Guest blog #29: Minimalist parenting by Crystal Thrall, part 1

Crystal Thrall, queen of the Diva Cup, is back, and this time, she writes about her new baby girl, and her efforts to minimize the ecological impacts of infancy. 

My parenting journey began unconventionally by planning a home birth, but I followed the mainstream idea of what babies need: diapers, a crib, a stroller, a car seat, and so forth.  As someone who lives a relatively minimalist life, I was troubled by the thought of adding all of this child-related baggage to my clutter-free home.  Over time, I realized that most baby gear is wasteful, unnecessary clutter, especially in the first year.  I know, you probably think I am nuts.  "How can you live without a stroller?"  "There is no way I am going to carry my baby everywhere!"  "And diapers?  Come on, babies certainly need those!"  "What about entertainment?  My baby will get bored!"  I admit that these ideas did not come naturally to me; however, I learned from other parents with similar interests.  All parenting philosophies aside, if your main goal is to minimize your environmental impact, the following topics might interest you: elimination communication; breastfeeding and baby-lead weaning; co-sleeping; and babywearing.  Today, I write about the first two.

Elimination Communication

The guiding principle behind elimination communication (EC) (also known as natural infant hygiene, infant potty training, or gentle potty training) is that people are born with the instinct to not soil themselves.  Babies communicate the need to eliminate just as they communicate other basic needs, and as parents it is our job to understand when that need should be met.  By exclusively diapering a child, the child learns that caregivers will not meet this particular need and that the appropriate place to eliminate is in his pants.  Imagine how confusing it must be after two or three years of eliminating in your pants to learn that you are actually supposed to use a toilet!  I won't go into the details about how to establish this sort of relationship with your baby, there are plenty of references out there that do a much better job than I ever could.  But I will share my personal experience.  

While I was pregnant, I thought I was doing my environmental due diligence by committing to cloth diapers.  Knowing that I would save landfills from a large volume of solid waste while protecting my baby's bottom from diaper rash made the additional laundry burden worth it.  For five months, we happily cloth-diapered our child until a friend and fellow new parent introduced us to the concept of elimination communication.  From the day her son was born, she started putting him on the potty.  I admit that I was skeptical at first, but after reading Diaper Free Baby, I knew that I had to at least try introducing my infant to the potty.  It wasn't long before my daughter refused to poop in her pants, and what an exciting accomplishment that was for us.  At this point, I was completely sold.  Now our daughter is 16 months old, and while she still has accidents, she doesn't wear diapers during the day and spends most of her time dry.  She directly communicates her elimination needs with either a hand signal or words.  Our experience has completely changed my perspective and opinion on diapers, and we are fully committed to respond to any future child's elimination needs in this way from birth.  

Some people would say that "elimination communication" sounds wonderful, but isn't practical for a child with two working parents.  The beauty of EC is that it can be accomplished part time and with zero stress.  Anything that ends up in a potty results in fewer diaper changes, and therefore less waste, so why not try it?!

Breastfeeding and Baby-led Weaning

Breastfeeding is a sensitive and controversial topic for many women.  Personally, I never questioned whether or not I wanted to breastfeed.  And while my breastfeeding relationship was easily established with my baby, I have met numerous women who have struggled for weeks, even months to exclusively breastfeed their babies.  I have also known women who, despite their best efforts, were unable to maintain breastfeeding for physical or psychological reasons beyond their control.  Breastfeeding is certainly not something women can take for granted, but even if it takes blood, sweat, tears, and a lot of time, the benefits to both mom and baby are well worth it.   

Well that's great, but my main point is to minimize "stuff consumption."  Obviously, if a baby receives his meals exclusively from mom, infant formula and the waste associated with it is completely unnecessary.  If mom stays at home, the need to bottle-feed is also unnecessary.  However, many moms work in which case bottles and breast pump supplies are probably necessary.  In the end breastfeeding can still lead to waste, but less so than formula-feeding.  

