Before “green” was everywhere you looked, before “local” was a foodie bragging point, and definitely before most of us knew anything of Sightline (then Northwest Environment Watch), we were still walking the talk of living sustainably. We bet you were, too.
Check out our staff’s 1993-vintage green living practices, and share your own in the comments section.
Migee, senior director of development
I grew up in southern California (don’t throw things! I’ve been in the Northwest for over twenty years now) and when I was growing up water was a premium item—we were constantly aware of the drought conditions we were living in. My mother encouraged us all to take “Navy showers” whereby we would get in, get wet, and then turn the water off to soap up, and turn it back on to rinse off and maybe indulge for a minute. The habit stuck. While I will admit that I no longer take “Navy showers,” they do hover around the 5 minute mark, I am very aware of how much water I use and take care to conserve it.
Nicole, senior development associate
I was 11 in 1993, and so had limited control over my carbon footprint. But here’s a fun fact: In 1990’s SoCal, in addition to D.A.R.E., we had school instruction on water conservation where we were told “Don’t be a water hog.” A couple years later, angsty teenage rebellion against my less-than-conservationist parents took hold as an obsession with convincing them to compost (didn’t work… at first), vegetarianism, watching Bill Nye the Science Guy, and only buying clothes secondhand.
Alan, executive director
A lot of my 1993 practices filled the pages of Sightline’s first flagship product: This Place on Earth: Home and the Practice of Permanence. (Sasquatch, 1996. Now out of print but you can download it for free.) That was the year I came home to the Northwest. It’s also the year I stopped collecting books, deciding to rely on libraries instead. That was also the year of cloth diapers that we washed ourselves and fastened with safety pins, the old fashioned way. (By 1994, when we had two babies in diapers, we weren’t so virtuous.)
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