MAYBE ONE:
A Personal and Environmental Argument for Single-Child Families
By Bill McKibben
Simon & Schuster, 254 pages, $23
This book will infuriate a lot of people for a lot of reasons–many just because of its title (I’ll come back to what infuriated me). But overlook its shortcomings as a treatise on family planning because “Maybe One” is a riveting, richly informative moral plea that Americans understand and act on the consequences of our modern prosperity. And unlike so many books of its kind, it is likely to reach–with encouragement–the very audience it needs to reach. (Grandparents and grown children, that includes you.)
In this deceptively small volume, Bill McKibben, a journalist best known for his book “The End of Nature,” rounds up an astonishing number of facts and speculations about the near future of our species, nation and world ecosystem to demonstrate why we in particular must slow our population growth more than we already have.
If you’re like most Americans, you don’t see our birthrate as a threat to the environement; that’s an issue for Third World countries to fret about. You may weigh, in your mind’s eye, the teeming streets of Calcutta against our own fruited plains, figuring we’ve plenty of room for growth. Well, has Bill McKibben got news for you. Our most urgent dilemma is not that we’ll run out of space, or even necessarily out of resources (although harvests of corn, wheat, rice and ocean fish have all dropped since peaking in the 1980s), but that we’ll run out of “sinks”–“the atmospheric equivalent of garbage dumps” that must absorb the byproducts, toxic and benign, of our increasing appetites. We must comprehend not just how many we are but how “big” we are–how significant are our footprints as consumers (and disposers). And whose footprints, do you think, look a lot like Godzilla’s?
According to one scientist’s calculations, one person in hunter-gatherer times used about 2,500 calories of energy each day, all of it from food–equivalent to a dolphin’s daily intake. “Modern human beings use 31,000 calories apiece, most of it in the form of fossil fuel. That’s the equivalent of a pilot whale. And the average American uses six times as much as that–as much as a sperm whale.” According to another comparison, each American uses 70 times the energy of a Bangladeshi, 20 times that of a Costa Rican. Numbers aside, there’s no denying that each American we add to the planet weighs a lot more than one of “them.”
Why not just urge more self-restraint? Because, sadly, we’re displaying less than ever before. Despite our supposed environmental awareness, we continue to equate progress with expansion, success with more stuff. Right now, “the average car . . . going to a junkyard has better gas mileage than the average car coming off the dealer’s lot”; for every energy-saving compact fluorescent bulb installed in the average household, seven conventional light bulbs have been added. And you can be sure most computer users haven’t a clue that one 6-inch silicon wafer may take 3,000 gallons of water to manufacture. Consumerism–the celebration of production and consumption–is “deep in our bones,” McKibben points out, and politicians wouldn’t dare question that ethic. Why? Because it would mean slowing the economy, something McKibben says “we won’t even discuss” in our society.
Because it’s clear we “won’t live simply enough soon enough to solve the problem,” McKibben says, the only realistic hope we have of scaling back is by creating fewer Americans. Ideally, he shows, we must imminently cut our birthrate from slightly less than 2 to 1.5 children per woman (I hope per man as well; OK, I’m quibbling). Some women would continue to have two or more–he’s not proposing reproductive coercion–but many more must stop at one, as have McKibben and his wife.
To see that choice as logical, the author knows, is not necessarily to be comfortable with it, and here’s where this book is so impressively ambitious–and sometimes so misguided. Answering every “Yes, but” that readers could conjure, McKibben addresses at length the hardest questions arising from the biologically contrary determination to make ourselves smaller. To create fewer Americans, mustn’t we also limit immigration? (Yes, but not completely or for the wrong reasons.) How will we cope with our already alarmingly aging society? (To begin with, by challenging our notions of older citizens as a nonproductive drain on society, and our antiquated system of retirement.) Aren’t teenage mothers largely to blame for modern birthrates? (No; though our teenage birthrate is the highest in the industrial world, it has remained constant relative to our total birthrate since 1950.) What about the Catholic Church’s injunctions against birth control? In addressing this incendiary question, McKibben takes a fascinating tack, tracing the history of Christian views on fertility, celibacy and contraception as they have come to intersect with American determinism. Convincingly and eloquently, he argues that the command to “be fruitful and multiply” is as empowered by our national work ethic as it is by reverence for scripture, that Americans embrace the sacrifices of raising a large family as a way to build character and strengthen social values. In the end, one has to agree that the pope is too easy a scapegoat.
