Green Life

I’m going to have a little green experiment this week, starting Thursday… We talk a lot in Sweden about the environment and how bad it is, we all have to work together and blah blah blah, just talk and no one cares what so ever I’m afraid.

I’ve seen plenty of people throwing paper in the trash instead of the recycling bins, you can’t leave this neighborhood without passing one of these bins and since most people take the car every morning to work why not take some paper along with you and throw it on your way?

Then there are people that still have their Christmas lights up… sigh. And they also have lots of decorative lights on their house and around the garden. Yes it looks warm and inviting but also a little like a theme park. Yesterday when I was out on my walk I noticed just how many lights people have. It’s not practical light but purely decorative, they are on the house, in the roof, in the drive way, in the walls, in the trees, on the trees, they are everywhere. Do you really need all of those lights? 10 – 15 years ago the only lights people had was one in the driveway and one above the door which is pretty darn practical when it’s jet black outside but apparently that is not enough anymore.

Then there is this one family that has had a fire lit close to every day this winter. Yes it’s cozy but every day? Come on! And it’s not a fire to warm up the house, just one of those things for ambience.

I’ve also been thinking, now when everyone build these glass boxes, insisting that it’s a house it must take more energy to warm them up a cold winter. Windows are as isolating as a wall is, are they? They also have much higher roofs which means more space, more space to heat and let’s throw in some windows in the roof as well. Doesn’t sound like the best design if you think about the environment but maybe there’s some fancy new technology that makes it all good, what do I know?

On Greenpeaces Swedish website there are ideas that you can do in your neighborhood to make it better… here are a few of them.

• Organize a “Clean up the beach” day. (Ha! No one would show up, well maybe some would show up and take a dip and ask if I was a criminal doing community service.
• Start a composting system. You can sell the soil to a gardener or a plant nursery to cover the expensive. (Well, I guess I could try to inform people about composting. Here people take all their garden trash and throw it in the wood and think Mother Nature will just make it go away. They throw whole Christmas trees there… are they retarded or do they simply don’t give a damn? I think it’s the latter I’m afraid.)
• Organize a tree planting campaign. (Ha ha ha ha!! People here HATE trees and cut them down and builds pools, wooden decks or lawns.)

I feel pretty damn alone in my neighborhood… I once said I didn’t want them to demolish a small patch of wood because I liked to watch the birds and the answer I got was something like, “Birds? Who gives a fuck about birds?”