Breathingearth.net

This morning I found a new website, http://www.breathingearth.net/. I'm not sure how I stumbled across it, I pushed something on my toolbar and it just popped up. I'm glad it did.

The website is simply a map showing births, deaths and CO2 emissions for every country on the planet. It's fascinating to watch; I've had it on all morning. Since I started watching, 30,871 people have been born, 12,654 people have died, and 6,302,000 tons of CO2 have been emitted. As of this moment, the population of the planet is 6,745,575,768 people.

While I watch the stars representing births, and the black dots representing deaths, I feel torn. The mother in me sees, in each one of those stars, a woman in a home, a tent, a field, a hospital, engaging in the beauty of bringing forth new life. I see the ultimate act of nurturing, of sacrifice, of love. I get goosebumps.

The humane educator in me wonders what the impact of these births will be on our environment, on the human condition, and on non-humans. Obviously, given that I have two biological children, I am not opposed to procreation. I am grateful for my children and (perhaps selfishly) I enjoyed the act of gestating and birthing them. I always wanted a large family, but we will probably adopt any future children. I gave long, serious thought to the issue of population growth before I decided, very consciously, to create two new human beings.

I think that this is an issue where some humane parents get lost in the shuffle, at least those who choose to have biological child(ren). There are many people out there, particularly in the animal rights and environmentalism communities, who believe that overpopulation is the single biggest problem facing our planet, and the biggest threat to the sustainability of our way of life. Each human, no matter where he is born and how she is raised, will use resources - resources that we may ill be able to spare. That said - one could argue that the urge to have children is something that is biologically built in to our species, and aside from the rare (statistically speaking) person who chooses to forgo this experience for personal reasons, most people still do choose to have offspring. This is not likely to stop. To blame parents for overburdening the Earth is to potentially alienate them, at a time when we most need to give them the tools they will need to their responsibility to their children and grandchildren to ensure that there will be a planet where they can live.

Several weeks ago, No Impact Man posted on his blog about population growth - and man, were there a lot of comments! 83, to be exact - it got to the point where I couldn't read them all. It's worth a look - it's an important and controversial topic, one that deserves serious thought.

Nickelodeon's Big Green Help

Nickelodeon is currently in the midst of a public service campaign called The Big Green Help. The purpose of this series of PSAs is to encourage young people to act responsibly by recycling and precycling and minimizing their energy and resource use:

"at home, at school, at the mall".

(Sound of brakes screeching in the background) Huh? At home - good. At school - great. At the MALL?

I am unclear as to how young people are supposed to exhibit their growing sense of environmental stewardship at a location that is expressly purposed to get them to buy stuff they probably don't need. By eating at the food court, dining on feedlot-bred hamburgers that were raised on denuded rain forest and shipped halfway across the globe, served on single-use plates/cups/forks/napkins? By purchasing clothing made of chemical-laden fabrics, likely sewn by underpaid young women, perhaps working in a sweatshop, that was again shipped halfway across the globe, each garment in it's own individual plastic wrapping? By asking their parents to drive them to the mall to "hang out" with their friends - because for all the talk about biking or walking instead of driving, I live in New Jersey, the mall capital of the world, and I have yet to see a mall that is within walking distance of a residential area, never mind in a location that is safe to walk to (though public transportation is sometimes an option)?

I realize that the idea of minimizing consumption in the current economic climate is controversial. For everyone who buys less, someone who works in manufacturing, retail, transportation, or related industries is at risk of losing her job. However, I refuse to accept that we are unable to come up with a new, sustainable paradigm that does not rely on stripping resources and filling our planet with trash in order to put food on tables and roofs over heads. Especially when we are talking to the young, who are the future and who are creative and intelligent, we should be encouraging them to find a new way rather than expecting them to continue in the old.

Keeping it Close to Home

This weekend, my sister and I brought Bess and Harry to Washington, DC for the Green Festival. While we were there, we planned to visit the National Zoo.

As a humane educator, I am ambivalent about zoos in general. I think that by bringing our children to visit animals in captivity, we are implicitly giving them the message that we approve of the practice of catching animals and putting them in enclosures for people's viewing pleasure. However, my sister, a zoologist and educator who has worked at one of the most well-known and well-respected zoos in the world, argues that without zoos, some animals would likely become extinct. Furthermore, she argues, giving people the chance to see these animals live increases the likelihood that they will make efforts to save them. I'm still not sure what I think about that, so my compromise has been to carefully select the zoos that we do visit, and to be sure to talk to my daughter about where these animals actually belong and how they might feel about being away from their homes.

Now, back to the story. The National Zoo has an impressive array of animals on display. We didn't get to see much because by the time we got there, Bess was quite overstimulated and exhausted. We did get to see their famous panda, and we walked through the bird house that contained some really interesting specimens including kookaburras, birds of paradise, and kiwi. But all Bess wanted to see were the mallard ducks in the pond outside and the squirrels playing in the trees.

In fact, that whole day, while we walked through the city, Bess was fascinated not by the new sights and sounds around her, but by the flowers in front of the buildings and the house sparrows and starlings sitting on the statues. She wanted to pick dandelions and look at the leaves, and feel the textures of the different types of pavement while we walked. She was duly unimpressed by the sightseeing, preferring to focus on the things that were no different from that which she sees every day at home.

I think that if we are going to effectively teach our children to be responsible citizens and stewards, we need to always make the effort to meet them where they are instead of trying to advance our own ideas of what they "should" be exposed to or care about. Bess is three - too young to be able to appreciate the panda we saw, and the struggles of wild pandas trying to survive in a faraway land. She is focused on her immediate environment, and attached to the familiar. As humane parents, we are best off trying to cultivate the attachment that already exists rather than trying to expand their horizons before they're ready.

In the end, the whole DC trip was probably a bad idea. It was too much, too far, too different for anyone to be able to enjoy it. It will probably, unfortunately, be a few years before I'm able to attend another Green Festival. But I'll have to take a page from Bess, and instead focus on examining and enjoying the things I have in my own backyard.