Great Depression and WWII Conservation Provide Guidance for Today

Sep 22, 2022 by michael

The next time you have an opportunity to tell your grandchildren stories that you heard in your childhood, mention the Great Depression and World War II as examples of conservation and sustainable living. If you are a Boomer, you are too young to have lived in the times, but your parents or grandparents lived them and you might have interesting insights to share.

We can look to memories of the Great Depression or World War II to learn how people coped with the need for sustainability and conservation of resources. Families in both of those times had to find novel ways to survive and thrive — not just in the U.S., but all over the world. When children’s clothes wore out or were outgrown, mothers had to re-make replacements using the older material, for instance. Many families had small vegetable gardens, called “kitchen patches” that provided produce to sustain the family, along with small amounts of animal protein . . . sometimes just bones, to make soup. The ingenuity their generation learned is in harmony with modern consciousness, as our natural resources become endangered for our grandchildren’s generation. You might share your grandparents’ stories to show your grandchildren that there are solutions to the global problems they hear about and are scary to young ones.