A Tough Question in Tough
McKibben, Bill
Point of View A Tough Question in Tough Times by Bill McKibben ANYONE INTERESTED in the future of wild places in this country must bear a lot of things in mind. There are laws, of course, that...
...That's 50 percent more Americans in 50 years...
...That was enough to convince my wife and me...
...No one wants Congress telling us to have fewer babies...
...Fifty percent more Americans means a fifty percent greater As the world's superconsumers, Americans have a greatly magnified impact on the atmosphere, and hence on every ecosystem on earth, impact on the polar ice caps, the Nile delta, the tundra...
...Between natural increase and naturalization, our current population of 270 million is likely to hit 400 million by 2050, according to the Census Bureau...
...I've spent the last few years working on approaches to this problem...
...Not "what should our birth rate be," but "how many kids am I planning on having...
...Here are the figures, shorn of any judgment, any valence: America's population is growing much faster than any other industrialized country's...
...We could, if single-child families became as common as two-child families, and if we limited immigration somewhat, actually have a slightly smaller population than we do right now in 50 years...
...And there's not an atmospheric chemist who can't calculate what that burst of new Americans will mean to the cloud of carbon dioxide now threatening the equilibrium of our climate...
...to look at the road during her commute and imagine 50 percent more drivers...
...There's the invasion of exotic species, the spread of plant blights, the encroachment of clear cutting and other forms of industrial forestry...
...One solution, I think, is for more of us to have just one child—and to begin a conversation within our culture that topples some of the stereotypes about only children, stereotypes that cause many parents to add to their families...
...Creating that margin seems to me the task of our generation, and one way to do it is to think about numbers...
...But the only way to think about numbers is to think in real terms...
...At the same time, the country is admitting 800,000 immigrants annually...
...And there is the sheer press of our numbers, too—by far the messiest and most divisive of environmental questions, one that I've managed to successfully ignore for most of the many years I've spent working on these issues...
...Though we now average about two kids apiece, the echoes of the baby boom continue to swell our population...
...My research into a half-century of studies showed overwhelming evidence that only children are not spoiled, not weird, not depressed, not warped—they are likely to be slightly higher achievers, and their personalities are indistinguishable from those of other kids...
...People in the developing world can devastate their own lives through rapid population growth—they run out of firewood or school desks—but they consume too little to have a wider effect...
...But those laws are at most a beginning...
...One can't say with any precision what that will mean to solitude, to silence, to habitat, to wildness, to darkness...
...His new hook, Maybe One: A Personal and Environmental Argument for Single-Child Families, was published this spring by Simon & Schuster...
...Bill McKibben is the author of The End of Nature...
...To me, that seems like a lot...
...There are laws, of course, that might protect such places— wilderness designation for vast western tracts, or zoning restrictions for suburban open space...
...That's a tough question, but it's a tough time...
...It's no stretch of truth to say that, judging by our impact, we already live in the most populous nation on earth...
...But there's not an American who can't look around his neighborhood and imagine what it would mean to have 50 percent more neighbors...
...if we keep sprawling at the same pace that we've sprawled since 1977, by 2050 the urbanized area of the United States will have doubled to 312,000 square miles, an area larger than Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan combined...
...There are also forces like global climate change that can fundamentally alter even the most tightly guarded wilderness...
...As the world's superconsumers, each of us has a greatly magnified impact on the atmosphere, and hence on every ecosystem on earth...
...Still, what is there to do about it...
...Since we seem not to be learning to live more frugally and compactly, it will likely translate into a few more rings of suburbs around each city...
...cutting immigration means crushing the dreams of people immensely poorer than ourselves...
...We seem able to accommodate our extra numbers—but our lifestyle casually devastates the entire biosphere...
...That would raise other problems—social security, for instance—but it would open up some crucial margin for the rest of creation as we confront the crest of our environmental woes...
...Even if we decided to reduce our careening consumption, even if we managed to cut back our use of fuels and minerals by an unprecedented one percent annually, population growth would leave us running in place 50 years hence...
Vol. 2 • June 1998 • No. 3
