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Red for Green

June 2008

Iwas on the road heading back from Ft. Lauderdale. I'd gone there to buy two small fuel efficient pick ups to replace two old larger vehicles in my fleet of lawn maintenance trucks. I just can't bring myself to buy new trucks anymore. I am compelled to recycle, reuse, recharge and renew. I got these at auction for about half the price I'd have paid in the Metroplex, so it made the trip worthwhile. And I was enjoying all the varieties of plant life along the way.

Just about dawn the radio announcer declared "It's Earth Day! We have a ton of info coming your way on how you can help green up America" I thought, it's finally happening. The whole world is turning green. It brought a smile to my face.

At the time of the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, the goal of the instigators - almost cult-like environmental activists, was to impress upon us that we all have a personal responsibility for the welfare of our planet. It was a grassroots effort to stem the unbridled contamination of our water, soil and air.

Now Earth Day has become a main stream media / merchandising event. The people who had the foresight to figure out how to recycle and reuse waste products in order to recharge their soil with carbon sequestering microbes and clean up the water and air, are being left behind. Now its GREEN GREEN GREEN! What makes me see red is that far too many green claims are far from true green. The only green on their minds is the greenback dollar.

We are being bombarded with ads from the corporate giants who were responsible for ruining our food supply and soil in the first place. They are pumping tons of money into advertising to convince us that they have the answers - from chemicals/organic bridge products to new fertilizers that conserve water to new microbial enhanced fertilizers. What they don't tell us is that earlier scientific 'advancements' concocted by their scientific experts are responsible for the dead zones in the oceans, polluted rivers, deformed or dead frogs, numerous human cancers and birth defects and the increasing incidence of sterility.

They also don't tell us the raw ingredients in many of their products are waste materials from third world countries - from unregulated farms and unregulated industrial facilities. Do the recent widespread recalls of Chinese imports come to mind? Do you think there might be some lead in some of the bagged products produced at the lowest possible cost? Some people are leery of some of my custom blends that include domestic sewer sludge - one of the safest, most highly tested and regulated agricultural material in this country. Yet they'll buy major brand products that have been concocted from unregulated waste materials that have been shipped halfway around the world. Go figure.

You can't tell if these third world waste products contain heavy metals, but you can be certain that they contain no beneficial microbes - and that they contain other toxins. Every ocean bound shipping container must be fumigated before it is loaded on the ship. Even if it was organic, it's been poisoned.

How can you do your part to keep the original intent of Earth Day alive, to go TRUE GREEN? Do business with you're local independent garden centers. They offer their own carefully concocted private label products and/or offer the products of local suppliers that have been carefully developed to meet our needs. These products have been tested extensively over many years under our local conditions - soil, sunlight, rainfall, potential pest and more.

If you stray from these reliable local products to the newly introduced so called Green offerings of the national labels and big box retailers you may think you're getting a good deal. But, it's a short sighted savings. In the long run there will be a serious price to pay.

If we fail to support local suppliers, someday there will be no reliable, safe effective truly green products. All the so-called green products will be shipped in from thousands of miles away at a high cost. And these nationally advertised now higher cost be-all-to-end-all-one-size-fits-all products will be a poor fit for all of us.

And, instead of getting thoughtful answers to your landscaping questions from Mr. Jones at the local Green Thumb Garden Center who has been doing business in your area for generations, you'll be dialing a toll-free number. Your call will be answered by 'Mr. Smith," for whom English is a second language. From some third world country he'll give a shot at answering your questions about roses, pecan trees or other Texas native and adapted plants from a cheat sheet in his computer data base.

Yes, by the time I got home to Mesquite I was seeing red over the so-called green being touted on Earth Day. On the good side, I will redirect that negative energy into a renewed dedication to help promote TRUE GREEN.