Breastfeeding is probably the obvious environmentally-friendly choice to many people, but what about the weaning process?  When I was pregnant, I had every intention making my own pureed baby food.  It could be organic, I could make my own concoctions suited to my baby's tastes, I would save money, AND I would contribute less waste by not buying packaged baby food!  This sounded like a great plan until I learned about baby-led weaning (BLW) which makes it even easier to avoid packaged baby food.  It's quite simple: let your child feed himself.  This means that the child eats finger foods rather than purees.  For us this means our child generally eats what we prepare for ourselves.  Honestly, BLW probably lengthens the path to weaning, so you have to be willing to commit to an extended breastfeeding relationship with your child.  As a mom who has been breastfeeding for 16 months, I know that it isn't always easy.  However, I didn't go into parenting thinking it would be easy, and I know she won't be breastfeeding forever.  

Come back tomorrow to read part 2 of Crystal's guest blog!

Crystal, a nuclear engineer, and her organic baby.

Brian, Crystal's husband, also a nuclear engineer, with his organic baby.

"Sustainability is illegal."

I find law fascinating, and I would love to write about it more.  But for this blog post, I would rather you spend your time listening to Thomas Linzey, Esq., co-founder and executive director of the Community Environmental Defense Legal Fund, which intends and works on "Building sustainable communities by assisting people to assert their right to local self-government and the rights of nature."  In the audio clip below taken from the fantastic radio show Making Contact, Linzey talks about ways to morph the current regulatory and property rights framework of environmental law to one that affords nature rights and better protects the rights of citizens in the face of ever-growing corporatization and pollution.  As it stands however, according to Linzey, "Sustainability is illegal.  The hammer comes down on you when you attempt to actually to prohibit something in the interest of building sustainability in [a] community."

Guest blog #28: Scott Wagnon's thoughts on population

(My last post generated a lot of activity on Facebook.  I also received an email from my labmate Scott Wagnon, whose detailed response to the post is below as a guest blog post.)

 

I feel as if Darshan downplayed the role population plays on environmental issues.  Where I wholeheartedly disagree with the unnamed professor (and I know Darshan does, too) is that race is a factor in the interconnection between the environment and population.  Environmental impact is something that is caused and felt by all age, race, gender and socioeconomic demographics.  I know and recognize that certain slices of the demographic pie contribute and/or are impacted more significantly than other slices, as Darshan mentioned in his post.  

 

From any perspective, it is just and right to advocate on behalf of people whose rights have been impacted, whose voice cannot reach a broad audience, or whose voice may not have the same impact as ourselves as wealthy, "educated" people.  But the simple fact remains that we--all of humanity--cannot have tens of billions of people consuming a few resources, as much as we--all of humanity-- cannot have a few people consuming tens of billions of resources.  Population control via family planning through various birth control options, abstinence, and education (see Darshan's post on the "entitlement" of having children, and the short discussion generated); increases in efficiency; and reduced consumption of resources are three equally important ways to reduce the impact of the choices we make.    

 

Those of us, such as Darshan and myself and likely you, who have been empowered with the means to make and enact such choices, should especially look at every aspect.  As Darshan pointed out in his post, wealthy, "educated" people--us--often consume the most.  (On a side note, I use "educated" because I wonder how smart we really are based on certain decisions that we make as a society... having to look no further than our collective treatment of the environment.)  If we--the large consumers, including myself :/--choose not to have large families, use less resources, and use resources more efficiently, we're fostering a culture where the environment is valued not as a commodity, but as something for all of humanity to enjoy.  We live in a finite world, so barring our expansion beyond this beautiful planet, all of humanity must always remain mindful that Earth can only sustain a finite population at even the smallest necessary levels of resource consumption.  We are all effectively one family altering our common home, for better or worse, through the choices we make.  I hope we all continue to make better choices.

 

~Scott Wagnon

Thoughts on the population issue

I just returned from a trip to the US National Combustion meeting in Utah, which was perhaps my last hurrah in combustion for the foreseeable future.  Here is the beginning of a conversation I had with a professor who shall not be named at the Sunday evening reception:

My advisor: This is my student, Darshan.  He just graduated a little while ago.

