Eco-friendly vacations … and lives

Being environmentally friendly doesn’t have to take a break during the summer vacation season, as many destinations offer fun family frivolity while contributing to saving the environment.

Yet, in some circles these days, having a large family is considered a crime against humanity, especially when it comes to family vacations. The idea that having children is bad for the environment isn’t as new as many people think.

In the 1970s, overpopulation was the global warming of its day. The average man or woman wasn’t really sure how or why, but experts told them the planet couldn’t support more people, and that was good enough for them. It was the subject of a Time magazine cover story, so it had to be true. In an episode of “All in the Family,” Archie Bunker’s daughter and her hippie husband, “Meathead,” explained their (short-lived) decision to remain childless with the then-fashionable alibi that it would be a crime to bring another child into this horrible world.

But as a chorus of demographers have pointed out, those experts’ doomsday predictions didn’t come true. Not only is there enough food to sustain the world’s population, but food prices are declining while distribution has improved exponentially.

Economist Amartya Sen won a Nobel Prize for proving that famines aren’t caused by natural droughts, but instead by all-too-human political corruption. Another Nobelist, Simon Smith Kuznets, demonstrated that “more population means more creators and producers, both of goods along established production patterns and of new knowledge and inventions.”

Families with children don’t necessarily place the burden on the environment that critics say they do, especially in urban areas. Big cities are no longer the polluted centers of waste and disease they once were when they were reviled in the early days of the Industrial Revolution. Due to population density, public transportation, and municipal green energy initiatives, many American cities have smaller carbon footprints than some rural areas.

The same logic applies to families compared to single adults living alone. Think about it: my family of four children doesn’t have six separate tubes of toothpaste going at once. My family is a little city in the big city. Children really are cheaper by the dozen. Economies of scale kick in. It’s just a matter of throwing a little more pasta into a larger pot. We vacation together, traveling to our destination by car, which can save up to four times the amount of carbon emissions that are let off by air travel. Driving my wife and kids in one vehicle uses up no more gas than a single person tooling around in the same car.

My children and I are learning how to care for planet Earth by reading “Curious George” together, as our family’s favorite fictional monkey learns to “reduce, reuse, and recycle.” I hope to send them out into the world with a healthy regard for the environment, as well as of other human beings. It seems to me that many well-meaning eco-warriors care about the environment only, not the people in it, and that doesn’t seem very balanced to me.

Jewish tradition tells us that children and the environment are not mutually exclusive. “Be fruitful and multiply” also promotes respect for nature and embraces conservation, animal welfare, species preservation, sanitation, and pollution reduction — something we learn from the world’s first cruise, on the biblical boat of Noah! The Talmud covers prohibitions against atmospheric, water, and even noise pollution, and Deuteronomy even tackles issues of waste disposal.

Thus, children and the environment are not mutually exclusive, especially when it comes to the summer season. Having children and caring about the environment don’t cancel each other out. In fact, they go hand in hand.