teens, in the 1960s, I was laser-focused on saving whales and peace on Earth. And then, like millions of others maturing into adulthood, I fell headlong under the magic spell of Madison Avenue, where postwar optimism and cheap overseas labour heralded a new age of rampant consumerism.
Soon, my First World life was awash in excess. So much plastic. So many possessions. So. Much. Stuff.
Today, I am busy de-accumulating while grappling with a new-found green guilt, courtesy of my granddaughter Charley, who at 15 is naturally much smarter than her grandmother and who is not shy about saying, Nana, the whales are mostly saved these days, so let’s talk about all those mid-20th-century-generated ignominies like climate change, child labour, big oil and, well, the list goes on.
And so we talk. And debate. And don’t always agree. About
Greta Thunberg lighting a brush fire across a somnolent, smouldering planet. About alternatives to fracking. About where our recycling ends up. About changing habits and raising awareness.
We talk about big issues, but also small, like is it better to dam a river to produce electricity for public washroom hand dryers or cut down a renewable resource like a tree to make recyclable paper towels?
Like what happens to discarded batteries from electric cars?
Like acknowledging that so much of what constitutes a modern household is manufactured from oil — from electronics and sneakers to make up and detergent — and if you are not willing to give those up, and you know you are not, then let’s stop the blame game and talk about solutions, about personal responsibility. For starters, young and old, how about we skip Skip the Dishes and cook our own dinner? How about curtailing the online shopping, and overpackaged, gas-guzzling, front-door deliveries? How about protesting against businesses that don’t offer recycling bins, against governments that pump raw sewage into the ocean, against the epidemic of litter on our streets?
And it is in those conversations that my granddaughter and I have come to an understanding, from one generation to another.
We are all guilty of messing up this planet. All of us. We consume too much. We waste too much. We are mostly unmindful of our impact.
And we all need to smarten the hell up.
Or, as she puts it: “If you’re not going to be alive in 30 years, Nana, maybe help clean up the mess you helped create.
“We all have to step in. There’s only one Earth.”
Wise girl.