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Wondering Pilgrim

~ the ramblings of a perambulent and often distracted sojourner

Wondering Pilgrim

Tag Archives: green

The Green Thing – a Senior’s Lament

22 Thursday Sep 2011

Posted by wonderingpilgrim in environment, Personal

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

environment, green, postaday2011

A reel lawn mower, adapted from an illustratio...

Image via Wikipedia

As a card carrying environmentalist, I can see the humour in this wry lament sent to me this morning by one of my long-suffering flock, who has herself been involved in several cane-toad busting expeditions in our state’s north east and has spent the last two weeks organising conservation measures on Rottnest Island:

In the line at the store, the cashier told an older woman that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren’t good for the environment.

The woman apologised to him and explained, “We didn’t have the green thing back in my day.”
The clerk responded, “That’s our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment.”

He was right — our generation didn’t have the green thing in its day.

Back then, we returned milk bottles, soft drink bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilised and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were recycled.

But we didn’t have the green thing back in our day.

We walked up stairs, because we didn’t have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn’t climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks.

But she was right. We didn’t have the green thing in our day.

Back then, we washed the baby’s nappies because we didn’t have the throw-away kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy gobbling machine burning up 220 volts — wind and solar power really did dry the clothes. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But that young lady is right; we didn’t have the green thing back in our day.

Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house — not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the state of Western Australia ..
In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn’t have electric machines to do everything for us.
When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used a wadded up old newspaper to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap.
Back then, we didn’t fire up an engine and burn petrol just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn’t need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity.

But she’s right; we didn’t have the green thing back then.
We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water.
We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull.

But we didn’t have the green thing back then.

Back then, people took the tram, train or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their mums into a 24-hour taxi service.
We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn’t need a computerised gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest pizza joint.

But isn’t it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn’t have the green thing back then?

Related Articles
  • “The Green Thing” (greenflbroker.com)
-31.911079 115.772731

Demonising the Greens – Eureka Street

28 Monday Mar 2011

Posted by wonderingpilgrim in environment, Personal, Wembley Downs

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

environment, green, parliament, postaday2011

Demonising the Greens – Eureka Street.

This thoughtful article reflects some of the healthy tensions in my own church community comprising robust and articulate adherents across the whole range of the political spectrum. Having just entered a solar-energy package that benefits both our local church and its adherents through our environmental policy (and the pragmatic demands of fiscal realities), I guess we lean more to green. But the fact that the politically more conservative among us can support green decisions that make good sense to them (and vice versa) demonstrates that there are community contexts where media promoted political divides are continually breached. Would that this was reflected in parliament and that sound bi-partisan policy could be debated and enacted on a range of issues that are now polarised and entrenched along party lines.

-31.911079 115.772731

The morning after polling day in Western Australia

07 Sunday Sep 2008

Posted by wonderingpilgrim in local politics

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Tags

democracy, election, green, labor, liberal, parliament, polling, western australia

So here we sit with an undetermined result – neither major party has sufficient seats to form government in its own right. Minor parties and independents will have a major say in how WA’s next government is formed. This is parliamentary democracy at work. In the end a small portion of the electorate will ultimately determine how political power will be wielded over the next four years.  The test of the effectiveness of democracy has always been how the majority treats the minority. It will be interesting to see if the reverse is true. The next few days should be most informative.

So – who are you going to vote for?

04 Thursday Sep 2008

Posted by wonderingpilgrim in local politics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

church state, elections, green, justice, labor, liberal, representative, voting

Elections are in the air. Campaigning has moved into high gear in the USA as Barak Obama and John McCain begin to slug it out. We go to the polls here in WA this Saturday. Will we vote for more of the same last eight years or take a gamble on a hastily revamped opposition? Or will we protest again by voting for a minority party or independent?

Should church leaders seek to influence how those within their orbit should vote? Political parties of all brands are recognising the significance of what they call the “Christian” vote. Note the singular – as if there is such a thing as the mono-morphous Christian vote. Certain parties and lobby groups appear to target church leaders in the hope they will use their influence, powers of persuasion and authority to help voters see political reform through their particular lens.

I wll not reveal how I intend to vote, nor seek to persuade another in any electoral direction. It behooves each individual to ensure they are well enough informed on the many issues that have a multiplicity of colours that apply in different ways to different parts of the community. As a preacher under the rule of the God who is fully revealed in the Way of Christ, I can hold up a prism that displays these colours, but it’s up to each voter to use their powers of reasoning and discernment to decide how these colours fall on the choices they make.  I can be no more directive than that. 

And why should any voter’s responsibility stop after the poll? Recent times have seen the growth of online grass-roots movements that seek to monitor the activities and decisions of those who represent us. Rather than list them here, for all have biases that could leave me exposed to charges of favouring either the left or the right, I will simply point out one, Open Australia, which simply provides a very direct means of accessing and monitoring the parliamentary speeches of your representative in both houses of Federal Parliament and giving their contact details.

There is plenty of scope for Kingdom oriented learners of Christ’s way to test their understanding and influence in dialogue with their parliamentary representatives – no matter which way the vote falls on Saturday.

Does green have a dark side?

16 Saturday Aug 2008

Posted by wonderingpilgrim in mission, Spirituality, theology

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

environment, faith, green, politics

I occasionally post “sustainable energy” news clips to the PeaceChurch mailing list, particularly where the church in Australia is adding something to the debate. Responses are inevitably mixed – no less earlier this week when I posted the following:

Some 40 religious leaders (including Churches of Christ, as well as leaders from Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist and Baha’i faiths) sent a letter to the Fed Government “calling for immediate and decisive action on climate change”(8.8.08)It coincided with a visit to Australia by Pacific church leaders who are deeply concerned about the effects of climate change on the region. The letter can be seen at http://mediaroom.victas.uca.org.au/?p=330

Some of the feedback (with permission from all sources) can be found in the comments section on this post. You may like to continue the discussion there, remembering that light is more illuminating than heat – which, given the topic, sounds like a terrible pun!

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