On a snowy winter morning five years ago, after four days of cocooning in the hospital, I walked home carrying my newborn daughter. I knew I was crossing the threshold into life as a mother, caregiver, and working parent. What I didn’t know was that I was about to become a different kind of environmentalist.
It took just a few blocks to transform my environmentalism from one based on vehement philosophical and political beliefs to one grounded in the humility of everyday experience. And it took just a little while longer for me, armed with a newfound sense of constituency, to realize the potential power of mothers to change the world as we know it.
Oh baby, baby, it’s a wild world.
Since college, my concern for the planet had been driven by idealistic beliefs: Every child should grow up in a healthy, thriving community with clean air and water, great public schools, and adults who care about them. We should support walkable communities and stop driving so much, polluting the air, and developing farmland while city neighborhoods are left to die. Governments and companies should invest in the cleanest technologies possibl... Read more
