It always makes sense to try to make things better, and even if it doesn't, we can't help ourselves from trying.

You know, from candlelight to electricity, from 6-team horsepower to turbo-charged horsepower, and from 2,000-hour light bulbs to 50,000-hour light bulbs, change can be a good thing.

Now, I am sure that some of you who just read that shook your heads at one or more of the above examples because of nostalgia for the good ole days or concerns over how much is too much. Since this is the landscape industry, some of you were probably thinking about the impacts on climate change or the impact on habitats"?usome positively, due to the help of the improvements, and some negatively, due to the cost of the improvements. But change is funny that way. Many resist it too much, and many embrace it too often. Many complain about change as they enjoy its benefits. Sometimes change is brought about through sound reasoning; sometimes it just comes about because it's time . . . Like springtime.

Yep, spring is in the air and change is in the air, too. Last month we published a news item about the Ohio Senate passing a bill to drop LEED v4. Now whether or not the Ohio House also passes the bill and it gets enacted, and whether or not other states follow, the changes brought forth by LEED are, by-and-large, positive. Green roofs, as just one example, may not cool the global environment, but they can help cool the building and they do add oxygen and environmental filtration, while adding a business-oriented benefit for the owners to sell to their tenants. As long as these elements hold true, especially the last one, this one small part of the LEED movement will continue to flourish on its own; so will things like UV-proof windows, pervious and permeable pavers, and LEDs.

It's really not an issue of global warming or climate change or whatever the term of the day is . . . It just makes sense and thus the change is made.

Some say fracking is a horrible way to extract oil. Some also say we shouldn't use oil at all. But change may take us to both. Because of concerns for the environment, we may or may not pass more bills to shape the industry, but getting more domestic oil today is a need as much as it is a pariah. At the same time, given that it will continue for many years, making its extraction cleaner and more efficient can only be good as well.

Moving forward, making Fiats that get 122 miles per gallon is also a good thing. And making powerful electric engines is certainly looking like a good thing. That, of course, will depend on improvements to the batteries and improvements to the power grid (hopefully NOT like the wind farm that destroyed the drive from L.A. to Palms Springs, but more like the wind farm outside of California City on the way from L.A. to Tahoe). But whatever is better always wins. And whatever wins will always be competed with. And competition always makes things better.

So as you read this issue, it's not the LEED points that make us want to convert from incandescent to LED, nor is it a government ban on incandescent light bulbs. It's just hard to argue with 20,000+ hours using 1/100th of the electricity. And guess what . . . These are not the only changes to come . . . And guess what else . . . They'll keep getting better . . .

- God Bless

George Schmok, Publisher

P.S.- I heard from some of you about my father's shooting of an eagle (with an iron-sight, single-shot, bolt-action .22, flying away, I might add). There are only four times one should shoot a gun: to practice, to eat, to protect yourself and to protect that which you care about. In this case, the eagle was making a habit of stealing food from a camp that needed that food to survive the winter, 900 miles north of the Canadian border in 1936. Sometimes the eagles lose.

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