As a pre-Boomer, this video makes me realize how truly Green we were back then.

That was a great second video (and this is a great topic) but I very much resent anyone’s lament that they’re “inheriting” a crappier planet, courtesy of previous generations. Don’t the majority of us just work & live the best we can, using the conveniences and societal mores available to us at that time? I was born in 1961 (what am I, a Baby Boomer? Gen X?) and while I admit I’ve never used an inkwell to fill my pen or dip a girl’s pigtails into, we were conscious of pollution & ecology. I grew up watching that commercial where a car zips down the highway, tossing their fast food trash out the window where it lands at the feet of a saddened Indian—I mean Native American. We knew not to pollute, but no one told us back then what all our spray cans were doing to the ozone layer.

I’m sure we would’ve been using pump-sprays & roll ons 20 years earlier if we’d known.

I remember being 11-12, my older brother & I canvassing the neighborhood for empty pop bottles (to return for 2 cents deposit & dammit why aren't we still doing that??) so we could see the new Charlton Heston movie, “Soylent Green” about Earth’s future, where everyone lives in a green haze & eats crackers made out of people because that’s pretty much all there was left to eat. No one laughed or waved it off, saying “Let the next generation worry about it”. Industry should’ve been more responsible and a lot sooner. They should've been held more accountable by our gov't.

But as I sit here typing this, Donald Trump is on my tv with his lame, mediocre ramblings about his “perfect call”. What an ignorant, delusional waste of space. I can’t help but think we’re in the mess we’re in in regards to climate change, precisely because oafs like him are allowed to be voted into public office.

Boomers screwed it up. Big time; however, show me a generation that hasn't.

Just saying......

Karin

While appreciating your point, Ronni, I feel boomers deserve some of that derision. As usual there is enough irresponsibility to go around. In our lust for simplicity and ease we have neither recognized nor stressed enough the wisdom of making a little extra effort to treat our planet with respect. And now, we have too many boomers who support Trump with their zealous doctrine of not our job to care about anyone else.

Name-calling is a symptom of frustration and disappointment, I think. I am trying to curb doing it personally, but sometimes the names still slip out. And sometimes the idea of PC just kills my determination, ha! We all could do better.

As you say,"we all need one another as never before in the history of Planet Earth."

I'm a war baby, not a boomer. That's a distinction missed or dismissed by most people. As a kid I returned pop bottles for deposits, sold bundles of coat hangers back to the cleaners, and took bundles of old newspapers to a collection point for recycling. We were not ignorant of threats to the earth. Remember Rachel Carson (born 1940) and Silent Spring published in 1962? Instead of focusing on differences in generations, we all need to work together or we'll all go down together.

I agree with what everyone is saying that we are all in this together and shouldn't be fighting with the younger generation. That said, though, I have been absolutely livid this week as I've heard the OK Boomer thing hurled about in the media. One young woman asked to explain it said that it is intended as an insult to elders because they didn't do anything about climate change when the had the chance, and her generation doesn't feel that there is anything that they, as individuals, can do. Isn't that the problem?? Like others here, I used glass bottles for milk/soda as long as they were available, moving into plastic only when it was the only option. We didn't think there was much we could do individually, either, and we did what we could. One young woman who has a radio show on NPR was very hostile toward boomers, and I wanted to tell her that without our generation, who bravely forced our way into the hostile male-dominated world of radio and TV, she would not have been hired. Sorry about the rant.

What Ken said!❤️

I have had it up to here with the anti-boomer snark. Why does nobody remember that we
boomers (yes, I am one--born 1947--) were deeply involved in the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the women's movement, the gay rights movement? The first Earth Day happened in 1970, when boomers were just coming of age, and they jumped into the environmental movement in droves.

Every generation has its good and bad actors, and to claim that a whole generation is better than another is ridiculous. The so-called "greatest generation" was the greatest for white men, but not so much for everybody else.

Wow. This loaded list of ways we once conserved and prevented environmental waste is both true and amazing when everything is combined in a viral rant. I am familiar with everything on the list and it all worked quite well until certain items (e.g. glass milk bottles) were no longer available. However, Doug M throws in some truth when he maintains that if the various easy-on and single-use products had been available, many people might have used them without any compunctions, human nature being what it is. When I mentioned the cloth diaper thing to my granddaughter, a new mother, she was shocked that we actually had to touch baby shit. I don’t know whether, given an alternative, I might have felt the same way she does.

The fact is, though, we didn’t have alternatives and we managed to exist quite well with what we had. Salinda has a point about the old woman’s plastic grocery bags—something this very old woman has never used—but she didn’t invent them and perhaps she uses them only because it’s difficult to carry heavily loaded paper or reusable bags.