Best rant on PC I have seen for awhile...long, but worth it.

[kentauros]

138. I'm sure this has been done before, but I just -had- to take it apart :)

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

That's called "re-using" not recycling. Recycling would have been if they took the glass bottles, crushed them, and turned them back into bottles again. Takes more energy, but glass always recycles back into glass of the same quality.

Also, millions continued to toss those "reusable" bottles onto the side of the road because they were lazy litterbug consumers.

The reason manufacturing switched to plastic bottles was a decision based on energy use. Energy to ship glass bottles of product to the store, energy to ship the empty bottles back to the bottling company, energy to wash them. Plus, glass bottles are thicker than plastic. You can get that many more bottles onto a truck with plastic bottles than you can with glass. Plastic bottles won't break in shipping. People don't take the chance of swallowing tiny glass shards when drinking due to a faulty bottling machine. (While that can still happen today, the bottling machines are also more sophisticated than they were back then, i.e., computerized and safer.)

Grocery stores bagged our groceries in brown paper bags that we reused for numerous things. Most memorable besides household garbage bags was the use of brown paper bags as book covers for our school books. This was to ensure that public property (the books provided for our use by the school) was not defaced by our scribblings. Then we were able to personalize our books on the brown paper bags.

You had to cut down more and more trees to make those paper bags, from a paper-industry that had no environmental controls on it like today. Schoolbooks are finally going digital, which saves even more trees. At least until we can kill those laws against the growing of hemp as put in place back then.

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.

You had elevators, so I don't think anyone was climbing the stairs of the Empire State Building willingly. Escalators were in all of the department stores. So I don't know where that comment comes from.

Department stores/shopping

As noted above, a few escalator types were installed in major department stores (including Harrods) before the Expo. Escalators proved instrumental in the layout and design of shopping venues in the twentieth century.

By 1898, the first of Reno’s "inclined elevators" were incorporated into the Bloomingdale Bros. store at Third Avenue and 59th Street. This was the first retail application of the devices in the US, and no small coincidence, considering that Reno's primary financier was Lyman Bloomingdale, co-owner of the department store with brother Joseph Bloomingdale.

And people did get into their big, massive cars to go a few blocks. Because they wanted to show off that they could afford a big, massive car.

Back then we washed the baby's diapers 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 our clothes back in our early days. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing.

(You burn up wattage, not volts.)
You can blame HOAs for many people not being able to use laundry lines. All too often run by people for whom aesthetics is more important than practicality. And I can't name how many times it was an older person who was so concerned about how things looked.

Electric power companies burned oil and coal. No environmental controls. Soot, NOX, CO, CO2 belching out and everywhere.

The American textile industry decided that they could make more money and offer more clothing choices by moving their factories to poorer countries. Clothing-thrift stores subsequently popped up everywhere, and filled with all of the now "hand-me-downs" due to the prevalence of the offshore textile manufacturers.

Not everyone today has decided that having a family is the only way to live, so no diapers to wash, either. But, disposable diapers were most likely invented by an entrepreneurial American, and creating the American Dream for themselves as they became multi-millionaires. Their product was heavily marketed as a wife's very dream of convenience and sanitation. Why would anyone say things were better before that? What is you, a Commonist?

Disposable

The first disposable diaper was invented and patented in 1948[16] by Valerie Hunter Gordon (née de Ferranti),[17] granddaughter of inventor Sebastian Ziani de Ferranti.

(Okay, it looks like the inventor was British, not American as I suggested. Americans did seem to embrace them, though...)

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 Montana.

Once TVs became more popular, you better believe people started buying more for their homes. Just as they did with radios. Plus, buying more is good for American business.

Television Sets - History
Television usage in the western world skyrocketed after World War II with the lifting of the manufacturing freeze, war-related technological advances, the drop in television prices caused by mass production, increased leisure time, and additional disposable income. While only 0.5% of U.S. households had a television in 1946, 55.7% had one in 1954, and 90% by 1962. In Britain, there were 15,000 television households in 1947, 1.4 million in 1952, and 15.1 million by 1968. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, color television had come into wide use. In Britain, BBC1, BBC2 and ITV were regularly broadcasting in colour by 1969.

In the kitchen we blended and stirred by hand because we didn't have electric machines to do everything for us.

Only if you didn't have electricity.

Electric Mixer - History
In 1908 Herbert Johnson, an engineer for the Hobart Manufacturing Company, invented an electric standing mixer. His inspiration came from observing a baker mixing bread dough with a metal spoon; soon he was toying with a mechanical counterpart. By 1915, his 20 gallon (80 l) mixer was standard equipment for most large bakeries. In 1919, Hobart introduced the Kitchen Aid Food Preparer (stand mixer) for the home.

When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used wadded up old newspapers to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap.

How often did things arrive in one piece?

Back then, we didn't fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power.

I suppose that was true at the turn of the 20th century. But, once powered mowers were invented, they became quite popular:

Powered Mowers - Further Improvements
In the United States, gasoline powered lawn mowers were first manufactured in 1914 by Ideal Power Mower Co. of Lansing, Michigan, based on a patent by Ransom E. Olds. Ideal Power Mower also introduced the world's first self-propelled, riding lawn tractor in 1922, known as the "Triplex." The roller-drive lawn mower has changed very little since around 1930. Gang mowers, those with multiple sets of blades to cut a wider swath, were built in the United States in 1919 by the Worthington Mower Company.

In the 1920s one of the most successful companies to emerge during this period was Atco, at that time a brand name of Charles H Pugh Ltd. The Atco motor mower, launched in 1921 was an immediate success. Just 900 of the 22-inch-cut machines were made in 1921, each costing £75. Within five years, annual production had accelerated to tens of thousands. Prices were reduced and a range of sizes was available, making the Standard the first truly mass-produced engine-powered mower.

We exercised by working so we didn't need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity.

I'll give them that. And yet, everything about American living back then was to push the envelop on convenience. As it still is today.

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.

Water that was delivered through lead pipes, or copper pipes connected by lead solder. Not to mention no water-pollution controls. Arsenic, anyone?

We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen

Such pens were notorious for leaking. How many shirts were ruined by them?

and we replaced the razor blade in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull.

And what, exactly, happened to the razor that was "replaced"?

Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service in the family's $45,000 SUV or van, which cost what a whole house did.

At least, they did until GM, Firestone, and Standard Oil conspired by buying up all of those streetcar lines and ripped the tracks out. Can't have people doing the "green thing" when they should be driving cars and consuming like good Americans.

There were also far fewer people in the country back then. Schools were smaller and closer to where people lived. People weren't scared into becoming helicopter parents by the media.

And you can't buy a house for 45k these days. Comparing numbers like that just doesn't work.

We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances.

And houses burned down because people tried to put as many devices into one socket as they could, with the help of plug-in socket expanders.

And we didn't need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 23,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest burger joint.

You didn't have satellites. So, no advanced warning for hurricanes or heatwaves, either.
Also, how come I see plenty of older people with those same gadgets in their hands, also looking for the nearest burger joint? Convenience, maybe?

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?

You were wasteful. You polluted the landscape like no other before or since. We had to enact things like the Clean Water Act, and the Clear Air Act to get industry to at least attempt to behave. Yet, it wasn't enough. Now we have too many people, and even with all of the pollution controls in place (when they're allowed to work) we still produce too much pollution.

I believe this is more like a conservative anti-green manifesto than a proponent for old ways of green living. This is the kind of thing sent to other conservatives to justify their refusal to be green today. They've already done the green thing. Why should they do it now?