What to do with relatives/friends resistant to the green effort?

i know ANTI-Organics too!

i got this buddy...he is going to be enisting into the Marines...he is young and hates trendy, liberal, HIPPIE stuff.

well...i was raised going to the Fred Meyer's health store...it was located outside of the regular store...i think so the HIPPIES wouldn't go inside and bother the regulars!

anyways...we are not hippies, we just know what is right! organic means unadulterated...and that is what will make the most anti-organic come around eventually...

i found a time to speak with him over a meal i helped make...yes with organic produce.

i asked him to tell me his issues with organics first...not that i hadn't heard before...then i asked him to now hear why i use it...and he was fair and did.

i told him that since he liked the olden days and small farms and old ways...some farmers reject modern usages of spraying all sorts of chemicals on foods that kill bad bugs and good bugs alike, and could cause cancer or other issues in people. i told him how small farms used to be everywhere and used simple crop rotation and other methods to get good crops, not genetically splicing fish genes into a strawberry to make it better. i told him that his own great grandparents would have farmed without GMO's, pesticides, herbacides, and their milk would not have growth hormones added to it either.

he agreed.
i told him that ORGANIC was oldfashioned...it was not HIPPIE...it was just what America did before the 20th century.

he thought about that...
huh, i guess he didn't like the WORD and the CONOTATION...
because he approuved of the methods, and that is how you can get a conservative to go Organic...call it gramma's style!

Depression era parents

My parents came up during the Great Depression also. My father is fairly frugal but my mother is a spender and consumer. She likes to help, though. I explained to her that I wanted to collect their old newspapers every week for recycling. She gladly let me have them, probably just to please me. I let them keep their aluminum soda cans because they leave them outside for collectors who rummage through the garbage for them. Mom keeps her plastic bags and reuses them to carry things or pack garbage. I'm working with the two of them, lol.

Depression-era environmentalism

I have found that those who grew up in the Depression tend to be very frugal and no-nonsense. They won't spend $5 on a eco-friendly cleaner because they can get 2/$5 on a conventional one. But they usually use fewer paper towels, paper napkins, and such.

They also tend to consume less overall. Buying fewer clothes and home furnishings, buying fewer non-essential items on impulse, and not eating at fast-food restaurants. My grandfather was composting thirty years or more before it became "trendy." If there was anything he could repair or reuse, he would. My husband's grandmother would reuse her paper grocery bags for storage and luggage. Tacky, yes, but her household consumption was 1/4 of mine.

Many of that generation still have plenty of good ideas that wouldn't exactly fit in with our eco-consciousness, but they can be valid. Perhaps if you told her how much money she could save by using reusable containers, it would make sense to her. Or you could give her some as a gift. Things that can go into the dishwasher, of course.

To someone her age, this environmentalism can seem just like one more trend in a culture full of them.

"dirty" relatives.

My mother tends to do some things that irk me. For her, the best weapon is money. She is super frugal about SOME things having been born during the depression. If I tell her how much $$$$ she can save by giving up X product she will sometimes listen. It's difficult, though. She likes the easy route having raised six children and having always looked for short cuts.

Even though I have bought greener type plastic storage containers and cloth napkins she still insists on paper towels and glad baggies for everything. She even puts leftovers like mashed potatoes in glad sandwich bags rather than in a reusable container!!