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Since Bill McKibben published his bestselling book The End of Nature in 1989, a few things have happened. Planet Earth has grown warmer, more crowded with people and less crowded with other species, more polluted, ostensibly more democratic and specifically more globalized. In the 10 years since the revolutions that ended the Cold War changed the map of Europe, it has--economically at least--been the best of times and the worst of times. For McKibben, there have been a few personal changes. He has had a child, Sophie, and a vasectomy. He now no longer works in the shadow of the population clock that runs near Times Square but in the Adirondacks, in a small town where the moose and bear roam. Even though the tick, tick, tick, of the three people added each second to the world's population may be further away, McKibben still hears it. Yet the departure to the country and the arrival of Sophie have given him an elegiac and wistful tone, and Maybe One is a book that not so much pulls its punches as doesn't enter the ring--content to suggest, wonder, and ultimately raise a mild demurral at the current consumption and production patterns around the globe. McKibben's aims are modest. His book is "not [about] saving the world, simply opening up a little room for ingenuity and discipline and grace." Ingenuity, discipline, and grace would perhaps be welcome when it comes to discussing (over)population, and McKibben certainly has the easy, fluid writing style to make the subject seem extremely inoffensive. He begins the book with a long essay on the normality of only children, pointing out that early, nineteenth-century studies (which lacked any reasonably scientific rigor) were largely responsible for the stereotype of only children as maladapted, lonely misfits. Not only have many more recent, and more scientifically valid, studies proved only children to be as successful as children with siblings, these studies suggest that singletons may in fact be more successful. The reasons for this are varied: for instance, more money is available for the singletons' education and more time is spent with parents--who make them feel more loved and bring out adult coping traits more quickly. McKibben's tone is somewhat defensive throughout, mainly because he's aware of how pervasive a social stigma ("You're just selfish," "They'll be weird") having only one child is. It is a stigma even he doesn't avoid when he paints an unfairly negative picture of those who choose not to have children at all. McKibben's main point, however, is environmental. It is not enough, he argues, to demand that China and India, and other developing countries with large populations, reduce their populations. (The forced sterilization programs and one-child policies, McKibben believes, are not only socially undesirable but ultimately ineffective.) Nor is it enough for developed (and developing) nations to all become vegetarian or use energy more efficiently or even consume less--although all these things would help. What is undeniable, McKibben writes, is that current population trends are pushing global consumption patterns to a point where the Earth is already changing profoundly in a way unseen before in human history. We do not know what will happen, but we know that--whatever Earth's actual carrying capacity of humans turns out to be--the Earth can only tolerate a certain number of humans consuming a certain amount before the system breaks down. It, therefore, makes sense to do the thing that has the most effect: bring fewer consumers of enormous amounts of energy and resources into the world in the first place. Sensibly, McKibben examines the statements of the doomsayers (those, like Malthus and Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb) who think that the future holds nothing but starvation, misery, and massive human extinction if the population expands. Malthus--who argued that food supply cannot increase at the rate population increases--was wrong in virtually all his predictions: the Green revolution has assured the planet enough food for us all. But McKibben also takes on the optimists, such as Ben Wattenberg, who think that more people simply means more ingenuity to solve the problems currently facing us, and that technology will save us again. Because we are currently altering our resource base so profoundly, says McKibben, even technical innovation will offer limited amelioration in the face of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, rising water levels, retreating snowlines, changing tundra and prairies, altered spawning and migration patterns, diversions of currents, extinction of species, and the other consequences of global warming. Indeed, the plateauing of fishing yields and grain harvests, among other signs, suggests the horn of plenty may already be emptying. McKibben is shrewd enough to know that talk about environmental devastation and human (over)population tends to make eyes glaze over. He points out that both, after all, consist of lots of individuals trying to make it in the world and producing their own little bundles of joy. McKibben believes that the urge to reproduce--one so deep as to be almost mystical--needs to be acknowledged as much as the imperative to conserve and maintain homeostasis needs to be instilled if our world is to survive somewhat intact. To this end, McKibben places trust in our ability to adapt, to choose, and to recognize that we can become better parents of the planet by learning to be better parents of our one child. McKibben is unabashedly anthropocentric. He wants "to be as practical as possible, as fixated on people." Consequently, he does not go into detail about what effect more Sophies will have on the other five to 30 million species who have as much right as we do to live on this small blue thing we call home. And it is hard to believe that grace alone with solve the "practical" problems of who gets water rights, who houses the displaced millions of refugees, the loss of topsoil, flooded islands, and other potential catastrophes. Pre-publication publicity originally announced
McKibben's book as It Has to be One--which suggests that McKibben was
originally willing to take on fatalists and natalists both, and demand
real accountability for those who have another kid just to fill up the
lonely heart of their Jeep Grand Cherokee. McKibben is to be commended
to trying to ease in what may be the most radical plan around for changing
our future; that he sells it so softly just shows how far we have to
go.
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