McKibben’s powers of persuasion wobble, however, in the sections of the book (among them, alas, the opening chapter) where he extols the integrity of one-child families. He does a good job of dismissing the notion that these kids are all “spoiled rotten,” but in his eagerness to debunk what he sees as a widespread prejudice against only children as “lonely oddballs” and their parents as egotists unwilling to sacrifice for a big (read: better) family, he falls into the worst habits of a journalist. Without a whit of analysis or even good-humored skepticism, he cites every study ever to show that “onlies” are smarter, more adventuresome and artistic, more academically focused than their peers with siblings. He never raises the possibility, for instance, that higher IQs may be the result of genes and socioeconomic status, that the kind of parents who stop at one child may be more affluent and better educated (and have higher IQs) than parents of large families.
And while acknowledging that the subject of family size is fairly taboo, he takes at face value a survey finding that parents’ “single biggest reason for having a second child is to provide their firstborn with a sibling.” Considering that part of the taboo involves our curious reluctance to discuss the selfish motivations for parenthood, I, for one, doubt seriously the integrity of this finding. Pick up just about any one of the countless books written today on mothering (or fathering) and you will read hymn after hymn to the euphoria of having babies simply to be a parent over and over again. If providing a sibling were honestly our primary reason for having No. 2, why would so many people go on having more?
Like McKibben, I have one child–almost certainly an only–yet most of his defenses for single children left me feeling skeptical and irritated rather than pleased, perhaps because they seem to support his choices too simplistically. Especially outrageous to me was what amounted to an attack on siblingship itself. Describing it as “a pretty bitter lifelong contest,” he suggests that an only child will be spared not just this rivalry but the heartache of worrying that Mom loved Brother best and, more ominous, the risk of sibling incest. This is like suggesting that you shouldn’t marry because you might divorce or, worse, find yourself battered! Glibly disparaging remarks about his own brotherhood do nothing to strengthen his case.
Even more puzzling–since there are times when it feels as if this book should be titled “Maybe None”–McKibben basically demeans the choice not to have children at all, quoting a woman who worries about losing her ” `sexuality as well as . . . identity’ ” and a young man who can’t imagine sacrificing ” `for someone who’s still got his whole life ahead of him.’ “
If this book affects readers’ reproductive decisions, I suspect the environmental arguments will hold sway, convincing us that a generation of onlies will live richer, less-imperiled lives than a generation of Brady Bunches. Writing about our role in the ecological and social future of our world, McKibben makes his case with sensitivity, humor and a gift for pinning down abstract concepts with lasting, affecting images. Addressing ecologist Garrett Hardin’s only-so-much-room-on-the-lifeboat argument for cutting immigration, he writes: “Lifeboat ethics don’t work so well when you’re sailing on a yacht. We could still take in some of those drowning passengers if we were willing to throw a bit of our stuff overboard, and in our heart of hearts we know that.” And, thanks to the sperm-whale analogy, I don’t know when I’ll stop seeing passersby on my street as lumbering, landlocked cetaceans.
One thing this book will do is make us look at a lot of benumbingly familiar dismal news (global warming, dwindling Social Security, the need for thrift) from a badly needed new angle. All McKibben’s asking is that we take population personally, and maybe it’s not such a bad thing that in the process he manages to say something offensive to just about everyone. Anger makes people talk, and though talk is cheap, it’s a start.
