Motherhood as a Movement

To reduce my carbon footprint, I've decided not to have that third kid. 

Hear me out. I have two, and they are awesome. Totally awesome. And I could have a third--I was one of three after all. But what I'm going to do, is I'm going to pass. For completely unselfish reasons. 

Now, in all honesty, this could backfire. Because that third kid could have been the one to invent hybrid solar panels made from upcycled ocean materials or a compost system that turns human waste into gold briquettes. But I'm going to bank on the probability that my kid will not be the one out of seven billion people on the planet right now to invent that really important revolutionary and environmentally impactful thing.

If you think about it, anything I mention right now to reduce my carbon footprint will only affect my emissions but not completely eradicate them. Here I am preventing an entire person's worth of emissions. "How much is that really, though?" you ask? I will tell you. 

In short answer form, according to Dr. Google, Ph D., if the average person's carbon emissions were made into the physical form of carbon for one lifetime, it would take forty truckloads to carry it. So, it is safe to say that any other answer to this question short of innovation spread to vast amounts of people would fall short of this result. 

This may seem irreverent. But try talking to the several friends I have encountered throughout my lifetime who have vowed not to have any children at all in the name of the planet. I'm not that way. I adore my children. But as I have been saying since the postpartum period for my second began: two is plenty!

Some countries have population control, which can sometimes be related to carbon footprints and can affect how many children are permitted per couple, and I'm not advocating for that. I am, however, advocating for people to be educated in the carbon footprint we each make and to make educated decisions--of our own volition, all--as to how many children would be the right number that would permit optimal happiness as well as optimal conservation of the environment. I mean, we live on the earth and affect the life of it tremendously; shouldn't our dear mother planet have some weight or at least presence in the decision-making process that leads to more forty-truckloads-of-carbon-makers on her precious land?

By all accounts, population growth is happening at an extraordinary rate. In 1800, there were 1 billion people here. Today, we have over 7 billion. Maybe we could all cool it a little and slow down our thinking when it comes to family planning to include the 7 billion other people and the planet instead of just our own ideas about ancestral continuation. I know, it's genetics, and it's very persuasive, but so, too, should be compassion and empathy for all the life forms on this planet being affected by our consumption.

In the name of the two kids I have, I want to emphasize the importance of motherhood in my human experience. It's all I could fathom. I feel that children are the closest thing to God and bring the sacred into the human experience just by their very existence. I adore them and feel they make the world better by being here. And I wholeheartedly believe in coming generations as the transformationalists and wavemakers for a better today. They will be the ones to solve the problems we created (There, I said it). It's just, do we need quite so many of them? Let's go for quality and not quantity. If we have less, then we can focus our own resources in improving their wellbeing while simultaneously consuming less as a factor of there being less population growth.

Perhaps this is controversial, but I care less about that than I do about the planet, and I've never felt better about having two kids.