A few months back, Crunchy Chicken launched a non-profit called Goods 4 Girls, which provides African teens with reusable menstrual pads to enable them to stay in school. I guess that's super nice of her. I'm sure those girls will be happy with their Lunapads or whatever. There is supposed to be some impact on the environment, something to do with burning disposable pads, which was the alternative provided by certain companies, and, as us greenies know, disposable everything is bad.
Still, as nice a gal as Crunchy is, couldn't she have picked something with more environmental punch? At least something closer to home? Keeping teens in Africa in school . . . it just seems we might put our efforts to more efficient use.
As it turns out, Crunchy knew what she was doing.
According to my recent read, Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet, keeping girls in school longer in undeveloped countries directly impacts fertility rates. Because they are in school, they are less likely to get married at a younger age and begin child-rearing. Further, education empowers women to speak up more and negotiate with their spouses about, among other things, family size. This, in turn, will decrease overpopulation in undeveloped countries, alleviate the food crisis in coming years, prevent resource exhaustion and alleviate political instability (e.g., terrorists and genocide).
Common Wealth made clear to me, this planet is smaller than we realize. All life - from the smallest bees to teens in Africa - is interconnected. Scientists repeatedly point out how one species' extinction affects the entire ecosystem that species once inhabited, throwing nature's tightrope balance off. We humans are not exempt. We are, not only linked with millions of non-human species, but we are tied to each other - even when we are half a world a way. Instability in the Middle East clearly impacts us in the form of terrorist attacks. Deforestation in the Amazon speeds up climate change. As humans, as Americans we find ourselves perched on the spider web that is the Earth. When one thread breaks, the stability of the whole is in jeopardy.
What a tangled web we weave and what sense it makes after all to help those we cannot see.