How the Depression Taught Grandma to be Green

This past fall, an anniversary has come and gone that I have heard little fanfare about. Black Thursday. Not the famed best shopping day of the year, where retailers open at 4 am and sale catalogs weigh 5 pounds a piece. But the infamous anniversary of that fateful day that took us into the Great Depression.
I am not a political analyst touting the cautions and comparisons to our times and those that lead up to that dark day. I really pay no mind to the issues that flood the internet linking the Depression to present day concerns. However, there is one thing that caught my attention as I sat down to write my “Green Christmas Tips “article for the www.repurposed4you.com newsletter. I couldn’t get this thought out of my head. Did Grandma start going green in the 1930’s and no one noticed?
The Great Depression was a terrible time in our history, full of homelessness, joblessness and poverty. To my amazing discovery, it was also a time of being frugal, being thrifty and going green. The environment wasn’t the issue. Al Gore wasn’t standing on his 100% post-consumer recycled soap box warning of doom and gloom. It wasn’t an option to reuse items. There weren’t green stores, green art and green articles teaching us how to be more green. There wasn’t this type of save the earth mentality that made people change their ways. But instead the Great Depression was a time of conservation based out of necessity.
"Repair, reuse, make do, and don't throw anything away" was a motto during the Great Depression. Look how far we have come. Look how gone to the other extreme. Is it only the” tree huggers” and the “environmentalists” that see the usefulness in that phrase today. That slogan could easily be on any Eco Friendly Website and no one would know that it was regularly tossed around in homes 70 plus years ago.
Their green behavior is clear; their environmentally sound practices are shown through their resourcefulness. These lessons that they taught their kids have since gotten lost in an age of waste. Grandma became the nutty one for reusing cloth ribbon on her packages and neatly folding her gift wrap and saving it for the following holiday. And we became so superior for showing her how we can mindlessly discard anything that isn’t shiny and new any longer. Remember, Grandma was the one who wore dresses and sometimes even undergarments made out of feed bags and flour sacks because her mom wouldn’t toss out the colorful cotton. Our grandparents were taught that once socks could not be patched any longer they could be tied to the end of a long handle to become a mop. Glass jelly jars became everyday drinking glasses, geese would have their bellies plucked for the family to have a softer bed and oh, those beautiful handmade quilts and rugs made from worn out clothing. Everything outdoors became the kid’s entertainment. The garden was their grocery store. There was no thought to how much pesticide was on the produce or how much fuel it took to ship it across the country to your local neighborhood market. The electricity was limited to illumining the house at night, if that, and not for mindless hours of television, video games and lighting rooms we aren’t even in. They composted. They recycled. They did the things everyday that we pat ourselves on the back for; Repurposing, Reusing and Recycling. They were the first environmentalists, without even knowing it.
Every “Going Green” Holiday article you will read this season will tell you to start folding your paper to save it for next year like it is a new concept. Remember, Grandma still does this now. This is not a new concept. Grandma may have had this one right. And you never know she might just be right about her bee hive making a come back too.