No

While I recognize the environmental aspects of the debate over the best type of diapers for babies — disposable being landfill-clogging and cloth consuming valuable water — I’m pretty certain that this particular out-of-the-box solution is not the answer — at least not for folks coming to visit my house.

As environmentalists celebrate the 34th annual Earth Day, some in the green movement are now advocating “diaper-free” babies to help save the planet.
[…] The green movement is now promoting diaperless babies as a “retro, cutting-edge, environmentally friendly scheme” to mothers throughout the industrialized world.
[…] “There is a way to have a baby and NOT use diapers,” says one website advocating diaperless babies. Parents are urged to get in tune with their infant’s body signals and hold babies over toilets, buckets and shrubbery or any other convenient receptacle when nature calls.
One advocate suggests bringing a “tight-lidded bucket” along to serve as a waste receptacle when mothers take their babies out in public.

Riiiiight. I’m sure that will impress the the proprietors of all the businesses you choose to visit.

Scott Noelle, editor of the Continuum Concept website and a father, explained why he eventually stopped using diapers on his infant daughter Olivia, in a web essay titled “Going Diaperless.”
“In my mind, diapers became the symbol of the Evil Empire of Western Parenting in which babies must suffer to accommodate the needs of their parents’ broken-continuum culture: a controlled, sterile, odorless, wall-to-wall carpeted fortress in which to live with the illusion of dominion over nature,” wrote Noelle, on the website livingharmony.com.
Despite his concerns, Noelle continued to use diapers on his daughter, despite the fact that he “felt like a monster and a fraud.”
Noelle finally chose to go diaperless and looked to traditional cultures for inspiration. “How I longed for a simple, dirt-floored, baby-friendly hut like that of a Yequana family,” he wrote.

No mention of the infant mortality rate due to dysentry amongst the “dirt-floored, baby-friendly” Yequana.

I tried reading Noelle’s essay but only got this far:

As Olivia grew, so did her objections to being diapered, as well as my feelings of guilt. I worried that diapering her could cause sexual hang-ups, impede her natural diaphragmatic breathing, and even interfere with the proper development of her bones as she walked in the bulky abominations. Maybe some of my worries were irrational, but certainly, I thought, the practice of diapering must be at odds with a human infant’s innate, continuum expectations.

I think you had it right with the “irrational” part, but … well, I’ll tell you what: you raise your child the way you want, and feel free to visit my house … after the kid is fully potty trained. Assuming potty training is not also “a symbol of the Evil Empire of Western Parenting.”

(via Ipse Dixit)