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

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

China is an example for the whole world to watch right now. There, you have increasing consumption rates and improved standards of living--including increased car use and meat-eating--while the birth rate is holding steady. Do you think there will be political unrest as people with higher standards of living may demand the right to have more children, because they will be better able to take care of more?

Possibly. No one knows whether the desired family size has really changed or not there--whether the idea of one-child families is merely a matter of coercion, or if small families have really become what people want. It's so crowded there that it would not be surprising if people had woken up--even without government intervention--to the idea of smaller families.

Environmentally speaking, if birth rates remain stable in China, but consumption rates continue to increase, how much damage, overall, is this going to do?

A lot. If those one billion people try to live like middle-class Americans, that's way, way, way too many people. It's not even clear that the world can deal with merely America living like this. It's clear that we're going to have to change our consumption patterns, or the rest of the world is going to try to live like we do.

Do you think those changes should start with the birth rate here, or with our consumption patterns?

Changes should start with both. I've worked harder on consumption issues than I have on population issues over the years. Trying to change our ideas about consumption is one of the hardest tasks one can take on. So far, we've made extremely little progress. The voluntary simplicity movement is going to affect us, at best, in incremental measures.

You write that coercion will not work, but that it's going to take quality education to let people know what's going on--like the fact that the increase in human population in the 1990s exceeded the total world population in the . Do you believe such scary statistics will change people's minds, or is it going to take some other form of education?

I don't think statistics are likely to do that because people spend entirely too much time thinking about population on some abstract Third World level--and not enough on a personal level. Much more likely, it's the fact that one kid is okay that will convince them. A lot of people, for many reasons, might want to have very small families, but may feel uneasy about it. Reassuring them is really important.

Do you feel quality-of-life issues would be one of the most important things in deciding to have just one child, or a limited number? To be able to devote more of your resources and time to fewer children?

More of your time is the most important thing of all. That's what we're running short of in this country. And it's one of the great pleasures of having just one kid--the chance to spend a lot of time with them and be better able to focus on them.

Of everything you've learned while writing Maybe One, what one piece of information would you want to pass on to your daughter Sophie?