[mos6507]

I'd like to know how many people here are actually holdovers from the 70s green movement rather than new converts.

[flash width=425 height=344]http://www.youtube.com/v/-a7K2uCJvvg&hl=en&fs=1[/flash]

[davep]

No, but my Dad is. I remember him taking me to the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales when I was about eight. I couldn't get my head round the idea that you can use shit to generate energy. I guess my interest in alt-tech grew from that.

[bratticus]

Thanks, I had not seen that video in decades.

But time marches on.

[flash width=425 height=344]http://www.youtube.com/v/QJvifVrGi8o[/flash]

[Ludi]

<<<<<<<<Old enough to be an enviroweenie since the '70s.

[bratticus]

I was a young child when that PSA came on TV.

I'm too young to be a baby boomer but too old to have missed the brunt of their propaganda.

Ahh, revenge is sweet!

[flash width=425 height=344]http://www.youtube.com/v/_N_SqLljunQ[/flash]

[Ludi]

I was born in the early '60s, so I'm old enough to have been aware of the environmental movement of the '70s and the very brief resurgence of the environmental movement during the first couple years of the '90s ("the environmental decade").

Then I guess we decided we just didn't care. Many of us gave up.

[copious.abundance]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('mos6507', 'I')'d like to know how many people here are actually holdovers from the 70s green movement rather than new converts.

[flash width=425 height=344]http://www.youtube.com/v/-a7K2uCJvvg&hl=en&fs=1[/flash]

[Pops]

My Mom taught me about conservation when I was a kid in the 60's.

Her family had squandered Oklahoma soil and oil from the Run in the 1890's back to Lincoln and beyond.

She gave me and Green Eggs and Ham and Silent Spring and be a good man in equal measure.

Not a holdover nor a retread, Mos, just a child who learned and did what was taught.


How about you?


BTW, when can we expect the results of you polling?

[mos6507]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Pops', '
')How about you?

BTW, when can we expect the results of you polling?

[davep]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('mos6507', 'T')he reason I'm asking is that it seems to me that peakers skew older. Older people have some key advantages and fewer obligations than younger people and so some of the advice I'm reading here doesn't seem as applicable to a 30-something with a young kid.

[IslandCrow]

I guess I can be classed as an old fart (got married in the 70s)

I first learned about energy saving bulbs in the 70's ... guess a lot of wasted time inbetween before moving to a higher pitch because of concerns about PO.

[Pops]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('mos6507', 'O')lder people have some key advantages and fewer obligations than younger people and so some of the advice I'm reading here doesn't seem as applicable to a 30-something with a young kid.

[mos6507]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('davep', '
')I'm guessing you're finding excuses for your lack of progress or inability to take risks (given your responsibility).

[davep]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('mos6507', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('davep', '
')I'm guessing you're finding excuses for your lack of progress or inability to take risks (given your responsibility).

[Ludi]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('mos6507', '
')The reason I'm asking is that it seems to me that peakers skew older.

[bratticus]

What can be said to defend the 70's after this happened:

[flash width=425 height=344]http://www.youtube.com/v/hqrHZYdAeOc[/flash]

No excuses.
No apologies.
It's too late.

[stonecypher]

Well, 60s retread, actually. (Although I'm the only one of my generation who actually DID NOT go to Woodstock or march in an anti-war rally.)

Dad was a combat veteran (Pacific theater) of WWII, raised in rural Louisiana, moved to California after the war to work for Lockheed and married Mom, estranged from her family (and who would never talk about her background) -- and they settled in a tract home in the beautiful orange groves of southern California to raise a family (three kids) and live the good suburban life with cigarettes, cocktails, neighborhood barbecues, and backyard tomato plants. Enter the State of California to exercise its right of eminent domain and condemn the entire neighborhood so a new freeway could be built.

On fire from a book he had read ("Crusoe of Lonesome Lake" by Ralph Edwards), Dad informed Mom he was going to use the proceeds from selling the house to the state to get out of California and head north to Canada to homestead and "get back to his roots." He bought an old delivery truck and built bunk beds in the back, piled the wife and three kids inside, and spent the three months of summer vacation in 1958 driving the family north towards his dream.

The money ran low in Eugene, Oregon, where he took the civil service exam for postal workers in desperation and landed a job. (Temporarily, of course.) While the family stayed in a fleabag motel, he searched for housing -- and bought a 110-acre spread with an old logger's cabin that had no indoor plumbing, a wood stove for heating, a seasonal well, and no electricity. (One can only imagine my mother's shock and abhorrence of her new lifestyle and how close they came to divorce over his decisions.)

Please indulge me while I give some telling details about why I'm a card-carrying "retread." This "temporary" hiatus from Dad's heading north to homestead lasted from my tenth year to when I left home at 21. My chores as the only daughter included chainsawing the winter wood supply, splitting log rounds into quarters with a double-bladed axe, clearing brush, digging new outhouse sites, walking a mile to and from a spring to collect drinking water in old milk jugs, caring for and butchering chickens, watering first-year fruit trees by hand to start an orchard, tilling/planting/fertilizing/watering a big garden, fixing barbed-wire fence line, digging out and repairing roadside ditches, and shooting rattlesnakes with a .22 when they were spotted in the pasture around our beef cows.

He built me a separate bedroom from my brothers in a huge oak tree, 15 feet off the ground and accessed by a spiral staircase, complete with handmade wooden furniture and a potbellied stove. When the fire went out in the winter overnight, I would wake up with frost INSIDE the windows by my pillow.

We walked a mile and a half uphill to catch the school bus. Mom had to bundle the laundry for five people into town twice a week to do the laundry. Showers were under a bucket of warm water in any weather while standing on a wood pallet with the chickens as an audience. Any spare time from chores I spent wandering the acreage, finding my special places and enjoying my solitude.

I thought everybody lived like this. I'm 61 now, and all of them and all of that is long gone -- and the life lessons I learned from being raised like that have stood me in good stead my entire life and repeatedly surprised me with the depth and breadth of knowledge my "green" visionary father imparted to me. I only wish I'd asked more questions and listened more closely than I did.

So, yes, I'm a "retread" but one with a pile of country-living smarts to offer to others who ask me about how things used to be done. I feel no need to apologize for the 70s -- or the 60s!

[mos6507]

I didn't use the term "retread" as a putdown. It was a bad choice of words.

I do think a lot can be learned in contrasting what went down in the 70s with today to try not to make some of the same mistakes yet again.

I have noticed that some of the more prominent figures in the scene got their start in the 70s. Like Mike Reynolds' Earthship Biotecture. David Holgrem's first Permaculture book came out in 1978. Ed Begley first got into electric cars in the early 70s due to concern over smog. Then you have Limits to Growth coming out in 1972.

I'm just wondering how much of the scene that we have today can be considered truly a product of the 21st century.