Everything Borrowed

My husband and I are expecting our first child - a boy - this spring. We're late 30-somethings, living in New York City. He's a school teacher, I'm an environmental consultant, mostly for non-profits. We try to do good by the world. We recycle, we sell our old appliances on craigslist, we eat a mostly vegetarian diet, we take public transportation and we try to remember to bring cloth bags to the grocery store.

That said, we consume a lot and we throw away a lot. We're a part of a disposable culture where we order new things on Amazon a few times per month and throw away perfectly good old kitchen cabinets to make way for new ones from Home Depot. Too many weekends are spent organizing our closets filled with things we really don't need, to make room for new things we could probably do without.

And we're bringing a baby into this world. A baby who really needs little more than a few outfits, breast milk and a roof over his head for the first new months, yet his carbon footprint will inevitably be significant - tens of thousands of times more than babies in developing countries.

But we want the best for this baby - and for us! We want him to have cute little summer hats and a cozy bassinet. We want to be able to carry him around in a really comfortable sling and leave him with a relative and a bottle so we can go to the movies now and then.

As a result, what we're proposing to do is not carbon neutral. It's not the lowest impact possible, nor is it going to completely simplify our lives and de-clutter our closets. What it will do - we hope - is to help us strive towards consuming less and disposing less. We hope it will have a net positive impact on the environment, on our wallets and on our storage space. We hope that it will help us build community and enable us to begin parenthood with a big dose of awareness and humility.

And we hope that it will inspire us to continue to set goals for ourselves that help us leave the world a little better than we found it. We'll see.