Well today I had something else in mind to post but oh, seeing as it's SNOWING outside, the plans must change.

So today I'm going to direct you over here to Simcha because she totally must've been reading my thoughts again and pretty much wrote what I was going to.  It's a good read.

Being open to children and being good stewards of this beautiful world can go amazingly well together.  Many of the large families I know are much 'greener' than the average small family simply by necessity.  None of these families are wealthy (by our country's standards) but yet all of them have one parent staying at home to raise their children.  This requires a whole lot of planning and conserving and more often than not is...environmentally responsible.

Our family of six creates about one bag of garbage a week.  That's it.  The rest is recycled (thankful to live in a municipality whose waste management allows almost everything to be recycled), reused, composted, or just not created at all.  I know single people who create more garbage, use more energy (electricity, gas, and otherwise), and output more pollution than our family.  Having more than the average amount of children doesn't mean that we care less about the environment and if you were to examine our lifestyle, you could see that in many ways, it forces us to care MORE.

Vilifying those who have more than the acceptable amount of children because it is ecologically harmful is wrongheaded and when you understand how large families usually work, it is fairly ignorant.  Almost always families with more children are not shy about passing down clothes, thrifting, not buying things they don't need, reusing pretty much everything when possible, saving electricity, making food from scratch (thus eliminating lots of harmful chemicals and wasted packaging), growing their own food and so on.   For a variety of reasons the large families I know are more concerned about organic food, making their own natural home and body care products, and it must be said, are not contributing to the tremendous amount of artificial hormones that are now found in our water supply due to pharmaceutical contraceptives.  It is ingrained from youth (or should be) in most large families that you don't waste things, that you take care of the things you have and any hint of consumerism is quickly curtailed.  

It is the people who have more disposable income or who are intentionally avoiding conception in order to have more things that are much more likely to use more than is just.  It is the large family that conserves and reuses and sees ecological living as simply a way of life and less of a movement. Certainly these are broad statements and there will always be exceptions but to ecologically admonish the large family simply because they are large is baseless.  And more than this, these families are creating one of the greatest natural resources that exists...people...and that contribution? Priceless.