Dad Says Two Kids Make A Crowd

By John Skow/New London

Elvis Presley was an only child, also Leonardo da Vinci, Nancy Reagan, Robin Williams, Brooke Shields, Joe Montana, Jean-Paul Sartre, John Updike, Chelsea Clinton, Hans Christian Andersen..." Environmentalist Bill McKibben provides this enigmatic list in Maybe One, the latest in a series of gloomy, worthy, admonitory volumes he began in 1989 with The End of Nature. The new book is an effort to persuade couples, maybe, to consider--the author is excruciatingly tactful--reducing the strain on the earth's resources by having only one child.

The subject is touchy, and McKibben goes on at length to show that only children are, on average, perfectly O.K., normal, not lonely and unsocialized, and even likely to do better in school, presumably because of more adult attention. He cites research, some of it a bit woozy-sounding, asserting that "only children show more interest in science, music, math and literature, while kids with siblings care more for...mechanical and technical work, skilled trades, and labor." Yeah, yeah, thinks the reader, concluding (as does McKibben, in fact) that only children are a lot like the rest of us. If your kid has no sibs, don't fret.

But do fret over McKibben's projections of population and resources. U.S. population growth is slowing, but at the current birth rate of just under two children for each woman--a bit under replacement rate--the population will swell from its present 270 million to about 400 million before it levels off around 2050. That is a horde of people, too many for anyone who worries about future food and water supply, air quality and energy depletion (but not too many for contrarian scientists, energy-company spinmeisters and idealogues who rejoice that each new human being is a potential Mozart, or at least a potential customer, so the more the better).

If half of U.S. couples had only one child, and the rest none, two or more, then, says McKibben, the population would plateau around 2020, and drop by 2050 to about 230 million, which was the figure two decades ago. McKibben says this plan would require cuts in immigration too. And it wouldn't save the world, but in McKibben's view it would give the nation some breathing space in what he sees as the cramped and critical next half-century. He cites familiar horrifying statistics: each year the nation paves over an area the size of Delaware; the average North American and his house and car emit 3.5 tons of carbon annually, 20 times the output of the average Costa Rican. Cut consumption instead of births? Hopeless; consumption "is deep in our bones, the way religion was deep in the bones of your average 14th century peasant."

McKibben can sound preachy; he and his wife agonized over having a child and decided to have just one ("the light of my life"), after which he had a vasectomy, which he describes at great length. Journalist Margaret Talbot, who erupted at this in the New Republic last week, is unconvinced by "population doomsayers" and rejects a "politically correct family size." Of the author, whom she describes as a "yuppie yogi," she says, "He is irritating not only because he is so wrong, but also because he is so sanctimonious." Irritating but driven by an impulse to keep us from crowding nature into extinction, leaving the world "a sadder, lonelier" place.

--By John Skow/New London