Unnamed professor: What are you doing now?

Darshan: Traveling, and then headed to the US Environmental Protection Agency in August.

Unnamed Professor: What are you going to do there?

Darshan: I will be working on issues of environmental justice and sustainability both within and outside of the EPA.

Unnamed Professor: To be blunt, the issue about environmental justice is just about a bunch of black people having too many children and choosing to live in polluted places. 

Perhaps one of the most insightful thoughts I have heard about the population issue in a long time comes from a 2008 conversation that Jeff Goodell had with James Gustave Speth, published in Orion Magazine and Change Everything Now.

Goodell: ...And you can say--as you do--that we consume too much, and that our economic system has become a slave to the idea of an ever-expanding GDP.  But you could also just say, "Look, there are too many people on the planet--"

Speth:  Well, I think a lot of people believe that.  I actually have a law, Speth's Law, and it is that the richer you are, the more you think that population is the world's problem.  But the scale of the impact is really derived from the phenomenal amount of economic growth in rich countries, not from the phenomenal population growth. 

Several facts bolster Speth's claim.  In case of climate change, for example, the majority (~60%) of historical emissions of greenhouse gases has occurred in just the handful of industrialized countries in the US, Russia, Germany, UK, Japan, France, and Canada.  Sticking with climate change (an issue laden with environmental justice issues), much of the greenhouse gas emissions in industrializing nations such as China are caused due to emission from the production of objects for industrialized countries.  Even though the populations of China and India are increasing, the slowly increasing population of the US and the decreasing populations of Western Europe still have much greater ecological impacts.  (I suggest taking a look at this [and this!] incredibly cool interactive graphical tool to visualize how the poorest are most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, and how blaming population increases in industrializing countries is misleading.)

Enough about climate change broadly.  Let's get into the specifics of population.  I will not deny that the world and many nations face massive challenges of population.  But blaming population growth occurring today for past ecological degradation that has caused injustice today is to deny culpability, to shrug off any responsibility for our actions.  There is no way to buy most electronics or textiles or food that has been manufactured or produced without degrading impacts.  Our electricity comes from coal and fossil fuels, which require mountaintop removal and tailing ponds and people to cut down forests.  By buying what we do, by using energy and electricity the way we do, we link ourselves to socioecological injustices of pollution and degradation elsewhere.  Environmental injustice is about people being socioeconomically or politically forced into living in degraded places, most times to serve the wants of the rich and powerful.  It is built into and a necessity of our economic and policy structures.  The population growth occurring all over the world only serves to expose these injustices. 
 
As you expect (and while I am sure he had to work hard to be where he is), the unnamed professor is not a poor person.  He is a rich and now privileged person living in an industrialized country.  I am, too.  All in all, the per capita emissions of greenhouse gases in industrialized countries, the demands of heavy metals and plastics and chemicals, are still several times higher than those in industrializing countries.  Therefore, individual action to reduce ecological impacts on the part of people living in industrialized countries is the equivalent of several people in industrializing countries doing so.  Population is part of the issue, but individuals are, too.

The jagged edges of the Keeling Curve

This time it made the headlines.  Something as vague and intangible as an invisible, odorless gas is encapsulated in a concrete number.  400 parts per million, a level of carbon dioxide not seen for the past three to five million years.

The number is in fact not intangible.  It is very real, real because sea levels are rising millimeter by millimeter, submerging island nations such as the Maldives and heavily populated coastlines.  The number is real because the summer of 2012 was the hottest summer on record in the United States.  The number is real because of the acidification of oceans and coral bleaching; because of drier forests fueling larger fires; because of the ever-shrinking amount of polar ice; because entire villages in Alaska are needing to be moved because of thawing land, to the tune of $380,000 per person.  

