BILL McKIBBEN: Three's Company—Four's Crowd. - Review - book reviews

E: The Environmental Magazine, Nov, 1998 by Tracey C. Rembert

When Bill McKibben wrote The End of Nature in 1989, his Malthusian vision of global warming was met with considerable skepticism. But his prescience has been proven by a panel of international climatologists, and witnessed by victims of drought, flooding and bizarre weather patterns all over the world. Now, the former staff writer at The New Yorker, prolific freelance writer and author of Hope, Human and Wild, takes an in-depth look at family size and overpopulation in his latest book, Maybe One: A Personal and Environmental Argument for Single-Child Families. He warns us that if moderate action is ignored now, future overcrowding may become a dire global event.

From China's coercive family planning programs to Africa's voluntary family-downsizing, the world's explosive population growth is slowly declining. But McKibben notes that America continues to be the land of excess, and with 2.1 children born per woman, our use of resources and global destruction outweigh many a Third World family averaging four to six children.

McKibben argues that, to prevent future space and resource conflict, families should consider having just one child. But, he adds, "I'm not saying that single-child families are a permanent solution. Clearly, they're not; eventually they would yield populations smaller than almost anyone would want." But he wants to open the topic to debate.

McKibben believes that education and discussion--not coercion--will help Americans overcome their long-held misconceptions concerning only-children. From psychological testing to his own personal experience, this self-proclaimed "Christian environmentalist" touts the healthy relationships in single-child families and how, by even discussing the issue of having just one child, Americans will have begun to move toward a more sustainable concept of family for the coming millennium.

E: What inspired you to write a book about having only one child?

McKibben: When environmentalists have discussed population issues before, it has usually been in quite abstract ways, about birth rates and things. I wanted to discuss it in very real terms--about how many children one might have. And I had one child of my own, and wanted to find out whether it was going to damage my child to be an "only." There was a professional and personal interest combined.

You mentioned in your book that you and your wife debated a long while over whether or not to have the one child that you have now. What really made you decide to have one after all?

Just how much we wanted a child.

You cite immigration throughout your book as a major factor in population growth, particularly for the U.S. But globally, isn't immigration really just a moving around of people, not true growth?

Well, it is. As I say in the book, I don't think it is the major problem. But I do think it's a component in all this. It's true that immigration moves people around. The problem--if you're worried about things like global warming--is that when you turn someone into an American, you turn them into a uniquely large part of global problems [because of consumption patterns]. Why do people want to move to America? So they can become, in many cases, better off, which is completely legitimate.

But which also means greater consumption.

Becoming an American means using resources at a level greater than in any other country. It means becoming almost a member of a different species in terms of consumption levels.

If people discussed family planning with their spouses or partners and commit to having a limited number of children, will that push them towards taking more permanent birth control measures?

I would think so. I hope that in as many cases as it's possible, that it's men who decide to do it, because it's a very easy operation; it really isn't so much for women.

Why do you think the topic of family planning is so intimate and so difficult to discuss? What is so taboo about deciding how many children to have?

Good question. It's one I don't completely understand, but a section of my book is spent tracing some of the religious interests in this topic. And since I'm religious myself, it was or great interest to me.

You mean the "be fruitful and multiply" concept?

Well, that certainly. That's the one commandment in the that we've managed to fulfill, so maybe we can go on from there and check it off the list. But there's also a long history of New Testament and church dogma about contraception, and things are still evolving. It's not really caught up in the "be fruitful and multiply" philosophy, but it is caught up in questions about body, spirit and personal selfishness. And these are important questions--not to be taken lightly. The Catholic Church, and even the Pope and others, are not entirely crazy, I think, in their discussions of family planning. They just come down in different places than I do.

How do you feel about fertility drugs and technologies that are bringing six or seven babies to a family at once?

Statistically, it still remains unimportant. But, it is important for environmentalists or anyone else thinking about these things to not overlook the basic fact that kids are great. It's an incredibly joyful thing, when a child is born. And when six kids are born --that's kind of neat in some ways too. I understand why people feel that way. And in a perfect world, in a different time or place, I might have had a dozen myself--and enjoyed it immensely. There's nothing more fun than having a kid and bringing him up. But we don't live in a perfect time or place. We live under certain constraints. And one of the points of my book was to show that having one child can be just as wonderful, just as much fun, and just as good for the child.