It's getting easier to be "Green"...

I've been "green" pretty much since I was a kid.  The 70s are known as the "Me" decade, but it was also the time when Earth Day was born. Remember the "Childcraft How and Why Library"? World Book encyclopedias published a kid's encyclopedia supplement that came with your set of encyclopedias, and you also got an 'annual' every year, each devoted to a different subject.  I loved reading those! They were my favorite books as a kid, and to this day I read non-fiction pretty much exclusively. What can I say, I love to learn new things. Anyway, one of those "How and Why" books was about endangered species and it really made an impression on me.  As a kid, I was appalled at how humans were putting so many harmful chemicals into the air, water and soil. I couldn't understand why anyone would kill a rhinoceros and take only its horn. It seemed selfish to me. As a ten year old, I was against such things, but what was I really going to do about it? Not much. My parents certainly weren't green. They weren't using rhino horn, but the had no problem using whatever chemicals they felt were necessary to get the job done. They are still pretty bad. They don't even recycle! I know, it's disgusting. I have tried to tell them they are messing up the planet for their grandchildren but they just think I'm overreacting. My family thinks I'm weird.
So, even though as a kid I was "green" in spirit, I wasn't "green" in any practical sense until the late 80s when I was grown up and ecology was trendy again. My husband and I became vegetarians as a protest to factory farming. We reduced, reused and recycled, and when our son was born in 1989, my husband and I vowed that we would only use cloth diapers. Remember the big Pampers backlash of the 80s? We didn't want our son's diapers to live 100 years in a landfill! Great idea in theory, but not too practical for parents who work 40 hours a week. I'm sure it can be done, but we couldn't make it happen. My son was in Pampers when he was 6 months old. But at least we kept 6 months of diapers out of the landfill. Better than nothing, right?

Usually, something is better than nothing. Even though my parents don't recycle, they do use cloth shopping bags instead of disposable bags. Which seems so much harder to me than simply sorting your recyclables, but whatever. Also, in my parents' defense, they put their trash cans out into the alley & homeless people go through and pick out the recyclables so not everything ends up in the landfill. And that's something.