Cycle tracking can help heal climate change

Something you may not know about me is that I am a climate warrior. The climate crisis is on my mind every moment of every day. It keeps me up at night. And, this isn't new for me. I have worried about the climate crisis for as long as I can remember. In fact, the only reason that my high school recycles - to this day - is because as the President of the National Honor Society in 2007/2008 I strong armed our group into choosing a recycling and environmental education initiative as our year-long project.

Picture this - a bunch of 17 year olds spending their free time calling trash and recycling haulers, gathering recycling bins, coordinating payment plans, AND THEN HOSTING A DAY LONG ASSEMBLY TO TEACH STUDENTS & TEACHERS HOW TO RECYCLE. That's what I did during my senior year of high school. So when someone tells me that buying secondhand clothes isn't as much fun or that composting is confusing, I have a really hard time not saying, "You're not trying hard enough."

Fast-forward 15+ years to last night when I was again frantically searching for how I could make a actual large-scale impact on the climate crisis given that banks, corporations, air travel, and BIG agriculture are largely to blame for the situation we're in (which is that by 2070 when my kid is only 44 years old and I am 80 years old nearly one-fifth of the world will be uninhabitable by humans because it will be too damn hot - that's a lot of people who are going to need a place to go, y'all! Stat from the book What If We Get It Right by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson). To my surprise as I'm scrolling the DrawDown.org solutions list for actions that are needed to draw down our CO2 emissions and right there in front of me is... FAMILY PLANNING & EDUCATION. An even bigger surprise? It had one of the highest ratings, meaning it has the potential to draw down CO2 emissions at a greater rate than many other actions we commonly associate with climate clean up like composting, recycling, and electric cars.

I had been feeling like what the hell am I doing faffing around teaching natural birth control when the world is literally burning down around us?! Then, clear as day, actual climate scientists are saying that these teachings are needed now more than ever to slow the climate crisis, but I still wasn't sold. HOW, y'all, how?!

After reading some more it started to really click...

Family planning and, more precisely, access to voluntary and affordable birth control options can have a HUGE impact on overpopulation which has become a driving factor for climate change. More people means more consumption, more stress on our food systems, more stress on our energy grid (to keep those people warm in the winter and cool in the summer), more cars on the road, more more more. You get the picture.

Don't believe me? Let's use my actual family as an example...

My grandmother was a teen mother... twice. She had two unplanned pregnancies, one at 16 and another at age 18. She had unplanned pregnancies because of a lack of family planning education. Simply put, no one ever taught her how getting pregnant happens or how to prevent it from happening. She simply didn't know. From those two unplanned pregnancies there are now 5 grandchildren and 2 great grandchildren. I am one of the grandchildren and my son is one of the great grandchildren. Because of a lack of family planning education there are 9 additional people in the world. And, that's just one person in my one family. Now of course these are my family members, as well as myself, and I love them all and we're all wonderful and I'm happy we're here, but I use this example to show, using my own every day family, the impact that a lack of family planning education has on overpopulation - which we know is a leading contributor to the climate crisis. I will also put my whole family on blast here too... the only one of those 9 people who is even trying to do a god damn thing about the climate crisis is me. So from two unplanned pregnancies we have 8 people consuming at an irrevocable rate and 1 person living a climate conscious life. I'm not the best at math, but I can tell you that that is a poorly balanced scale, y'all.

So I am writing this love letter to you today to highlight the importance of family planning and fertility awareness methods education on our WHOLE ENTIRE PLANET. It's not just natural birth control. It's a FREE & effective birth control method that can save the world, but first we have to LEARN how to use it.

It's starts with you. Then your daughters. Then your granddaughters.

It starts with making sure that access to family planning education and reproductive rights services are available to everyone, everywhere.

It is time to learn how our bodies truly work. It is time to take our fertility into our own hands. It is time to make this education available to women, girls, and people of all ages, races, and socioeconomic positions. For ourselves. For our families. For our planet. For the future of humanity.

I've said it before and I will say it again, this work here at Sauvage Wellness is about so much more than just cycle tracking and periods. It is about rewilding ourselves and our planet. It is about reconnecting to our bodies and to our natural environment. It is about no longer doing what is "easy" and, instead, doing what is right. It is about saying NO to how things have always been, so we can say YES to how things should be.

And so today I close this message with an ask...

Do you work in a field or career that could benefit from greater access to family planning education? Think - Schools, social work, sports coaches, overseas aid, nursing, etc. If so, please contact me and introduce yourself. I would love to explore how we can bring increased family planning education to your community to better our society and heal our planet.

Dang, I love us.

Ps. Regardless of what field or sector you work in I highly encourage you to look at DrawDown.org 's list of climate action solutions. There are some that will surprise you. Some that you can implement right at home and others that you can use in your workplace to make an even bigger difference. And, others that will need our championing through how we vote, what we buy, where we bank, how we eat, and more. We only have a few decades before life on Earth is unrecognizable. I want better for my children and for yours. They didn't create these problems, but they will undoubtedly have to live with them.