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.

About this title

Review

"The next I-search:50 years," says the author, "will be crucial to our planet's future--they are the years that could so devastate the earth's biology that it will never again be able to support life as abundantly as it does at present". This is a big topic for a relatively short book and an elegant writing style combined with good editing of information and points means that McKinnen's book does manage to explore this idea fully.

The chapters are headed "Family", "Species", "Nation" and "Self", and each travels a fascinating path through past research, ideas and future predictions, made cohesive by the author's own passionate beliefs. Although its main pool of facts and figures source from the US, much of it is universal and McKinnen discusses global issues too.

Advocating one-child families is a difficult and controversial issue, as the author readily points out, and this is one of the sticking points that he wrestles with in the book. Instead of asking whether we should have just one child, he asks: what if we don't?

As the author himself says: This is the last chance to change the world. --Alison Jardine

Review

"What stands out in this eloquent book... is McKibben's wonderfully illuminating and entertaining work in tracking down our national prejudice against only children and single-child families. There and throughout this call to arms, the reader feels the added dimension of a father's love."--Publishers Weekly

"A timely book."--Booklist

"An impassioned call for Americans to limit their offspring in the name of the planet."--Kirkus Reviews

"A warmly personal exploration of what may be humankind's most compelling dilemma."--The San Francisco Chronicle

"One of those rare books that encourages the reader to think and gives us the tools with which to do so; it has a point of view without ever becoming doctrinaire. For all its sobering issues, it is a delight to read. McKibben is that better kind of optimist, one who sees a problem and finds liberation in sculpting an answer."--The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review

"Compelling."--The Boston Globe

About this edition

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