Molly Germaine At this outdoor wedding in Ames, Iowa, all members of the wedding party wore "manly footwear."

As is typically the case for young women, I went through a phase where each year brought two or three weddings to attend. More often than not, these affairs took place in rural Northeast Texas. Sometimes I was a happy guest, other times, a cheerful bridesmaid.

Where I grew up, when a gal accepted an invitation to be a member of the bridal party, her mother usually made the dress from a pattern and material selected by the bride-to-be. This is how I came to wear a Pepto-Bismol pink lace-and-satin dress that would have made Shelby Eatenton Latcherie neon green with envy. Typically there were a few “other duties as assigned” for the bridesmaids and their families, just as there’d been for my mother when she was a young woman living on a South Texas farm.

We country girls were expected—and more than willing—to help out with a variety of tasks, many of them the kinds of things I understood city brides typically hired a pro to undertake. For one wedding, I learned how to fashion pink, burgundy and grey icing roses (yes, grey--the groom’s favorite color!) using instructions in a Wilton’s cake decorating book. A couple of years later, my artistically gifted mother helped another family create an elaborate floral display for their home’s large, curving stairwell; the bride had raised and dried her own autumnal flowers just outside the house for the project.

Times of Malta The Danish port of Frederikshavn, pop. 25,000, is dedicated to becoming the first city ever powered entirely by renewable energy.

Green energy is not only powering Denmark’s homes and appliances, it is powering Denmark’s rural economy.

On Samsø Island, a farming and tourist destination in the Kategat, wind turbines can churn out 13 times the electricity the 4,100 residents need, and farmers are selling their wheat straw to be burned in district heating plants.

On the Jutland Peninsula, manure produced by cattle and pig farms is turned into biogas and mixed into the natural gas in pipelines. And Vestas Wind Systems, the world’s largest wind turbine maker, was founded and maintains factories on Jutland.

Far from taking jobs, green energy is creating jobs in Denmark and, more and more, around the world. Vestas, for example, employs 20,000 people worldwide, many in small towns like Ringkøbing, Denmark, population about 9,300, and headquarters of Vestas Nacelles. (Nacelles are the streamlined housings that hold the inner workings of wind turbines).

“We have created thousands and thousands and thousands of jobs in this sector,” said Connie Hedegaard, Minister for Climate and Energy. Even amid the economic crises of 2008,  the Danish export of energy efficient technologies grew by 19 percent last year. “It has tripled over the recent 10 years,” said Hedegaard, “and if you go and see where we have some of those strongholds … they will often be located in rural areas very far from here in Jutland.”