The Mommy Files, a mom-oriented blog affiliated with the San Francisco Chronicle, ran a post this week about the local chapter of Diaper Free Baby, a nationwide effort to raise kids sans Huggies.

Apparently, there is a growing number of parents who potty train their babies from birth and see it as a way to save thousands of dollars, reduce landfill waste (single use disposable diapers are responsible for one-third of the non-biodegradable waste on Earth), avoid diaper rash and to strengthen the bond with their children.

The story quotes this kook named Willow Lune saying that babies are born with awareness and control of their bodily functions and the ability to communicate when they want to eliminate. In the piece, Lune waxes poetic about babies offering up cues (grunts, wiggles, cries) to signal their parents to hold their bare bottoms over a toilet, a sink, a grassy field.

The essay also cites Procter & Gamble, a diaper manufacturer who recently reported that between 95 and 99 percent of American parents use diapers, and juxtaposes these numbers with statistics from elsewhere on the planet—not surprisingly, many cultures worldwide never use diapers.

I read the post with twisted fascination. On the one hand, I’ve estimated that L tears through an average of 50 diapers each week, and feel terrible that once we get rid of them, the things just sit in our local landfill. On the other hand, though, I can’t imagine it’s very sanitary to hold a baby over a tiny Tupperware every time it has to pee or poop, nor do I think it’s feasible to catch everything every time the kid has to go.

For environmentally minded people, the diaper argument is a real stumper. As parents, you want what’s best and cleanest for your kid. But as lovers of Earth, you want what’s good for the environment, too.

Powergirl and I frequently discuss alternatives to the Huggies we buy at Target every other week. Our most viable candidate: cloth diapers, just like our parents used to use. If we went cloth, we estimate we’d end up doing two or three times the number of washes we do right now. With water supplies dwindling here in Sonoma County, this option isn’t much friendlier for the environment.

It also wouldn’t reduce our carbon footprint to hire a cloth diaper service, since the most affordable service would drive up from Marin County, roughly 45 miles away.

In short, we’re pretty much damned with any diaper decision except going diaper-free.

Herein lays the last conundrum. Sure, Lune advocates life without Huggies, but she also hasn’t met my kid, who can fill a diaper as prodigiously as Mark Teixeira can hit a baseball. No matter what these whack-jobs try to tell me, no matter how aggressively they guilt me into feeling like a bad environmentalist, there’s no way in hell I’m going to get a Tupperware and play Tetris with my newborn’s turds.

Sorry, Earth, but you’re just going to have to deal.