There’s more than one way to be green, and the San Francisco Chronicle has featured Mark English touting old-fashioned thrift over more showy forms of environmental non-consumption – even the very same stuff we were talking about only last week.

So yes, reuse where you can, and make your home more efficient first, before you put in those solar arrays that will make your neighbors “green” with envy. Then when your neighbor is showing off his new solar roof tiles, you can counter by saying that your home uses so little energy already that you decided to put your money towards a “living carpet” instead.