A Gift for the Earth

Celebrating children’s birthdays are always fun. There’s cake, there’s ice cream, and good times – what’s not to like?
It’s the gifts that concern me. Not the quality, but the quantity. In our consumer-driven world, our desire to have the latest this or that has spilled over to our children’s world. At kids’ birthday parties, there seems to be an unspoken rule of buying the latest, greatest, and most expensive toy for the birthday child. And the quantity! I know of at least one friend who has doubles of some of her child’s toys, a set for upstairs and a set for downstairs.
William Rees, an urban planner at the University of British Columbia, estimated that it requires four to six hectares of land to maintain the consumption level of the average person from a high-consumption country like Canada. The problem is that in 1990, worldwide there were only 1.7 hectares of ecologically productive land for each person. There is probably less than that today. Another shocking statistic is that 99 percent of the stuff we harvest, mine, process, transport in North America – is trashed within six months.**
What is an environmentally conscious parent to do? Well, for my toddler’s first birthday party, we had cake, ice cream and lots of fun. But I asked my guests not to bring any gifts, and if they did, the gifts should be taken from their own child’s collection and not have been bought for this occasion. This request was well received by everyone and some even went as far as writing a beautiful poem for my child as a gift or making a gift from recycled materials – which is way more meaningful than another generic toy.

* Richard Robbins, Global Problem and the Culture of Capitalism, (Allyn and Bacon, 1999), pp. 209-210.

** Paul Hawken, Natural Capitalism, (1999) p. 81.

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