Neighbors Helping Each Other Make Green Changes

Today making green changes is easy with the help of your neighbor. Not only does this trend make stocking close to home something that is far more livable, but it is also the basis for a neighborhood watch and the ability to share resources between homes.

Having a home garden, for instance is a great example. If one neighbor has fruit trees and another has vegetables, you can trade and save yourself the bother of canning. Alternately, you could share canning supplies between several different houses, so each person doesn’t have to buy the supplies. The sharing of resources can be done with quite a few different tools and pieces of equipment that are used infrequently, such as a carpet cleaner or hedge trimmer.

This sort of “neighbors helping neighbors” approach might seem like something out of a 50’s sitcom to a lot of people who’ve grown up in the somewhat insular world of the suburbs or even highly urbanized areas. While people now have a great many distractions, as the cost of travel increases with the price of petroleum, many people are going to spending more time around the home. Now is a better time than ever to get to know the neighbors

It’s not as if its something new. This is, in fact, how people have lived near each other for most of human history and continue to live in some parts of the world that are routinely praised for their relaxed lifestyle. Just as people in North America have gotten out of the habit of growing their own gardens, it’s surprising how quickly people forget.

The good news is that it’s easy to be easy with most neighbors Helping neighbors along with some of the most common tasks that you see them performing, such as yard work or asking them if they can keep an eye on your house while you’re gone is the sort of give and take that comes easily when you spend a little time getting to know the people next door.

Being out in the front yard with a garden is an especially good way to meet people in your neighborhood. Having a neighborhood party is also a wonderful way to meet the neighbors This tends to happen very quickly if families have children of the same age, and the adults will meet each other through the children.

The community of a city or suburban block can be very tight, though those in rural areas may have neighbors who are quite a long way off. In this case, the neighbors are usually a small community that gathers at a public place such as a coffee shop, church or park. People with dogs in a nearby area often meet each other at dog parks while their animals are running off-leash.

Not only do neighbors make it nicer to stay near the home and save the monetary and environmental cost of driving around (or even taking public transport) to go out. They make the community more livable by simply being friendly. A neighborhood tavern is a long tradition in just about every part of the world, and it’s very handy to be able to know your friends and neighbors will be at the pub when you walk there from your house.

If you have a neighbor who has a truck, you can trade them for helping you move the occasional large thing that you don’t want to drive a truck around all the time to justify. You may even be able to split up cost-saving wholesale sized packages of goods, forming a sort of neighborhood buying club that saves on all the individual trips that would otherwise be made.

The environmental benefits of sharing resources with your neighbors are only part of what makes such relationships valuable. A neighborhood where people know each other is also a safer community where people keep an eye our for other’s kids and drive slowly. Yards tend to be kept a little better and people have a reason to hang out and simply interact with each other.

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