Green Parenting

I should probably have timed this column to coincide with something significant like Earth Day, but that’s still a ways off, and this is what I worry about right now. When relocating a family, there are a lot of decisions to be made. Where are you going to live? How are you going to balance work and family in a new place? What schools and/or daycare possibilities are there? And then there are the little details. How do we all stay clean, and how is that going to affect the fragile planet?

Okay, so perhaps not so little.

These decisions are by no means unique to moved families; all families have to decide how to live. We all have opinions on this one.  But when you relocate, the questions come fast and furious. All the brands are unfamiliar, and you need really to think through the mundane details of housework. Why do you buy what you are buy? Should cost or effectiveness be your prime deciding factor? Is this detergent better than the next? What does that even mean?

It was diapers that really started this green worry for me. There is a lot of debate about cloth vs. disposable, the effects of washing vs. the filling of landfills. For us, the image of all those years worth of our children’s filthy diapers sitting in a landfill was depressing and untenable, so we have used cloth for the majority of our diapering days. But in transit, we used disposables with Blue. Cloth was just utterly unrealistic (and unpleasant) for us to consider for a long car journey.  We have been here in the UK for a couple of weeks, and because we stayed with friends, we kept to our on-the-road routine. But now we are planted in our new home, and we’ve got some home-making decisions to make. So I’ve been doing my research.

Strangely (and delightfully, really), in the UK, cloth diapers are called “real” nappies. I have found a whole new vocabulary to learn. And there are also different ways of doing things here.  I’ve got a friend in Scotland who swears by compostable diapers, prefolds here seem to have gone the way of the dodo, and there is even an auction website here where you can bid on used diapers. The ebay of incontinent.  So many paths to consider.

But this green worry isn’t just about the logistics of living with little ones. I think that all of this has faith implications. I want to raise my kids to be aware of God’s good creation and of our place in it, even in the midst of our city-dwelling lives.  I want them to think about how we make decisions, and how our decisions do change to world, one way of another.

And I worry about the trend towards disposable culture. It seems wrong that when something is dirty or broken or complicated, our impulse is to throw it away. What does that do to our sense of redemption? How do we know that creation is good if we always replace things rather than trying to make things better? How do we hope to understand healing if we just throw everything away?

Maybe washing cloth diapers is an odd way of preaching the power of resurrection.

Maybe oddness isn’t a bad thing.