Maybe One: A Case for Smaller Families - Softcover

McKibben, Bill

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0452280923 ISBN 13: 9780452280922

Publisher: Plume, 1999

Synopsis

In light of climate change warnings, more families are looking for ways to reduce their carbon footprint and help prevent disasters like rising sea levels, wildfires, and increasing global temperatures. In this compelling book, the author of The End of Nature and Falter argues for a solution with sociological, population, and environmental benefits: having fewer children.

The earth is becoming dangerously overcrowded, and if more families chose to have only one child, it would make a crucial difference toward ensuring a healthy future for ourselves and our planet for generations to come.

But the environment alone may not persuade most people to consider having just one child, as 80% of Americans have siblings. Powerful stereotypes about only children—that they’re spoiled, selfish, or maladjusted in some way—still persist. McKibben, the proud father of an only child himself, debunks these myths, citing research about the many emotional and intellectual strengths only children possess, including higher test scores, higher levels of achievement in school, and greater development of positive personality traits like maturity and self-control.

At once a powerful personal argument and an accessible exploration of what overpopulation could mean to human life and environmental sustainability, Maybe One is a provocative yet well-reasoned opening to what has become important and lasting debate.

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Review:

Here's the bottom line according to Bill McKibben: the earth will not be able to sustain its ever increasing population indefinitely. But the population problem is not just a phenomenon of developing nations--the United States is a major environmental threat, gobbling up a huge piece of the resources pie as our numbers grow larger every year. To avoid worldwide catastrophe, McKibben believes that the United States must reduce its birthrate.

Maybe One is more about the concept of having only one child per family, than a sanctimonious sermon on the perils producing more than that lone baby will have on the world. Understandably the implications of overpopulation for the planet's resources isn't something the average American cries into his Cheerios about every morning, but Maybe One argues that we must start thinking about family size and stop thinking of population as an "abstract issue" that has no bearing on our lives. McKibben produces compelling if not controversial arguments for curbing the U.S. population explosion, a population which he believes could grow by at least 50 percent by the year 2050 to possibly 400 million people. That's a lot of mouths to feed, fuel to burn, and waste to dispose! McKibben's arguments are a mixture of the highly personal (he speaks in great detail of his decision to have a vasectomy) to the highly global (McKibben cites scary statistics about the greenhouse effect, species extinction, soil erosion, and food shortages). He is particularly passionate about "only children" and that it really is okay to have just one child, arguing that only children are often more intelligent and confident than their multiple-sibling friends.

Like in The End of Nature an earlier McKibben book concerned with man's catastrophic contribution to the greenhouse effect, McKibben urges us in Maybe One to really think about our relationship with the earth. He writes, "No decision any of us makes will have more effect on the world (and on our lives) than whether to bear another child." Prophetic words, but words many parents will find difficult by which to abide. --Naomi Gesinger

About the Author:

Bill McKibben is the author of more than a dozen books, including The End of Nature, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age, and Deep Economy. A former staff writer for the New Yorker, he writes often for Harper's, National Geographic, and the New York Review of Books, among other publications. He is the founder of the environmental organizations Step It Up and 350.org, a global warming awareness campaign that in October 2009 coordinated what CNN called "the most widespread day of political action in the planet's history." He is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College and lives in Vermont with his wife, the writer Sue Halpern, and their daughter.

About this edition

• Publisher: Plume
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0452280923
• ISBN 13: 9780452280922
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256