Accidental Environmentalist

I meant to post this on Earth Day a few days back, but was busy having a small melt down. Now that I am back in a normal space I just wanna say something...

The best way to influence eco-friendly behavior is to keep people poor. Ok, maybe not scrounging for food poor, but Canadian actor poor. Why? Because you don't have money to throw at everything. Because you reuse everything wether or not it is trendy and buy second hand stuff because shopping at Pottery Barn isn't an option. Do you know how many times during the renovations on this house we have fixed something instead of throwing it out and buying something new? Countless. I have remolded scrap pieces of wood into miraculous thing-a-ma-bobbers all with non-power tools from the 1940s. I have taken carpet from upstairs and put it downstairs and will be painting soon with mis-tinted paints. When you struggle for expendable income suddenly an off-ish-mustard-mixed-with-peach-yellow is your favorite color.

So then how do I keep my home from looking like a hodge-podge decorating disaster. Well, that is another thing that a person must develop when they make $13,000 a year. An eye for design. Creativity. Ways of spending virtually nothing and still having a home that makes a head bob up and down appreciatively. It ain't easy, but at least it is saving my planet.

My mom (and many of my family members) are the same way. Save, reuse, save, reuse. They don't need to recycle because they never throw anything out. Having been raised on a farm with eleven brothers and sisters and only the garden to feed them, they learned how not to be a disposable generation... and how to use old tires as feeding troughs for the pigs. I have watched this unfolding in the my life for the last few months while the Green Trend becomes chubby with popularity and I have come to coin a term. Accidental Environmentalist. They are the people that are forced to be kind to Mother Earth due to their wallets if not due to their guilt-ridden souls.

Happy Belated Earth Day my fellow readers. For those of you who also can not afford to spend $47/meter for specialty fabrics made of hemp weed and plastic water bottles, do something simple. Fix something in the coming days that you could otherwise throw out. Or decide to use an empty Fruitopia bottle to store your one inch screws.

And remember you can always shop for those silver linings at Value Village...