This morning someone told me I had to choose between having another child or using plastic baggies. Okay, let me back up.
I like to put leftovers into glass jars, like old jelly jars, because they’re free, reusable, and I don’t have to wonder if the plastic is leaching toxins into my food. I hate to waste plastic baggies for something that I know I’m going to eat within a day. I just don’t want to have to throw the bag away. The problem is that when he goes to organize the refrigerator and fill it with fresh groceries, my precarious stack of jelly jars has a tendency to fall out of the fridge onto his toes. Although other families might use neatly stackable Tupperware or solve the problem with a billion clever, space-saving, and earth-friendly techniques, these are the options in our home - friendly yet awkward jelly jars or evil yet convenient baggies.
These are the mundane, downright boring, environmental decisions that people make every day. Not too interesting, not a big deal.
And then. This morning we read in the paper that the best gift to the environment is to stop having children. We’ve heard that one before. Nothing worse than delivering another spoiled, carbon-devouring Western child into the world. But this is the first time I’ve thought about it since having two kids. Nowadays, my environmentalism isn’t about saving the earth, but about saving ourselves from ourselves, or maybe even saving the earth for our own sake. (I’ve said this before in Writing Green.) So much of green writing misses this point. There are other legitimate moral, logical, religious, health, economic, and miscellaneous reasons for environmental practices, but for me, this is the big one. So I’m not too swayed by any reports that my two kids are the worst thing I could have done for the environment.
So… someone was really just teasing me about choosing between a third child and the plastic baggies. But he hit on a seeming contradiction in the logic of environmentalism. While we spend our days making piddly little savings – a scrap of tin foil here, a lower wattage light bulb there – we spend our lives raising two environmental disasters… (unless we hit the nature-nurture jackpot and raise a change-the-world type). Except that I see the world – selfishly, I’ll admit – as something I want to benefit me, my friends and family. I mean, isn’t it obvious that children are the only reason environmentalism even exists?
