Brown is the New Green

This weekend as I perused the 5 inch thick Sunday paper with all it's ads for the *must have* gadget of the year, I couldn't help but notice all the products with their 'green' labels. You've seen them. Eco-friendly. Recycled. Low Carbon. Earth-Friendly. Green. 100% Post-Consumer Waste. Carbon Footprint. Sustainable. We've been inundated; greenwashed, if you will. Slick marketing executives have come up with new and better ways of making us feel GREAT about spending our money.

Cheap bottle of laundry detergent=bad!

Expensive bottle of all-natural, earth-friendly, low carbon footprint detergent in a 100% post consumer waste recyclable bottle = good! With a swipe of our debit card, we're single-handedly saving the world...and lining a few pockets too.

I don't consider myself green. I consider myself brown and that's far more difficult to market. What is brown? It's making your own and making do. It's using simple, old-fashioned products, not because they're quaint, but because they're affordable and effective. It's looking past the frayed edges and seeing the quality underneath. And above all, it's refusing to buy into the new, trendy gimmicks and new, trendy causes. Each of the last several decades have meant a new cause to keep our 'do good' selves going and each of the last several decades have meant newer trendier gadgets and products to keep that money flowing into someones pockets. Think about it....the 80's were all about CFC's and the ozone layer. The 90's were saving the whales. The "Double Ots" thus far have been about carbon emissions and global warming. Any predictions for the two-thousand-tens? What will be the cause du jour of the next decade?

Folks tend to disregard brown because it's hokey, homey, hill-jack, or just plain "homemade-ugly." Brown is hard to label, market, sell, advertise, because it isn't pretty or trendy. It isn't about buying a new kind of fertilizer in a recyclable bag from a sustainable green company for your organic flowerbed...it's about spreading horse poop thick on the garden so you can grow those 6 foot tall tomatoes. And above all, brown is something you either 'get' or don't. One of those things that, if I have to explain it to you, you just wouldn't understand.