Seeing red because I'm green
Posted: May 10, 2008
1:00 am Eastern
By Patrice Lewis
© 2008
Hey, here's a newsflash: My family and I are green. Whoa!
Why do we qualify? We work at home (no commuting). We grow or raise a large portion of our own food (ooh, organic). We don't use a clothes dryer; we heat with wood we cut ourselves (no heating oil, gas, or electrical heat); we buy almost everything (clothes, furniture, household items) second-hand. We don't have cell phones or television reception. We don't have air conditioning or central heating. The list goes on … and it's a long list (available upon request).
Our greenness came about when we decided to do something bold and daring, something most people only dream about. Fourteen years ago, we chucked our urban, two-income, professional lifestyle in the city and bought a fixer-upper on four acres in the country. No jobs, no income. No kidding.
So there we were – poor. That was our first step toward greenness.
Unable to find a job, we decided to start our own woodcraft business so we could work at home. If we had known that we were embarking on a decade of being really poor, we may have taken a different path. But ignorance was bliss, so we continued. Now we were well on our way toward environmental consciousness.
We chugged along without health insurance through the birth of our two daughters. (We departed from true greenness by insisting that we pay our own hospital bills, however.) I worked nights outside the home and my husband worked days in the shop because we couldn't afford (nor did we want) day care. We used cloth diapers and I breastfed because we couldn't afford disposable diapers and formula. See the greenery building up?
I learned to can fruits and vegetables. We had a cow/calf and chickens, so we milked and butchered and gathered eggs and made cheese. (Oops, we're not vegans. Strike one.) Our business slowly stabilized until I could stop working outside the home and could split the hours in the shop with my husband. (Oops, a stay-at-home mom. Strike two.)
We homeschooled because we couldn't afford private schools. We figured our kids, in the long run, couldn't "afford" government schools either. If my kids are going to get propagandized, they may as well get it from me.
Fast-forward to today. Because we work at home and are not dependent on proximity to a city, we had the freedom to relocate to an area where property prices are low. Now we have 40 acres, more cows, more chickens and a bigger garden.
But we try to stay frugal. To save on propane, we never use our dryer (line-dry in the summer, rack-dry in the winter). We still heat with wood from our own woodlot. We produce our own fruits, vegetables, meat, milk, eggs, cheese, yogurt and butter (wheat is next on our list of things to try). We buy in bulk. We drive a small car. We buy all our clothes (except socks and underwear), furniture and most of our household goods at thrift stores.
The funny thing is we moved to an area where most people are greener than we are. They out-green just about everyone I know – living off-grid, building their own homes with no mortgage, making their own soap, grinding their own grain, making their own pasta. …
We're still pretty low income – but that's "green" too, isn't it? After all, most environmentalists love poor folk. They must, or they wouldn't be so interested in making everyone uniformly poor by taking our money away to equalize the misery.
Recently, I got curious about the extent of our carbon footprint and logged onto
www.carbonfootprint.com to see just how bad we are. According to this website, the average footprint for people in the U.S. is 20 tons of carbon per year. The average for the industrialized nations is about 11 tons/year. The average worldwide footprint is about four tons/year. To combat climate change (wait, wasn't it "global warming" last week?), the worldwide average needs to reduce to two tons/year, approximately cave man status.
Our results: 4.165 tons/year. I also learned that I could offset my evil capitalistic consumerist lifestyle by planting six trees in Kenya, planting six trees in another "approved" country of my choice, or contributing toward "VCS verified carbon reduction projects around the world which reduce carbon emissions through the displacement of fossil fuels through clean / renewable energy generation." But wait, we're too poor to purchase these indulgences, so I guess we'll have to keep spewing out carbon unabated through our evil capitalistic consumerist lifestyle. The 48 trees we've planted so far on our property probably don't count because we're not in Kenya.
Nonetheless, because we're walking the walk but not talking the talk, I've been accused on various forums of not being green. That makes me see red. What will it take? Reducing our standard of living to cave man status?
Probably. I think the greenies won't be satisfied until their advanced socialism has reduced everyone to stark poverty (except the environmentalist leaders, of course – they get to live in 10,000 square foot homes they tell us are "green").
If your belief is that it's impossible to be environmentally conscious without supporting the extreme left, socialistic philosophy, then you're mistaken. Some of the greenest people in this country are those with a fierce love of independence and a wish to be left alone.
Remember, greenies don't really care if you walk the walk. They only want you to talk the talk. The purpose of today's environmentalism is not to get people to live a green lifestyle; otherwise our neighbors and we would be their heroes. No, the purpose, the scheme, the agenda of the greenies is to get us all to knuckle under to socialism. Pure and simple. "Saving the planet" is just their excuse.
Good stewardship of the earth just makes sense. My family does it because it keeps our expenses low and our independence high.
By looking at green issues through the lens of intelligence rather than blind worship or political power-grabbing, people can make sound choices and decisions that can protect the environment … without the hype that can lead to dangerous and socialistic trends.
Source:
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=63861 page and ran my numbers. Even though I don't take a lot of pains to "be green" and live surrounded by electronic toys, my calculated footprint is only 7.5 tons of carbon/year. I could offset that by planting 11 trees (per the noted web site), but only in Kenya or the UK.
