It's Not Easy Being Green

Today we have a guest post from Robert Parkhurst. Robert is a gentleman who I recently met online after I published one of his Letters to the Editor here on my site. Robert contacted me via e-mail, we've corresponded via e-mail, and today I am pleased to present another of Robert's essays here today. Thank you Robert.

What Being Green Means To Me by Robert Parkhurst

Being “green” is what our grandparents practiced and it was just called frugal living. They didn’t have to worry about low flush toilets; they called them outhouses — no water at all. They didn’t have to worry about efficient clothes driers; they called them clotheslines and they used fresh air and sunshine. That was “green” living the old fashioned way. I remember my grandmother darning socks when they got holes in them by using a needle and thread to weave the thread back and forth to make them like new. What do we do now? Throw the socks out and buy new ones, of course!

About a year ago our 30-year old Maytag drier would not work any more. My wife called the Maytag repair shop and was told they could not repair it — they just didn’t have the parts. They informed her that they would sell her a new efficient “green” drier for less than $500 and that included picking up the old one. After calling around, she finally located an older shop that said they might have a replacement pilot light for such an old drier and they would check. The repairman came out and replaced the pilot light (a small part the size of a cigarette). The charge was about $80. My 30-year-old drier didn’t have to be transported to San Francisco, crushed, shipped to China, smelted down into metal ingots, rolled out into sheet metal and stamped out into new more efficient “green” driers. The amount of energy that would have been required to get the new drier compared to the amount of energy to repair the old one would be a good exercise for a college engineering class but it was a lot cheaper for me to just have the old one repaired. Even without the engineering class’s report, I can assure you my wife was doing the green thing just like grandma would have done and I didn’t have to burn all that gas going to work to earn the $500 either. Will the real environmentalist please stand up? Yeah — it’s my wife!


It may not surprise anyone that the Maytag repair shop didn’t carry spare parts for an old drier. They would be happier selling us a new drier even taking away the old one all included in the price. You may not even be surprised that businesses are all trying to sell you a new, more efficient “green” everything from new cars to a whole new house. No one can blame them, that is the way they make a living — nothing wrong with that. It used to be that the businesses had to convince the purchaser that the product was really worth their hard earned money. That is all changed. Now businesses and the government have discovered that they can work together. Businesses lobby to get the government to make laws mandating that many products are obsolete, inefficient or unsafe and that consumers will just have to buy new replacements. The businesses win because the consumers are buying more and the government wins because the more consumers buy the more taxes are paid. What a deal: everybody wins — well, maybe not everybody — the consumers don’t win if they buy things they don’t need and the environment is not improved if people are discarding usable items that could be fixed — you know, like my wife’s drier or the socks we discarded last week.