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From Cleveland Plain Dealer Letters page, 8/10/2008 by Tom Rose
When everybody lived a ' green ' life
"These days, the media and others are making a big deal about going "green". When I was young, we were already " green " and we were just living a common, ordinary life.
My dad was fortunate enough to be able to walk to work. My mother took the bus to work after a five- or 10-minute walk to the bus stop.
As kids, we walked or rode our bikes to the school playground or the swimming pool.
We played in nostructured activities.
On Saturday, my mother and I or my sister would gather up our cloth shopping bags and take a bus, which ran every 20 minutes or so, from Old Brooklyn to the West Side Market and purchase meats, vegtables, fruit, bakery and other foods.
If you lived off Lorain or Madison avenues, you could be even more "green" and ride the "track-less trolley."
I may sound like Dick Feagler ( a top columinist with the Cleveland Plain Dealer that wrote about the good old days for years ), but I guess we were "green" and we didn't know it!
How could we have come so far that we need to get back to the way we were?"
Tom Rose - Westlake Ohio USA
We can go farther back in time and find we were even more "green".
The Way we Were
I grew up in a family food store. There were about five different types of similar stores in just one block including both sides of the street. There was a drug store and hardware store about every other block or so. Everything was in walking distance for miles up and down Madison and Lorain Aves. You did not need a car. Many kept their cars in the garage all week until the weekend and used them for a Sunday drive in the country. We had more than twice the population we have now living in the city. The country was nearby too.
The electric street cars rolled by constantly and you were able to make the downtown trip about 5 to 7 miles in no time. I rode to school by myself early in the mornings about a mile and a half away from home or rode my bike. There were even street cars on the tree lawns on Clifton Blvd full of beautiful homes.
At the store, the shoppers would come in with their own shopping bags - both cloth and paper. Many times I had to debate with customers to let me give them a new bag. They would keep their worn out paper bags for weeks. They even saved the bags and gave them back to us. They preferred to buy bulk products and counted the cost of packaging as an added unnessary expense. If we did not have what they wanted, there were plenty of other food, meat and vegtable markets around us. We even went to other stores and got them what they wanted. In the summers, there usually was a truck farmer parked on the side streets selling home grown vegtables and fruit on a regular basis.
Imagine these shoppers going to a modern day supermarket where the packaging represents the largest part of many purchases and the pretty pictures on the boxes portray something that is entirely different from what is found inside.
The food now comes from distant places requiring long haul shipping including refrigerated trucks traveling for hundreds of miles .
The imports require long haul ocean, air, rail and truck which cause a massive pollution problems. A newer software company in the U.S. devised a program showing this cost on domestic level. Just think how this damages the ecology on a worldwide basis. It certainly is not a "green".
We wrote about the dark side of energy saving products that are made in places like China.
We call the energy saving light bulb - the 8000 mile light bulb. ( See Dark Side of Energy Saving Light Bulbs )
That is how many miles it takes to get one here and they are manufactured in "dirty" factor envirnoments with deadly mercury out in the open. Workers are exposed to this working for pennies aday while workers in the U.S. lose their jobs.
While our economies are based on making money on money instead of making things, the real story of about going "green" is put aside. The economic crisis is part of it.
When will we have Plain Talk about all of this? Someone should begin by asking Al Gore and President Obama. Their concept of "green" is printing paper and calling it money. They never bring up Free Trade or Globalization as a cause of pollution.
From Cleveland Plain Dealer Letters page, 8/10/2008 by Tom Rose
When everybody lived a ' green ' life
"These days, the media and others are making a big deal about going "green". When I was young, we were already " green " and we were just living a common, ordinary life.
My dad was fortunate enough to be able to walk to work. My mother took the bus to work after a five- or 10-minute walk to the bus stop.
As kids, we walked or rode our bikes to the school playground or the swimming pool.
We played in nostructured activities.
On Saturday, my mother and I or my sister would gather up our cloth shopping bags and take a bus, which ran every 20 minutes or so, from Old Brooklyn to the West Side Market and purchase meats, vegtables, fruit, bakery and other foods.
If you lived off Lorain or Madison avenues, you could be even more "green" and ride the "track-less trolley."
I may sound like Dick Feagler ( a top columinist with the Cleveland Plain Dealer that wrote about the good old days for years ), but I guess we were "green" and we didn't know it!
How could we have come so far that we need to get back to the way we were?"
Tom Rose - Westlake Ohio USA
We can go farther back in time and find we were even more "green".
The Way we Were
I grew up in a family food store. There were about five different types of similar stores in just one block including both sides of the street. There was a drug store and hardware store about every other block or so. Everything was in walking distance for miles up and down Madison and Lorain Aves. You did not need a car. Many kept their cars in the garage all week until the weekend and used them for a Sunday drive in the country. We had more than twice the population we have now living in the city. The country was nearby too.
The electric street cars rolled by constantly and you were able to make the downtown trip about 5 to 7 miles in no time. I rode to school by myself early in the mornings about a mile and a half away from home or rode my bike. There were even street cars on the tree lawns on Clifton Blvd full of beautiful homes.
At the store, the shoppers would come in with their own shopping bags - both cloth and paper. Many times I had to debate with customers to let me give them a new bag. They would keep their worn out paper bags for weeks. They even saved the bags and gave them back to us. They preferred to buy bulk products and counted the cost of packaging as an added unnessary expense. If we did not have what they wanted, there were plenty of other food, meat and vegtable markets around us. We even went to other stores and got them what they wanted. In the summers, there usually was a truck farmer parked on the side streets selling home grown vegtables and fruit on a regular basis.
Imagine these shoppers going to a modern day supermarket where the packaging represents the largest part of many purchases and the pretty pictures on the boxes portray something that is entirely different from what is found inside.
The food now comes from distant places requiring long haul shipping including refrigerated trucks traveling for hundreds of miles .
The imports require long haul ocean, air, rail and truck which cause a massive pollution problems. A newer software company in the U.S. devised a program showing this cost on domestic level. Just think how this damages the ecology on a worldwide basis. It certainly is not a "green".
We wrote about the dark side of energy saving products that are made in places like China.
We call the energy saving light bulb - the 8000 mile light bulb. ( See Dark Side of Energy Saving Light Bulbs )
That is how many miles it takes to get one here and they are manufactured in "dirty" factor envirnoments with deadly mercury out in the open. Workers are exposed to this working for pennies aday while workers in the U.S. lose their jobs.
While our economies are based on making money on money instead of making things, the real story of about going "green" is put aside. The economic crisis is part of it.
When will we have Plain Talk about all of this? Someone should begin by asking Al Gore and President Obama. Their concept of "green" is printing paper and calling it money. They never bring up Free Trade or Globalization as a cause of pollution.
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