Not Easy Being Green

At the moment BBC is showing a programme (no link, because I can’t find one, although there’s a small piece about the series here) called “It’s Not Easy Being Green”. No, it’s not about the Muppets, but instead about a family, the Strawbridges, who have moved to Cornwall and are working to live in an ecologically sound manner.

It’s a strange programme in a number of ways, because while it contains some good ideas and good advice, it also helps to do more damage to the Green and Ecological lifestyles than it should, because frankly Mr and Mrs Strawbridge (as opposed to the children) spend half the time looking like nutters.

In the most recent episode, for instance, they managed to merge some excellent ideas about glass recycling and heatsinks, solar-heated showers etc., with a visit to the Big Green Gathering, or whatever it was called, which had an awful lot of hippies in a field, and some of the most manky “recycled” tat in existence.

Now, I don’t mind hippies per se, nor do I overly object to the Big Green Gathering and its like. I do, however, have a problem with the way that hippie-type people seem to always become the enthusiastic/lunatic fringe for things to do with Green and Ecological living, and thus become the poster-children for all this kind of thing.

I don’t know, this entire mental process hasn’t yet been fully thought-out by me, but if we are to start living in a way that encourages things like recycling, sustainable power, self-sufficiency and so on, perhaps the first step on the way to mainstream acceptance of these concepts is to have some sane non-hippies taking in the lifestyle, and becoming a better advert than the current crop of users?