Our Grandparents: The Real Environmentalists?

My mom is confessing to me over the phone.

"I have to admit," she says, "as a kid I thought my baba was a horrible old woman." The horrible old woman is her dad's mother, Pearl, the great-grandmother that I'm too young to remember. "She had almost her entire backyard filled with strawberry bushes, but when we'd go over there, she would see us looking at them and she'd scream, 'Don't you touch those strawberries!'"

"We didn't understand how she could have that much and not let us have any. So we would wait until she wasn't looking, and we'd crawl on our bellies through the dirt and bite the strawberries right off the plants."

I didn't ask her to confess these childhood crimes, exactly, yet she is confirming the suspicion that led me to give her a ring: although they are among the most familiar faces in our lives, on certain counts our grandparents don't just seem to come from the distant past, but from the queerest reaches of outer space. It's pretty safe to wager that, for most of us who graduated from diapers among strip malls and cable television, our grandparents lived lives astonishingly different from our own. (Even my parents -- who are still in their 50s -- are able to regale me with stories that make it sound as if they grew up competing for nuts and seeds with the woolly mammoth.)

Look to the current spate of environmentally minded "ordeal books," whose authors detail Herculean struggles with self-imposed sustainability challenges -- 100-mile diets, a year without shopping or electricity, life without TV or the tiniest scrap of garbage. I applaud them all, yet I imagine that my grandparents would be less impressed, seeing as how they could handily check off the entire list of deprivations and likely add a few more besides. The very fact that this genre has been saddled with the "ordeal" moniker should serve to illuminate the howling chasm between my baba's youth and my own.

And so I have to suppress my generational pride (not to mention that lingering sense of injustice over my gido's unwillingness to accept my teenage haircuts) and admit something unflattering: If my grandparents hail from outer space, it is from a planet quite possibly more sustainable than the one I have always called home, and despite having gone about their business not knowing their greenhouse gases from their carbon credits, they might still have a thing or two to teach me about being green.

They appear to have the credentials to back them up. By and large, they used less water, burned less gas, needed less electricity, put less carbon up into the air, imported less food, bought fewer cars, built much smaller homes and threw out way less garbage. Moreover, whether they accomplished this by choice or by harsh necessity, they managed it all without organic grocery stores and front-loading washing machines and hybrid gas-electric cars and compact fluorescent lightbulbs -- all of those glittering new consumer choices that we keep hearing so much about.

Regrettably, I arrived at this realization a little too late, since all of my grandparents have passed on. So I did what any self-respecting young(ish) man does upon finding himself in a jam: I called my mom and dad for help.

Clean your plate (and quit showing off)

I've always enjoyed getting on my dad's case for his shitty diet, which, as far as I can tell, consists of two parts red meat, two parts milk, one part potato, and only incidental traces of vegetable. In turn, and maybe in revenge, my dad enjoys nauseating me with tales of how much he loved it when his mother would set aside bacon fat and other pan drippings for spreading on toast at breakfast.

There's more to his rhapsodizing about lard than arterial hardening. That congealed animal fat was just one aspect of a general refusal on the part of his parents to say goodbye to anything that could still be put to good use. Having little disposable income probably had something to do with that. So did the provenance of these inconspicuous scraps of food, which, no matter how humble or downright unappetizing, represented many months of backbreaking labour.