Dear little one,
While we don’t know you quite yet, we’re really looking forward to being your moms in the coming years. We imagine that we’ll have lots of good times together, especially since we both love to play. We can picture rolling down hills together, building sandcastles at the beach, riding bikes, exploring new hikes together, and lots more. Your moms just finished our first triathlon together – and we hope to be able to do one with you one of these days too!
But we’re worried that climate change may very well interfere with our ability to do these fun activities as a family. Everyday, we see headlines about pollution, droughts, and disease threatening our health and wellbeing. And it looks like it just keeps getting worse. Unless we change our behavior and ensure governments across the world enact bold policies to help curb climate change, our ability to swim, bike, and run together may be limited.
In our own personal lives, we’ve tried to make smart choices to do our part to protect our environment and public health. We own a hybrid car and try to use public transit as much as possible, we buy local veggies from a local farm, we use energy efficient light bulbs, and we stopped using paper towels. But we could definitely do more.
We are working to change our diets to shrink our environmental footprint. For example, we’re trying to eat less meat and purchase items with less packaging. We just purchased a new book to help us make better food choices. Our friend Jill has inspired us to host clothing swap parties with our friends – instead of buying new clothes, we can save money and the environment by shopping from each others’ closets. There are lots of little things we can do like this to make a big difference – we just need a little nudge!
So in the coming months, we plan to complete a full assessment of our environmental impact online. We hope to discover our biggest areas of resource consumption, learn what we can do better, and create an action plan to improve over the next year.
We know that we won’t ever be perfect, but by the time you come into our lives, we hope to be a good example for you and your siblings. We can’t wait to meet you!
Jenny and Christine, your future moms
