ProWomanProLife

The next frontier: Greening the sex-toy industry. We’ll do anything for the environment, including giving new meaning to the term “tree-hugger”. [WARNING: this is for people with a sense of humour. Chronic nit-pickers, please skip this one.]

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Rebecca astutely notes: “‘When customers come into our store they’re not necessarily looking for ethically made and sourced nipple tassles,’ Roddick admits.”

How great must it be to have a job where you find that sentence leaving your mouth? Policy analysis is BORING.

From today’s Globe and Mail:

Contraception is a cheaper means of preventing climate change than conventional green technologies, The Daily Telegraph reports, according to research by the London School of Economics. “Every £4 [$7] spent on family planning over the next four decades would reduce global carbon-dioxide emissions by more than a ton, whereas a minimum of £19 [$34] would have to be spent on low-carbon technologies to achieve the same result, according to researchers. The report, Fewer Emitters, Lower Emissions, Less Cost, concluded that family planning should be seen as one of the primary methods of emissions reduction. The UN estimates that 40 per cent of all pregnancies worldwide are unintended.”

Just wondering: How do they estimate that number of unintended pregnancies? Do they go around asking pregnant women how they feel about things? Do they just pick a number at random?

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Tanya’s mind reels: What about the greenhouse gasses emitted during the production of these “family planning” methods? Oh, and the effects of their subsequent “disposal.” Did you know that 100% natural latex is completely biodegradable? But that nearly all condoms are not made of 100% natural latex, but contain synthetics? Furthermore, one of the main causes of yeast infections among women is condom and/or spermicide use. Clotrimazole, which is the leading treatment for yeast infections, is associated with major environmental risks. Oh, I could go on and on…

A new movie to be released in October: Not Evil, Just Wrong. Title made me laugh, anyway. (I feel that way about so many things. But then I get trapped in pseudo-philosophical circular debates–if it’s wrong, is it evil? Hmmm. Deep thoughts with Andrea…)

Just heard a snippet of an interview with the producers who declared that “children are an endangered species,” which also made me laugh.

This article is about only having one child for fear of increasing future’s carbon footprint:

In some sense, you are responsible for the carbon emissions of your descendants,” he said in an interview. He added that the impact on population growth and consumption of resources are also important to consider.

Then yesterday, I went to this event:

As soft-impact tourism, ArtWalk is non polluting and is inclined to attract people respectful of the community while generating community pride.

The random question for today is: Am I also responsible for the non polluting art of my descendants? Who will buy this non-polluting art (and let me tell you, it wasn’t cheap) if we have no descendants? What is my carbon footprint when I drive to the non polluting art event? Hmmm. High class problems, to be sure.

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Ouch! Brigitte hurt herself falling over backwards while trying to fetch eyeballs that had rolled a little too far.

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Tanya ponders: More art (AKA stuff) and less decendants (AKA consumers)… isn’t that what Al Gore wanted from the start?

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Véronique adds: Excuse me while I pull out my soapbox. I think the one-child-as-environmental-statement is a cop-out. It’s the kind of excuse people who are too self-absorbed to have a larger family use to make themselves look more self-sacrificing. It’s like couples who live in expensive houses, driving expensive cars, going on expensive vacations and tell you they would have “much preferred staying home to raise the kids but couldn’t afford it…” Why not just assume the fact that kids get in your face? Not giving a child a sibling is a decision that the only child does not make but that he or she will have to live with for the rest of his or her life. Even after the parents die. I personally think it’s unfair but I have six children so take it or leave it.

There is a mansion on my street. It’s likely three times the size of my house and my house is about 3,000 square-feet. Like me, the owners have two vehicles that they use to go shopping etc. But unlike me, the owners have two kids. They are driving the same distance I am to buy food and gas and drive their kids to activities. Except that they are doing it for four people, I am doing it for twice that number. So who has the bigger carbon foot-print? The problem is not the number of children. The problem is our lifestyle.

Mark Steyn writes:

There is a — drumroll, please — demographic element to the automobile question. Europeans often ask, “Why do Americans need those big cars?” The short answer is: Because Americans have kids and Europeans don’t. So Italians and Spaniards and Germans (and Japanese) can drive around in things the size of a Chevy Suburban’s cupholder because they’ve got nothing to put in them.

If you’re a soccer mom schlepping three kids plus little Jimmy from next door around, you need a vehicle of a certain size. In the old days, you could just toss ‘em all in there and they’d roll around as you took the hairpin bends in fourth gear. But now you can’t stick kids in the front and you need baby seats for the youngest and booster seats for the oldest and soon nanny-state regulation will require every American under 37 to be in a rear-facing child seat, which is a pretty good metaphor for where the country’s going.

And, if you mandate small cars and child-seat regulations, don’t be surprised if the size of the American family starts heading south, too. The difference between U.S. and European vehicles isn’t an emblem of environmental irresponsibility or American corpulence but of something more basic and important.

It’s great to be pushing small cars that go about as fast and park almost as easily as a tricycle. If people want to pay extra premium for the privilege of driving around in a glorified beach buggy, it’s their affair. But it’s not for everybody. Families, people with huge karate bags (those sparring pads and shoes sure are bulky), and those who generally like to drive at decent speeds in relative comfort, deserve options, too.

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Here’s what Andrea is pushing: The Couchbike. Affordable. Comfortable.  And Green. Who could ask for more? (Room for your karate equipment somewhere on the sofa, Brigitte.)