In spite of all of this very real evidence of the effects of climate change, nothing new is being said that can wash away the line that have been drawn in the sand that divides the "believers" from the "skeptics".  (If you don't "believe" in climate science, perhaps you might question your beliefs in most any science that you rely on in your daily life.)  Perhaps it is time for a new story about climate change, a new story that connects old facts.  Perhaps our sole focus on the emission of greenhouse gases as a technological deficiency is distracting us from the real issues; framing climate change as a “carbon” problem is “possibly the greatest and most dangerous reductionism of all time: a 150 year history of complex geologic, political, economic, and military security issues all reduced to one element.” [1]

As a postdoctoral researcher, I wonder if Charles Keeling thought about the symbolism of his scientific endeavors in the thin air of Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawai'i.  The jagged edges of the Keeling Curve are symbolic of the sharp divides and fractures in our politics, and under our feet in the fracked Marcellus Shale.  The jagged edges show how cruelly we continue to cut and lacerate this earth, just as is being done in the forests of Canada to access tar sands.  The curve is symbolic because not only does it show that carbon dioxide levels are rising, but that also our hubris is, too--the hubris of thinking that we may be able to engineer ourselves out of this problem.

From The Scripps Institution of Oceanography

 

[1] Thomas Princen, “Leave It in the Ground: The Politics and Ethics of Fossil Fuels and Global Disruption” prepared for the International Studies Association International Conference, Montréal, March 16-19, 2011; to appear in State of the World 2013.  

Let it go

Barry Schwartz, in his book Paradox of Choice, talks about the confluence of freedom and choice.  He says (and you can see this in his TED talk, which I have added below) that one of the central ideologies of Western industrial society is that freedom is inherently good (well, it depends on what kind, right?), and that today this freedom is manifest in expanding choice for individuals.  Our supermarkets host hundreds of kinds of cookies and salad dressings (even though crop diversity has been on the decline), and electronics stores have every single combination of processor speed and physical memory and screen type you can hope for.  Yet, as Schwartz claims, increased choice doesn't lead to satisfaction or happiness.  Rather, we are crippled with regret or anticipated regret that we could have made another or better choice because we expect too much from our choices, and in the end we blame ourselves for our lack of satisfaction.

To be more specific, though, Schwartz's talk is broadly about how material choice relates to our happiness or satisfaction, and to extend Schwartz's thoughts, regret and anticipated regret and self-blame can make us continually buy things with the expectation and hope that we will feel better about ourselves.  This ties us into the bind of continually buying material products that are decidedly not socioecologically benign;  the new phones we buy are still made of heavy metals and rubber and plastic by people who are treated poorly.  

This is not to say that we should live non-material lives; cutting ourselves completely from this culture will do very little to change it.  We live in a material world and I hope that all of us want to do something about its socioecological destructiveness.  Finding that balance, that is, being able to participate in this culture while advocating for and acting toward change requires participation and engagement, not isolation.

Making a choice and being satisfied and/or happy with it requires letting go of the perceived benefits or costs of your choice.  Letting go is about making choices and not being affected by comparisons of what we have to what others do, and not being affected by imagining our lives had we made another choice.  Rather, we must stand by the choices we make to free our minds towards the positive, the constructive, rather than remorse, regret, and self-blame.  Letting it go opens up space to recentre and redouble our efforts on what must be done about social injustice and ecological degradation rather than tethering ourselves to choices that cause injustice and degradation.  A phone is a phone, and if my phone can't look up Wikipedia, big deal.

The Overview Effect

Our capacity to switch back and forth between scales of time and place--to understand the global, to acutely observe the local; to learn from the past and act compassionately for the future--is what seems to be in short supply with coming to terms with burgeoning and intricate problems such as climate change and sustainability.  We constantly narrow our focus when the problems at hand are large, and we blame structures when it comes to changing what goes on in our households.  And so, on this Earth Day, I wanted to share a video with you (which I found posted on my friend's Facebook page a few weeks ago) that helps us make connections of scale, that helps inspire wonder in our minds and activism from the heart.  On this Earth day, Overview inspires the aerospace engineer in me, and, more importantly, provides all of us with boundless meaning to the word and the notion of our home, Earth.