Sustainable You

Sustainable You
Issue 145 - November/December 2007
by Peggy O'Mara

Sustainable means able to hold up. In environmental science, the word is used to talk about the yields of forests and of oceans.

Sustainable forestry means not cutting down more trees than will grow back to replace them. Sustainable fishing means not catching more fish than will reproduce to replace them. Bill McKibben, in his recent book, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (Henry Holt, 2007), prefers the word durable, which means simply to last. But is it enough simply to last, simply to hold up?

Article continues below

Sustainability is more than that. Ultimately, sustainable means giving back more than you take. It means regeneration.

How does this definition apply to families? Faced with the reality of overpopulation, one could argue that the human family is not sustainable at all. The carbon footprint of US families in particular is irresponsibly heavy. This is why it is imperative that we, as parents, become conscious of the impact of our behavior on the environment and become its allies.

We wait for our political leaders to show us the way, and they do not. We hope for some last-minute miracle, but it does not come. That is because, this time, we are the miracle. We are the people we have been waiting for. This time, the future is in our hands. It is each of us, in our own daily lives, who will change the world.

As parents, one of our job requirements is optimism. Along with empathy, trust, dependency, affection, and conscience, optimism is one of the qualities that are imprinted in children in the first three to five years of life: the attachment period. These are the very qualities that make them sustainable as human beings.

Sustainability begins, then, at the beginning. It begins even before you have children. It means bringing consciousness even to pre-conception. Many of us readily accept that there is consciousness after death. Can there not then be consciousness before birth? If so, does it not make an individual's sustainability more likely when he or she is actually wanted, planned for, dreamed of?

Once we welcome a new being into our lives and become pregnant, we may come face to face with our culture of fear when we are treated as if we were sick. Pregnancy, of course, is not a disease, and birth is perfectly normal. It is sustainable to have confidence in our own capacity to birth normally because we can have faith in the reproductive history of our species. If birth itself were so dangerous, we would not now have an overpopulated planet. Birth is inherently safe, and research shows that it is safe in any setting.

Technological procedures during pregnancy and birth leave a deeper carbon footprint than hands-on procedures. For example, ultrasounds are used routinely in pregnancy even though a midwife's hands are much better able to detect the size and position of the baby and are more accurate in determining due dates'and, of course, hands use no electricity. The electronic fetal monitor, another plug-in device, is used routinely in hospital births, though no research has shown it to be any more effective in detecting infant distress than a simple, low-tech stethoscope.

A natural birth welcomes to the world a new being in a way that is actually ecstatic, and thus in keeping with our biological blueprint. Simply put, an undisturbed birth contributes to a human being's sustainability because the imprinting and bonding that form the basis of attachment to our species are also left undisturbed. Ignoring the birth practices that have sustained our species for millennia puts our very survival at risk.

Another way that we put our species at risk is through our infant-feeding practices. The bodies of female humans produce the milk that is not only uniquely made for our species, but is individually made by each mother specifically for the age of that particular baby. Mothers of premature babies make premature baby milk. Mothers of toddlers make toddler milk. Breastfeeding is the sustainable choice.

Manufacturing formula requires miles and miles of cows. Each grazing cow that produces milk for artificial baby milk needs about one hectare (10,000 square meters) of land. To create enough land for cows to graze on, forests are cut down, which leads to deforestation, which in turn contributes to soil erosion and water contamination; or land is used for cattle that was previously used to grow food for families. In addition, cow flatulence and excretion account for 20 percent of the world's total annual emissions of methane. While methane is second only to CO2 in contributing to greenhouse gases, it is much more destructive of ozone than is CO2.

In nonindustrialized countries that use wood for heat, each bottle-fed baby requires a minimum of 73 kilograms of valuable wood each year. One study determined that producing one kilo of formula in Mexico costs 12.5 square meters of rain forest.

In addition to the pollution and deforestation caused by the manufacture of breastmilk substitutes, there is the waste. The 550 million cans of artificial baby milk sold to bottle-feed US babies in 1997 alone would, if lined up end to end, circle the earth one and a half times. These 550 million cans waste 86,000 tons of tin and 1,200 tons of paper labels.

