Kansas town wins recognition for 'Green tea' effort

If the expression about making lemonade when life hands you lemons is too shop-worn, then making Green Tea is appropriate in the case of one Kansas town

We still remember a television reporter's first words back to the station in Wichita when she arrived on the scene. "Greensburg is gone."

"Oh, my," responded the weatherman on duty, incredulous, true concern in his voice.

As it turned out, 11 people were killed there that night, and 60 injured, but 95 percent of the town was destroyed, the rest severely damaged.

Despite the early pronouncement that the town was "gone," the town was still home to 777 residents in 2010, but that was less than half the population before the tornado struck.

But Greensburg buckled down and took advantage of its name, becoming perhaps the "greenest" city in America.

The effort earned it a No. 10 spot in the recent list of the 10 "Coolest Small Towns in America," awarded by the Budget Travel team.

The magazine lauded "elegant wind turbines and LED streetlights," and quoted Ruth Ann Wedel, site manager of GreenTown, the city's rebuilding campaign, who said "being green is such a part of our identity that people assume we changed our name after the storm."

In fact, the town was named after a stagecoach driver, D.R. Green, if that gives you any indication of the timeline involved.

"These are not hippie-dippy concepts," the magazine quoted Stacy Barnes, director of the 5.4.7. Arts Center (named after the date of the storm.) "These are the same tenets used in pioneer days -- south facing windows in chicken coops to increase sunlight, reusing everything like Mennonites do. We got lazy over the past century," she said.

While it didn't face the devastation of the tiny Kansas town, we have to wonder, if the rest of the nation would have taken "going green" as seriously as Greensburg, if we wouldn't have been a long ways down the road toward energy independence and freedom from fossil fuels.