Recently, my wife and I went to a living history museum where we saw how the people of the world have lived in the past. We saw the old way of doing things and it has helped inspire us in our own green journey for Our Green Year. What we have learned from this experience, is that to go green, we have to go retro. We have to learn from the past in order to discover how we can plan an environmentally-sustainable future.

Our world is full of energy. We use energy in everything we do and very little of that energy comes from our own  . These days, if your rug is dirty you use the electrical energy in your house to clean it, rather than taking it outside and beating it with a stick. If you want to cook something you use an electric stove or microwave, rather than starting a fire and cooking over a fire.

We are so ingrained with energy that something as simple as a power outage will upset our entire lives and have us scrambling to cope. We can't even feed ourselves without being able to drive or walk to the supermarket, where you don't even have to open the doors for yourself.

Why use the washer when you can just use your own hands and a washtub? You take no energy from the environment and you help get some exercise as well. Why do you have to have an air conditioner when some simple physics understanding will help you create a cold air chimney in your house that cools down everything? These are methods that have been used for centuries, methods we have forgotten about.

This is why people need to start looking  for ways that will allow them to begin being greener by going retro. There are so many ways that this can be done and all it takes is a familiarity with history. Long before we ever harnessed electricity, our civilization was going strong doing things by hand. The lawn needs to be mowed? Go out and push a manual lawnmower then! Thinking of driving to the corner store? Why not just walk?

Going green not only makes our world healthy, but it makes us healthy as well. Looking at cancer rates, they have been on a steady increase through the decades. What else has increased over the decades? Our use of chemicals. They are in everything we own from air fresheners to the pop we drink. We cover ourselves in chemicals, we breathe chemicals, we even thank chemicals for giving us the current high-tech civilization we enjoy. All this happens while we decry cancer and hope for a cure. Why not stop the cause?

Go green by going retro because Retro = Green.