The making of artificial baby milk consumes enormous amounts of energy as it is processed in factories, where cow's milk is converted into powder at high temperatures. In addition, manufacturing formula involves the transport of raw materials from their places of origin to their place of manufacture and packaging, and then the transport of the finished product to outlets all over the world. Ecuador, for example, imports breastmilk substitutes from the US, Switzerland, Ireland, and the Netherlands.

The cans that formula is sold in and the bottles it is drunk from have both come under recent scrutiny. The hormone-disrupting chemical bisphenol A (BPA) can enter milk from heated or scratched polycarbonate (#7) bottles. A recent study initiated by the Environmental Working Group found unacceptable levels of BPA in two of the six cans of formula tested. A three-month-old baby exclusively fed these contaminated formulas would be exposed to BPA levels approaching those found to be harmful in animal studies. In addition, plastic feeding bottles, nipples, and pacifiers take 200 to 450 years to break down when disposed of in landfills, which themselves are becoming increasingly scarce.

As if the positive environmental effects of breastfeeding were not enough, it also has uncounted economic value. In her new book, The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics (Berrett-Koehler, 2007), Riane Eisler calls on us to create a caring economy. She says that "to construct an economic system that can help us meet the enormous challenges we face, we must give visibility and value to the socially and economically essential work of caring for people and nature." She states that in our postindustrial economy, the most important capital is "human capital."

Right now, we don't count mothering or breastfeeding in our Gross Domestic Product. What would the GDP look like if we did? While we don't have an exact model yet, here is what some other countries have discovered.

In 2001, the Journal of Australian Political Economy published the research of Julie Smith and her colleagues. Smith says that the Australian Bureau of Statistics includes an estimate for the consumption of commercial baby foods and the production of cow's milk, but excludes mother's milk, whether it is for one's own baby or expressed and given to another baby. This means, according to Smith, that economic growth is boosted by the increased manufacture and sale of infant formula and the higher health care costs that go along with it.

Smith correlated the value of breastmilk in Australia by calculating the cost of replacing breastmilk with infant formula and adding to that the health care costs avoided by breastfeeding. She counted only the costs of five illnesses: gastrointestinal and respiratory illnesses, otitis media, eczema, and necrotizing enterocolitis. She found the cost of not breastfeeding for the first six months of life in Australia to be between $60 and $120 million a year.

In the US, in 1997, Jan Riordan published an article in the Journal of Human Lactation on the cost savings in health care of breastfeeding when factoring in just four medical diagnoses: respiratory virus, diabetes mellitus, otitis media, and infant diarrhea. She found a potential savings from breastfeeding of $1.3 billion per year.

In the 1990s, it was estimated that if the 51 "percent of women then exclusively breastfeed"ing in India stopped, it would cost $2.3 billion to replace their breastmilk with formula. A 1980s study calculated that Indonesian mothers produced a billion liters of breastmilk annually; the equivalent in formula would cost $400 million. In the late 1990s, one woman received a $400 insurance claim check to compensate her for frozen breastmilk lost when hurricane Fran took down the electricity in her town. And, last but not least, if you had to replace your breastmilk with breastmilk from a milk bank, it would cost you at least $30,000 for a one-year supply.

In 2007, Salary.com determined that the time mothers spend performing ten typical job functions would equate to an annual salary of $138,000 for a stay-at-home mom and $86,000 for a working mom. If you add the value of purchased breastmilk to that of the value of the stay-at-home mom, the estimated salary grows to $168,000. This doesn?t even take into account the increased health benefits of breastfeeding.

Thinking in a sustainable way about our choices in pregnancy, birth, and parenting brings us back to ourselves and to our natural impulses. When we choose natural birth and breastfeeding, we are simply carrying on the ways of our species perfected by the 100,000 generations of hunter-gatherers that preceded us. We learn to trust ourselves as parents when we trust ourselves during birth. We learn to mother through breastfeeding. And when we take responsibility for our everyday actions and their impact on others, we cultivate optimism.

The three Rs of environmentalism are Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. We sometimes forget that first R. When we become aware of our consumption and set goals to buy less, we free ourselves from the tentacles of our national cultural ethos of consumerism and materialism. Consumerism and materialism are enemies of the family because they teach our children that they are what they have, that everyone can be rich, and that money can buy happiness. We seek to teach our children the opposite: that they are intrinsically good and worthy simply because of who they are, not because of what they have.

In living a sustainable life with our families, we teach our children the deeper meaning and the truth of life: that people and nature are more important than money and things.

Citations available upon request.