My Earth Day Promise to the Earth

My promise to the Earth for Earth Day this year will be the same one I make every year. It's very simple.

I promise never to have children.

My, my, I guess that may sound a little drastic to you. Yeah, you, the lady with the 50 percent post-consumer-recycled-materials baby buggy. Drinking from your reusable coffee cup, putting the 'green' sticker on your improved-fuel-efficiency family SUV. Rewashing your own cloth diapers, breastfeeding, then sending the little darlings off to school with reusable lunch boxes and vegan gluten-free meals.

Well, guess what? Your little darlings are still using stuff. If you're upper-middle-class Americans, it's likely way too much stuff, regardless of how many green tags you stamp on it. If you put a stack of tires the size of the Eiffel Tower in your backyard and lit it with hairspray, you couldn't do as much environmental damage as you're going to inevitably do simply by raising a child.

Think about it. How much stuff have you used in your life? How much do you need to eat and drink each day? How many gallons of gas have been burned just to make you you? Now think about it: you could leave it at that. Or you could have a kid and make it double. You can sneak into your neighbors' garbage and recycle for them, you can eat nothing but lawn clippings, you can cut off your arm and feed it to a dolphin - you still haven't made up for the cans of baby formula you're going to feed your offspring.

Worse, no matter how green you are, how do you know your child is going to follow in your footsteps? The stereotype of the rebellious teen is a staple of our culture. You might be able to force-feed him macrobiotics and drive him around in an electric car when he's little, but once he hits eighteen, how do you know he isn't going to subsist on a diet of steak and drive around in a monster truck? Answer: you don't. The only way you can truly put a lid on your total impact on the Earth is to become, as Morrissey - a notable vegetarian - put it, the end of your family line. It's not that sad - surely not as sad as the extinction of entire species, including our own, yeah?

So make like me: make a childfree life your promise to Mother Earth.