We’ve visited this issue before. Seems new concerns about birth control pill hormones leaking into the water supply have again arisen:

Experts believe the hormone could be getting into drinking water and affecting men’s sperm counts. They say sewage treatment does not remove the chemical entirely from drinking supplies, although the water industry insists there is no evidence of a risk to health….

One study by the Medical Research Council found that Scottish men born since 1970 are 25 per cent less fertile than those born 20 years earlier – and that fertility is continuing to drop by two per cent a year.

Of course, other chemicals may be responsible, for we are increasingly discovering that we are surrounded by ‘gender-bending’ substances.

Many pesticides and plastics, for example, contain chemicals that disrupt the hormone system. (emphasis mine)

And it seems going ahead with broad water filtration programs is out of the question since the process of filtering these chemicals out of the water contributes to global warming. (Good grief!) So buy your water today… in glass bottles, I guess.

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Andrea adds: All these environmental crises, economic crises, everything is a CRISIS! The average guy is going to reach for something in a bottle and it won’t be water. I think I need a drink too.

Reproductive choice or environmentalism? How does a progressive mind choose between the two? Another news story about the effects of hormones on males:

Half the male fish in British lowland rivers have been found to be developing eggs in their testes; in some stretches all male roaches have been found to be changing sex in this way. Female hormones – largely from the contraceptive pills which pass unaltered through sewage treatment – are partly responsible, while more than three-quarters of sewage works have been found also to be discharging demasculinising man-made chemicals. Feminising effects have now been discovered in a host of freshwater fish species as far away as Japan and Benin, in Africa, and in sea fish in the North Sea, the Mediterranean, Osaka Bay in Japan and Puget Sound on the US west coast.

There are many bad things in the environment besides female hormones from contraceptive pills. If you read the whole story, you’ll find lots to be afraid of. But my question remains: If the choice is between continuing the use the Pill and demasculinizing fish, which one will we choose?

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Andrea corrects Brigitte: Oh dear, Brigitte, you should know this by now. “Women’s rights”, especially “women’s reproductive rights”, no matter how broadly or narrowly defined are THE trump card. Of course they win. The fish don’t stand a chance. (Unless this damages female fish too. In which case, this remains an open question. Hmmmm.)

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Rebecca is enlightened enough to realize there is no problem, since gender is a social construct: if the fish were secure in their own identity and not marginalized by a phallocentric hegemonistic culture, they would not mind feminising effects.

Running my usual Saturday morning blog count, I came accross this post. The news is what it is, I am now too disillusionned by two years of graduate studies in ethics to be surprised by anything. So the debate about the morality of abortion is done and over with, what else are we going to debate about? Plant dignity. Please tell me this is from the Onion News Network…

But to put everything in perspective, keep reading the comments section. Some of them are hilarious!

h/t Small Dead Animals

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Andrea adds: The comments are hilarious. I too, imagine Vegetable Rights Tribunals. I have always thought those new orange cauliflowers were weird. Now I know they mark a grave injustice.

The only thing more alarming than this poll question is the result (at time of posting, “yes” and “no” are neck in neck):

Drivers in Beijing have been forced to give up their cars every second day in hopes of reducing smog. Should Canadian cities take a similar approach?

I have a different poll question: “Should Canada drop democracy in favour of a “strong hand,” someone who will be able to decree that pollution, crime,  even abortion levels, should fall?”

Dictators, getting things done. How ’bout it, Canada?

Intelligent discussion about the environment and pollution can be hard to find. I find the loudest voices on both sides of the “are we headed for ecological armageddon?” debate to be noisy and poorly read in basic statistics. There’s a lot to be said for maintaining the environment, especially in places like Canada, where open spaces are abundant and incredibly beautiful, but it takes a pretty hard heart to ask Indians and Chinese to do without heating and basic transportation for the sake of a theoretical reduction in world temperatures of .8 degrees several decades in the future.

Here is an issue of pollution and a threat to wildlife that’s worth more discussion than it’s getting.  The hormones in birth control pills (used also in the morning-after pill and some abortion inducing drugs, but because of sheer volume, it’s really about birth control pills) end up excreted into sewage, and make their way, despite all the treatments meant to neutralize human waste, into the water, well, everywhere.  This is devastating some fish populations.  If an oil refiner were releasing a substance into the water that had similar effects, we’d hear of nothing else, and be encouraged to boycott the producers, call for new oil taxes, lobby for new laws, and so on.

It’s no secret that the hard core environmental lobby are in favour of Zero Population Growth, where they don’t favour reducing the population.  The most common and reliable birth control method (in the developed world, anyway) pollutes the environment.  Will Greenpeace or similar have the intellectual honesty to call for a new look at birth control and our reliance on synthetic hormones to manipulate nature?  Many people have spoken out about hormonal manipulation of livestock and its effects both on humans and animals.  Why the silence here?

By all means, we (humanity) need some method of birth control that is safe and effective.  There is a lot about the pill that is politically attractive: it is, used properly, very effective, it is entirely within the purview of the woman involved, which meshes well with the reality of the hook-up culture, it’s marketed for all sorts of trivial things that make it even more appealing (want to have only four periods a year? want to clear up your acne? try the Pill!) and it makes drug companies a ton of money.  But there are increasing reasons to think that it’s not very safe.  If it’s not safe for wildlife to be exposed to these hormones indirectly, maybe we’ll finally start to look at how healthy it is for the women who ingest it daily.