I talk to everybody about my green living passion, my desires to be more self-sufficient and my hope that mankind will rob a little less from what mother nature has to offer. I've realized that there's a lot more to the green movement than just having the desire to be less of an impact on the earth's resources.

Through a few conversations with a couple of important people I know, I started thinking about the history that we've went through to get to where we are.

I'm going to start with pieces of some good conversations that I had with an old friend of mine named Martial. I'm 36 years old and Martial is in his mid 70's, so he sees the whole world a little differently than I do.

Martial grew up in a rural setting in Eastern Canada. He recalls using bucksaws to take down trees, hauling the trees out by horse, and generally living a life that was more self sufficient as compared to today. Martial remembers how his mother canned food, preserved different meats with salts and he remembers using a cellar for actually storing food, instead of relying on corner or grocery stores to serve up what we need whenever we need it.

My friend Martial was born in 1934. This means that he was born in an historically infamous time period known as “The Dirty 30s” or “The Great Depression”.

One of the things that Martial recalled about his younger days was that even though they were living through the worst economic downturn in history, his family always had lots of food to eat. However, Martial recalls the people in the city as being starved and really suffering the effects of the economic downturn.

When I reflect on how things were when I was a kid, I can remember my mother doing a lot of the stuff that Martial's mother did. We always had a large backyard garden from which we harvested the best tasting vegetables that I ever remember tasting. My grandparents had an orchard which we would always go to during the summer and pick and eat fruits of all sort to our hearts content. When it was in season, we'd always have salmon as well.

My mother would somehow find the energy to can all different sorts of pickles. She would can fruits, vegetables, jams, applesauce and an apple-butter than was unbelievable on a nice warm piece of toast. I remember fondly the sound the pressure cooker made when my mother was canning salmon and the taste of her nice home-made mint jelly.

I don't know where she found the energy, but I do know that some of what she did wore off on me because even I can do a little bit of canning without her help.

Now let's step over to another important person, my father, who is a lot like me and is very interested in the things I'm doing to be more green.

My father says to me “son, you know, your ideas and web site are really great, but your audience is all wrong”.

Of course I was surprised, and I explained that my audience was the whole world. My audience was anybody that wanted to listen, and that my audience was anybody who had an interest in being more green.

But when he replied to me he made the suggestion that my audience was the connected generation. This generation is the one that is plugged more deeply into the system than any generation before them. He explained to me that my audience was so dependent on the system that being more green was just a dream that they'd not be able to survive in.

That last comment of my father's clicked with me, and I remembered what my friend Martial had said about the people in the cities during the Great Depression.

For a minute I began to believe. It was easy to believe. I recalled the images of people during the Great Depression, starving and looking so helpless because the system had failed. Many people had neither the resources nor the prior planning to live comfortably, like my friend Martial did, through a devastating event like this.

I'm starting to think that maybe the things about being green that are so appealing to me is the independence, the self-sufficiency and the cutting of a few cords that tie me into the system. With some reflection on the state of economic affairs of the world today, it's easy to see the benefits of being more green.