I was on my way to work this morning and there was a sign on those highway blinky pads that read “HURRICANE SEASON IS HERE. KEEP YOUR GAS TANK FULL.” Which read a lot like C-O-N-S-P-I-R-A-C-Y to me, this sign being on the highway of a city booming with petrochemical and drilling and exploration companies. One of which I work for.
Back when I was a kid - and I will say that the time that’s passed since then is shorter in my head than on a calculator - my mom used to tell me that every ‘bad’ thing I did would result in a Black Dot On My Heart. She was Catholic, after all. And since I was too afraid to go into a confessional and tell my priest that I had vandalized a car or poured salt onto a yard or other junior high experiences, I read up on the Protestant faith and learned about forgiveness. And I didn’t even have to recite such number of Hail Mary’s or Act of Contritions or what have you.
My understanding of forgiveness and faith are a little deeper now. A little. But I try to even out my Black Dots - like my carbon footprint - with Good Deeds, like recycling cans and plastic and cardboard boxes. But if I was thinking my slate was anywhere near half clean, boy was I wrong!
By virtue of parenting, I belong to a couple groups in my area where the adults bounce ideas off one another, provide warnings or accolades about products, opinions about schools and the like. And it was on these boards that I discovered how very far removed I am from Taking Care Of The Earth or even Doing What Is Best For My Children.
Take water. Seriously? I think the water in the bottles is the same as the water from the tap. The labels say otherwise, some people agree, but I’m not sure drinking bottled water is necessarily better. I mean really, all those decreased chemicals we put in our bodies is made up for with what we toss onto the earth. But from the very first nanny we hired, we were strictly informed that we should not use tap water with the babies’ formula because their bellies were just brand new and they shouldn’t be subjected to such evil.
And the bottles. Watch out for BPA!! LORD HAVE MERCY don’t use platic bottles! Lots and lots of conversation and talk about the estrogen imitating chemical and how it can prevent your offspring from ever having offspring of their own. And yet I was fed with plastic bottles and I conceived.
Maybe that was part of the problem - that I wasn’t breastfed. Because OH MY GOD if you don’t breastfeed you are deliberately choosing for your children to have lower IQ’s and the ability to handle rejection when they are fourteen.
And when you want to give them a quick meal in their youth, DON’T FEED THEM RAVIOLI because the cans you find on grocery store shelves are teeming with BPA and other things that will certainly stunt our brain development. Want to make it fresh, instead? You CAN’T! Because of the tomatoes! HOLY SHIT, THE TOMATOES! I actually read a post/response from a neighborhood mom who buys non-BPA packaged tomato paste for $10 for 24oz. I am sure the tomatoes are plucked directly from God’s garden. Only to find out it’s the JALAPEÑOS! THE DAMN JALAPEÑOS!
Then there was the mom who bought milk in TetraPaks from South America and Australia. Or the folks who don’t use certain dry cleaners because they use perc or CO2. I don’t even know what some of this stuff is!
Suddenly, putting cans and plastic into my green recycle bin that gets picked up twice a month is so insignificant. Even though something is more than nothing. I thought all the reading I felt I had to do before giving birth was a lot of material. But in terms of educating myself about products/schools/environmental factors, I have this perpetual feeling of having to take a final exam tomorrow morning, and I just now got the textbook.
It is all a bit overwhelming isn’t it. I always recycle and try to do good but find I feel as if I’m not doing much good when I hear of the efforts others make.
Hey! I saw the sign also on my way in. I guess it’s because of the tropical storm out in the Gulf?
The whole green thing is a bit overwhelming. But remember that your contribution does help, at least that’s what I keep telling myself.
The RJB’s are getting so big!!! I love the pic of both of them with your Mom…too cute!
I don’t think it’s really all or nothing. Trying to avoid all chemicals in life is just impossible (both on a practical, and a purely scientific level). Heck, I grew up in a town that has the most hazardous toxic waste site in North America smack dab in the middle of it, and although we have the highest cancer rates in Canada, we just have to live with it and try to make up for it in other ways (and lobby the government to clean up the mess).
Recycling is absolutely an important step towards living more sustainably. I do think though, that we are exposed to far more chemicals in the run of a day than we used to be, and trying to (reasonably) limit our exposure as best we can may not be a bad idea. It would cost a fortune to buy chem-free everything, but, for example there are foods that have more pesticides on them than others, so maybe buy that stuff in organic section… If you’re renovating a house, check out what green options are available in building materials, and maybe choose one or two to use.. If there is a sweatshop free option in clothing, try that..
Like everything else, it’s about balance, and making choices, where possible that are healthy for us, for the environment and in keeping with how we want our lives to be lived. As Naomi Klein says…boycotting certain products is not going to make companies stop producing unhealthy stuff, it’s about being informed, getting involved, and speaking out on all of this health, environment, and social justice stuff.
(PS. I agree with you on the water issue! Actually in Canada, most of our bottle water comes from municipal water supplies with minimal filtering, so I can’t see why tap water is so bad.)
we recycle - when we remodelled the kitchen, we specifically got 2 bins that hide in the island - one for trash, one for recycling. we have a big blue bin outside that all the paper and cardboard goes into. we shred all the trash mail and then recycle that too. dp takes used batteries to work to recycle. it’s a lot of work but very much worth it i think.
nearly all of our appliances are energy efficient. we plan on getting a tankless water heater and replacing the toilets with low-flow this year. our windows are energy efficient, the attic has been reinsulated. we have a heat pump/air unit and a furnace but the furnace only kicks in when the temp dips below zero. as a result our energy bills have come down. a lot.
we are lucky in that we can car-pool to work and reduce gas and parking costs.
we only internet order items that we can’t buy locally. that reduces our carbon footprint.
baby indigoscot’s bottles were not bpa-free but as a nursed baby, he rarely used them and never heated up. his sippy cups are bpa free. our kitchen sink cold water is filtered and that’s what he drinks. the food we make for him is almost 100% organic…our local farmer’s market’s prices for organic are only a little bit more expensive than non-organic.
i don’t consider us to be crunchy lesbians, but after reading what i wrote, it definitely sounds like we are, lol! a lot of our environmental considerations come from dp and information from the LEED certified folks she works with.
forgot to add that we have a rain barrel that we use to water plants with and we also use baby indigoscot’s bath water for that same purpose.
the responses above lead me to think we’re a little more crunchy than we thought. Like raisin bran that’s been in milk for a minute or two. We do the recycling, shred junk mail and recycle that, have energy efficient appliances (one of my justifications for getting our spiffy front-load washer and dryer), and a tankless water heater. I like the rain barrel idea, but for the fact that our yard is so friggin small, I think if we put collection cups under the drooling RJBs that might just do the trick. Maybe we’ll use that as their bath water, too, after we boil it. We still purchase the organic stuff on occasion, but it’s not life or death for us. Sometimes we just gotta get what is less expensive. We thought the filtered water from the refrigerator was good enough for the kids, but even that was not approved by our Russian nanny who’s husband is a biochemical researcher in a huge medical center. I am sure when someone invents a biodegradable, self-sustaining plastic bubble (that lasts until the kids get out of college!) for us to put our children in, we’ll hear about it. I’m sure there are helicopter parents working on it right now. Until then, we’ll just do what we can. That is, after we purchase that gas-guzzling SUV we’ll need to get to fit our family for a drive on over to the farmer’s market. Baby steps, people! Oh, and I had to look up Naomi Klein!
It is all overwhelming… but sounds like you are doing quite a bit already… we try to do all we can… hey we even changed the majority of our light bulbs to the more efficient ones. But, like others have mentioned I know there is more that we can do!