Wither Are We Bound?

Remember those old printer’s trays that young girls, mostly, now a little older, used to put on their bedroom walls filled with the most hideous useless junk. I think the trays then moved to more sumptuous parts of the home and became centre pieces for more ornate and tasteful knick-knacks as the girls grew up. If you have printers trays in the house you now know what to buy for Christmas this year and if you are the recipient of some irksome little trinkets this Christmas, you know where you can put them now.

Well, as a pre-Christmas chore  I found myself chipping and scouring away the layers of paint, especially from the corners, from my daughter’s printers trays that she inherited from my wife, that she had as a teenager back in the, never-mind. Clearly instead of their beautiful virgin wood, paint was applied with whimsy and little skill to the trays as often as a new fashionable colour got their attention. Alas the burden of restoration is a heavy one. If you find yourself being asked if you think the current colour of the printer’s trays is suitable, whatever you do gush madly at its beauty in order to avoid hard labour.

This got me thinking about when I was a library prefect at King Edward VII School. I had an unorthodox and engaging library master called Mr Sandom. He encouraged us to read all manner of works from the classics to the then, recently in vogue, fantasy literature.

Just before the Christmas holidays Mr Sandom took us library geeks, as we would be called today I suspect, to the then arty-farty suburb of Melville where we visited a house with a ye-olde genuine printing press, cabinets with draws similar to the printer’s trays that people used to put up on their walls in the 80’s. They were full of letters, numbers, punctuation, and many other characters, as well as space blocks.

We all got into the spirit of the occasion and learned from the Mr Sandom how to create a page that we would print and place into our hardcover books that we had manufactured out of old maps as Christmas gifts the previous week. I distinctly remember that I had Iceland on the back and Nyasaland on the front. We didn’t just learn the rudimentaries of what it took to create a page of text the manual way we came away with a sense of achievement that a print out from our state-of-the art dot-matrix couldn’t do for us.

Which causes one to reflect, wither are we bound? Elsewhere in this magazine you will have read that inkjet technology exists that can produce droplets smaller than bacteria. Talk about sending the ‘flu a message. Then some Japanese guy had the bright idea while putting on his deodorant one morning: “if inkjet printing is just firing liquid at a surface why not spay stuff with perfume and other smells.” So maybe you’ll receive Christmas card smelling of roast turkey. And to think we got all excited in the 80’s about scratch-n-smell.

Whether it was yesterday, today or tomorrow, in the printing world higher and higher resolution seems to be that holy grail or fleeting horizon, reaching ever further, to working harder to produce clearer and better images and text, faster and faster, with less and less, in narrower and smaller spaces, cheaper and cheaper, with fewer and fewer people, using the fewer calories and lower wages, during reduced hours and…okay I’ll stops now.  

So I asked my 85 year old dad...

So I asked my 85 year old dad: “what do you think of when I say ‘Green’ dad”. There was a brief crackle on the phone and then came: “mould.” The generation gap on matters Green is clear.

I have to admit that as a 43 year I too didn’t think of the practice of making modern day sacrifices in order to conserve the rapidly depleting fossil fuels, when the word Green came up. Rather I would think of someone new on the job, who parks in the bosses bay on the first day, a ‘Green-horn’ if you will, it’s best not to mix those two words up.

Or perhaps “Green Fingers”. I used to have “Green Fingers” when I was more involved in our garden or is that having a Green Thumb? It means the difference between getting anything to grow and creating a micro-desert.

 But the search for a Green definition remains elusive: The movement to green has been nearly a thirty year process beginning in the 1970’s with the solar-energy craze.  Early in the 1990’s for example, the green building movement began to take hold.  Expanding our thinking and consideration for the larger picture of the total environmental impact, thus driving demands for materials, commercial and home designs offering reduced long term costs, healthier living, greater efficiency and sustainability.

But for me Green is for gunge: Gangrene from war stories, brave soldier who fought in the trenches and got the Dreaded Lurgy. Then there’s the sludge down on Zoo Lake before the big clean-up of whenever-it-was.  Then there’s beautiful, wonderful mucous. Oh yes, oh quivering parent – there were those nappies that….never mind. Green gunge is every little boys early fascination until puberty hits then green becomes just another colour.

One mini Green definition I heard somewhere, went something like is this: “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.” A little whimsical with a touch of daisy and shoo-wah, but pleasantly unimposing.  I rather like it.

Depending on where you are applying the term Green, ‘sustainable design’ may be a good substitute. True sustainability embraces a commitment to see the world as interconnected, to understand the impact our actions have on others and our environment, and to nurture the offspring of all species that will inherit the planet. To become truly sustainable, it is vital to equally address social sustainability, economic sustainability, and environmental sustainability like three legs holding up a stool. Okay, a little preachy.

The truth is, the Green movement is now orthodoxy, mainstream, convention if you like. It’s no longer the fringe realm of hippies and New Ages or people with pony-tails in general. For example, Green construction is huge in South Africa now and Green Stars are a coveted reward.  It reminds me of my children when they were of the age when a gold star on the forehead for good behaviour was the most coveted award in preschool. Now we have pinstriped executives scurrying around fulfilling the requirements of the Green Buildings Council so as to acquire more Green Stars for their buildings.

As if Green building isn’t enough we have green nappies, green fuels and green political parties. But a new interesting one I discovered is “green-hypocrisy”. Green campaigners argue that cheap short-haul flights have fuelled a massive hike in carbon emissions over the past few years. Celebrities in particular are criticised for struggling to reconcile their well-meaning efforts to develop green credentials and the demands of the modern world.  Sienna Miller and Chris Martin preach the importance of being 'green'. They recycle obsessively, insist on green nappies and compost every scrap of organic vegetable peeling and they're not slow to tell you about it. Yet they jet set the world over producing a carbon foot-print bigger than the rest of us.

 It’s tough at the top. Looks like you can’t get away with anything these days. Did I say Carbon Footprint, let me tell you what my 85 year old dad said when I asked him what he thought of when I said Carbon Footprint….