Phil Gutis's Blog
Yummy vs. Slummy
August 22, 2007
Posted by Phil Gutis in Living Sustainably
In a delicious essay titled "Yummy vs. Slummy," Newsweek's Kathleen Deveny confides that her mother left her as an infant napping on the family porch in suburban New Jersey under the watchful eye of the family dog. "He was a very caring dog," Deveny's mom told her "only slightly defensively."
That laugh-out-loud moment came near the end of an article lamenting the current obsession over talking about the details of raising kids. "The mommy wars are killing me," Deveny writes. "Raise your children however you'd like. Just please – please – stop telling me about it."
As a gay man with no children, I'm definitely not an expert in this area, but I've watched my sister Beth raise my two nieces and nephew and I am all-but-exhausted just from standing on the sidelines. I don't think I could juggle that many demands and, believe me, I juggle a lot each and every day.
So while no expert on raising kids, I am fascinated by the current trend. In my mind, the newfound interest in details about childrearing is a response to some truly scary developments on the environmental front. Not the environment that is way out there, hundreds or thousands of miles away. No, what we are seeing now is increasing concerns about the environment that we all live in.
This environment is the food we eat, the air we breathe, the water we drink. Despite what some would have us think, those are all environmental issues and increasing concern about them could be the savior of the environmental movement and our future on the planet.
It is the obsession with kids that Newsweek's Deveny writes about turns many a mom (and dad) green. In preparing to launch our new SimpleSteps website, we did a bit of market research about this trend and found that the closer we tied environmental concerns to the home, the more successful we were in causing people to think differently about the choices they make that affect the planet.
"It is not that we are not concerned with the environment, "one focus group participant in Hartford, Connecticut said." If you talk about the environment, we are all going to say 'okay.' If you talk about our personal health, we will want to know what else you have to say. You will have our attention a lot more."
I'm excited about NRDC's new SimpleSteps program and delighted with the new collaboration with my colleagues in our Health and Toxics program. And, yes, I'm particularly excited about the soon-to-launch BabySteps section and the impact I think it will have on our work.
So despite how Newsweek's Deveny feels, I do believe that all of this obsessive talk about our kids and our health could help save the planet and us. A true win-win situation.
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