What will remain?
Generally, people have a tendency to glorify the "good old days." It seems like the air was cleaner, grass was greener and everybody skipped around singing "Zip-a-Dee Doo-Dah" all the time. The truth, of course, is much more interesting and complicated.
While the 19th century was an age before gasoline engines and nuclear power plants, much of America was rapidly being deforested and coal-fired factories blackened the skies of many cities. At the same time, there are lessons we can learn from the lifestyles of our ancestors. This is partly due to technologies available (or not) in the past. In other cases, "green living" ideals were intentionally being carried out by our ancestors.
Think of a home in 1870, such as CNC's Homestead Cabin, shown above. If left to the elements, a cabin like this would eventually rot and crumble to dust. What would be left 100 years later? Surely, archaeologists would find bits of glass and ceramic, bricks, nails and other metal pieces such as a sled runner, woodworking tool, or piece of a woodstove. What would persist of the barrels, ropes and basket shown here?
What if your home were left abandoned for 100 years? What would happen to the vinyl siding, heaps of plastic, styrofoam, and other synthetic materials that abound in our lives today? Surely they wouldn't look very nice a century from now, but most of them would still be there, some for hundreds and hundreds of years. We've chosen to live this way and in many respects our lives are "better" (or at least more convenient) for it. But because we've made these choices, it's also up to us to be responsible consumers, reducing, reusing and recycling in order to limit this large and long-lasting footprint we're leaving on planet Earth.
For sure, it's quite impractical (if not impossible) to return to a primarily biodegradable lifestyle like our ancestors lived more than a century ago. But in the rush and tumble of our modern lifestyles, it's also important to pause once in awhile to really think about all the little choices we make each day. How can we live more lightly on the planet? We can decide what will remain.
Generally, people have a tendency to glorify the "good old days." It seems like the air was cleaner, grass was greener and everybody skipped around singing "Zip-a-Dee Doo-Dah" all the time. The truth, of course, is much more interesting and complicated.
While the 19th century was an age before gasoline engines and nuclear power plants, much of America was rapidly being deforested and coal-fired factories blackened the skies of many cities. At the same time, there are lessons we can learn from the lifestyles of our ancestors. This is partly due to technologies available (or not) in the past. In other cases, "green living" ideals were intentionally being carried out by our ancestors.
Think of a home in 1870, such as CNC's Homestead Cabin, shown above. If left to the elements, a cabin like this would eventually rot and crumble to dust. What would be left 100 years later? Surely, archaeologists would find bits of glass and ceramic, bricks, nails and other metal pieces such as a sled runner, woodworking tool, or piece of a woodstove. What would persist of the barrels, ropes and basket shown here?
What if your home were left abandoned for 100 years? What would happen to the vinyl siding, heaps of plastic, styrofoam, and other synthetic materials that abound in our lives today? Surely they wouldn't look very nice a century from now, but most of them would still be there, some for hundreds and hundreds of years. We've chosen to live this way and in many respects our lives are "better" (or at least more convenient) for it. But because we've made these choices, it's also up to us to be responsible consumers, reducing, reusing and recycling in order to limit this large and long-lasting footprint we're leaving on planet Earth.
For sure, it's quite impractical (if not impossible) to return to a primarily biodegradable lifestyle like our ancestors lived more than a century ago. But in the rush and tumble of our modern lifestyles, it's also important to pause once in awhile to really think about all the little choices we make each day. How can we live more lightly on the planet? We can decide what will remain.
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