Health Medical Information

Raising Baby Green was easy and quick to read and is a book I will keep around simply for the fact that Dr. Greene has put together an impressive resource guide of websites where one can find lots of information on greening one’s life and home. I’m sure this book will be a great reference in the future when I’m looking to buy something, that being said, I had two problems with this book.

First, after about the second chapter this book starts to read like an advertisement to buy buy buy! For example, there is repeated references to bringing you own organic cotton sheets to wherever you give birth and using them to replace the sheets at the hospital/birthing center. Now call me pragmatic, but 300 count organic cotton sheets cost between $125-$175 for my bed, thus, these are not the ideal sheets TO GIVE BIRTH ON. They will be ruined and I know when I’m expecting a baby I don’t generally have $175 dollars to throw away. Nor does he address the impracticality of packing home sheets covered in birth mess for washing.

While Dr. Green does repeatedly say you can do as little or as much greening as you like in your home, he really does seem to push for more. There comes a point when ripping up your current hardwoods floors which are perfectly good to put down new floors made from cork which is a renewable resource stops being green. If you gut your entire house to “remodel green” the question becomes, are you really being green? Or are you just buying into the latest fad and wasting valuable, usable resources?

This green baby guide seems to have bought into our consumer culture hook, line and sinker, which is the reason I was going to give it 4 stars, but I dropped that down to 3 stars when I ran into my second problem with this book: Mis-information.

On page 248 there is a section titled “How to Drive Green.” Two of the suggestions given are changing your air filter (which he says will save you $130 in fuel economy) and filling your tank at night. Now if you google “10 gas saving myths” you will find several articles about, well, gas saving myths and both of these are on there. Neither filling up at night nor changing your air filter really increase you fuel economy.

Green goes on further to say that filling up at night, “decreases evaporation during pumping, so anything that escapes won’t be cooked in to the ozone.” So, those fumes I see/smell when I pump gas at night don’t go into the ozone? Because it’s night? So . . .where do they go? To the pub for a beer?

If Greene has mis-information about fuel economy in his book that can be disputed by a simple google search, it makes me wonder what else he got wrong.
Rating: 3 / 5

This book was a gift for a friend who is pregnant with her first child. I heard an interview on NPR’s People’s Pharmacy and expected the book to great. I was thrilled. It was better than I imagined. My friend loved it too and is excited to apply some of the great advice. I recommend this book to anyone who has children or is thinking of starting a family.
Rating: 5 / 5