A mere four months ago my responsibility to live a wholesome, healthy life, to provide a wholesome, healthy home, and to care about the Earth in a healthy, wholesome way became so much more than lip service. With the birth of a child, all these things that I’ve done my best to stand up for over the years became ever more crucial, while at the same time, due to changes in time, priorities, and, let’s be honest, financial and personal flexibility, they run the risk of becoming ephemeral aspirations. Finding that balance between those aspirations and the nitty-gritty, day-to-day of raising a baby boy in highly urbanized Southern California is what this blog is all about. I am far from my childhood of Pacific Northwest woods and rivers. While there are times when I yearn for all that green, I know there is plenty of nature here to share with my son. I will show him how to find it in the nooks and the crannies, between the cracks in the pavement, along the channeled riverbeds. Together, we will become urban naturalists!
I will begin this blog by making a pledge. I want to commit it to the archives so that I can refer back to it and can be held accountable to it.
I pledge to raise an ecoliterate family, to find nature wherever we are, and to nurture it in any way we can.
I pledge to do my best to provide wholesome foods for my family. I will nourish them, mind and body, with healthy real foods that are responsibly farmed and raised. While I may not always make it to the farmers market (I haven’t been in far too long), I will aim to buy mostly local, whole foods and very few processed foods (heres to trying to make most of his baby food!).
I pledge to teach him about the place in which he lives and its connections to other places and to the planet as a whole (this is the geographer in me).
I pledge to get him outside, to get his hands dirty with real dirt!
I pledge to be flexible and adaptable, to grow with him and what we learn together.
My goal is to find a balance. A balance between being “green” and reducing my family’s impact and not feeling guilty for buying paper plates. A balance between providing healthy foods for my family and not feeling as though I’ve poisoned them when I find “canola oil” or “corn syrup solids” on an ingredients label. A balance between the tenets I aspire to and not being Allister’s crazy hippie mom!
Cheers,
MB
P.S. I plan to share resources, such as books, movies, websites, etc., that I find useful. Please, please, please, share any you find as well!
Citizen Concerned For Science 