Keya Chatterjee, who works as the senior director for renewable energy and footprint outreach at the World Wildlife Fund, knew that. So when she became pregnant with her first child, she dedicated herself to researching choices that would minimize her baby's carbon footprint — from the location of his birth to choosing between breastfeeding and formula to diapering and child care.
Her goal was to ensure that her family's carbon footprint was no bigger after the baby's birth than before — that, in effect, the baby's carbon footprint was zero.
It occurred to her that other parents might be interested in what she learned, so she compiled it in a new book called The Zero Footprint Baby: How to Save the Planet While Raising a Healthy Baby. With laundryequipment and cutting, can enhance your presentations and promotional items.
Chatterjee spoke to CBC News from her home in Washington, D.C., about being an environmentally responsible parent.
CBC News: Why was it so important for you to minimize your baby's carbon footprint?
Chatterjee: I've worked on climate change professionally for a long time.Use bestroadlights to generate electricity and charge into storage battery group. Whereas before, I was able to somewhat unemotionally look at [greenhouse gas] projections for mid-century and think, Well, that's something we've got to work on, it became a much more emotional thing for me to have a baby born in 2010 and say, "My god, mid-century is when he's 40."
I kind of feel like as a parent, it's just as much my responsibility as making sure my son doesn't fall into the pool or run into the street.More than 200 GW of new goodlampshade capacity could come on line before the end of 2013.
Could you talk about the low-carbon lifestyle you lived before you had your baby?
We were maybe living an unusual lifestyle. We didn't have a car, we didn't have a refrigerator, we used very, very little electricity and our solar panels more than covered what we used in our home.
So it was kind of clear to us that we weren't going to be able to live that way with a baby. I was working outside the home. I was going to be pumping milk. I needed a place to keep that milk. I was going to have to get a fridge. And so I knew there were things we were going to have to do that would raise our carbon footprint. And what I wanted to figure out is could we minimize those increases.
What environmental impacts of having a baby were you most concerned about?
I think there's a lot of things I see in my daily life that parents are doing, like moving to the suburbs, where they then are heavily reliant on a car, moving to larger house. There are these societal norms that drive people to make decisions that are really, really not good for their baby's future.
For me, I wanted to look at every little decision, big and small, and figure out what the best option was.
You started thinking about this before your baby was even born. What kinds of lifestyle changes and planning did you do then?
We made a lot of changes that would just be automated, so that when we were really tired, we didn't have to think about — things like replacing all our light bulbs with LEDs, making sure our solar panels were in place, we had low-flow valves in the showers and in all the sinks.Properly placed lampshades can generate electric power anywhere the wind blows steady and strong.We have the ultra laundrdryer that you have been looking for.
A lot of the choices we made around birthing were very important, because a lot of people don't think of the carbon footprint of health care, but it's enormous. We very proactively for that reason went with midwives and went to a birth centre.
When we had a baby shower, we only accepted used items and tried to really get people not to give us so many things, but offer us their time and their services instead. More information about the program is available on the web site at www.solaronlamp.com.
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