The Greens Go Amish

One of our great pleasures in life is a long, hot shower in the morning. But our green guilt starts to kick in once we wake up enough to realize that we’ve wasted untold amounts of gas to heat the gallons of water that have bounced off our back during our 20-minute shower. Imagining a polar bear struggling to find an ice floe in the arctic, we grudgingly turn the water off and start our day.

But some locals can loiter in the shower without guilt because they’ve taken the old-fashioned barn-raising and turned it into a solar-panel raising.

We’ve got to give the Globe credit for echoing back to last week’s feature about beekeeping in today’s feel-good green story. Emphasis added, naturally.

Shortly before 9 a.m., like a hive of bees, workers descended on the house and set about a variety of tasks, such as cutting pipes and assembling the solar collector. Others milled about, sipping coffee and sharing their concerns about the fossil fuel burned shipping goods from China to the United States.

One of these days, we’re going to make a Venn diagram of all the tree-hugging nature lifestyle stories that appear on A1 of the Globe to get a visual representation of how many of the people interviewed for these pieces participate in more than one activity. We’d wager that several of the people who appeared in last week’s beekeeping story were probably helping to hook up the solar-heated water system.

And, hey, if you want to get out of bed at the crack of dawn on a Saturday to build a water heater for your neighbor, all the more power to you. But you do know you can buy green energy without all the hassle of installing new equipment, right?