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Contents
For my godchildren, Gordie, Annie, and Micah, and for their brothers and sisters, Alice, Johnny, Nora, Christopher, and Chloe; and for the many, many children of the Johnsburg and Mill Creek United Methodist Church Sunday School
Introduction
P opulation is a subject Ive been trying to avoid for years, and not just because I know it will cause turmoil and angry controversy. It scared me more because it forced me and my wife to confront head-on the issue of how many children we were going to have, a decision that probably affects each of our lives more than any we will ever make. Its as intimate a topic as there is, one of the last subjects we avoid in this taboo-free society. At some level, its not any of my business how many kids anyone else has.
And yet my work on environmental issues kept bringing questions of population front and center. For reasons I will explain at some length, the next fifty years will be crucial to our planets futurethey are the years that could so devastate the earths biology that it will never again be able to support life as abundantly as it does at present. How many people we have on this planet during that half-centuryespecially in its richest sectionswill go a long way toward determining how deep that damage is.
Americans currently bear children at a rate of just under two per woman, which sounds like we should simply be replacing ourselves. But, happily, most of us do not die soon after becoming parents; we live on to see our kids reproduce, and perhaps their kids. Combined with unprecedentedly high levels of immigration, the Census Bureau says this rate of natural increase will bring our population of 270 million to as many as 400 million in those crucial fifty years, that by the year 2050 there will be almost 50 percent more of us than there are right now. These numbers are guesses, forecasts; the Census Bureau revises them regularly as fertility and immigration change. But by even the most conservative estimates, from columnists like Ben Wattenberg, our nations population will grow at least 30 percent in the next half-century. It is true, as I will show, that rates of global population growth have begun to slow, and that the peak of our numbers may be within (distant) sight. It is, unfortunately, also true that that peak is too far off to stave off our environmental troubles, and that the United States in particular continues to grow far faster than other industrialized nations.
But if we averaged 1.5 children per womanif, that is, many more people decided to stop at one child, nudging the birthrate down toward the current European leveland if we simultaneously reduced immigration somewhat, then in the year 2050 our population would be about 230 million, or what it was when Ronald Reagan was elected. Im not saying, then, that everyone should stop at one child; just that if many more of us did so, it would help. That gap of as many as 170 million Americans could be crucial, I think, in reducing our environmental damage. By itself it would not solve the problem, for our fierce appetites and our old-fashioned fossil-fuel technologies also account for much of our dilemma. But it would make a difference.
To be honest, though, thats not the real reason I did the research for this book. I did it because of Sophie, my four-year-old daughter. I wanted to make sure that growing up without brothers and sisters would not damage her spirit or her mind. Thats why the first chapters of this book have nothing to do with the environment and everything to do with kids.
And its why the last chapterafter all the discussion of demographics and global warming and Social Security and immigrationfocuses on parents, on me and my wife and anyone else grappling with what it might mean to raise much smaller families than tradition dictates, or to raise no families at all.
Those considerationsof children and of parents, of our offspring and of our soulsbracket the more traditional argument this book contains. They will serve, I hope, to make what has usually been an abstract question very personal and immediate. I do not doubt that that will make this book even more disturbing to readers who disagree with me. But that is as it should be, for my desire is to open a debate, to get a conversation going.
This particular debate, however, can quickly deteriorate into a shrill and bitter tussle. So I want to begin by listing a few things I am not saying in this book, secure in the knowledge that there are plenty more issues that willand shouldbe contested.
Im not saying that my friends, or anyone else, are wrong to have several children, or that they should feel guilty or defensive. As Ive already said, I dont think its necessary for every family to have but a single child. There are plenty of good reasons to have children, chief among them that kids are magnificent. This volume is dedicated to my godchildren and their brothers and sisters, as well as to the dozens of first, second, third, and fourth children Ive had the pleasure of teaching in my Sunday School class over the years. There are also a dozen categories of grief and joydivorce, remarriage, adoption, and so forththat Ive not covered in these very basic calculations. All Im saying is that we live at a watershed moment in our ecological history when we need at least to consider this question, a question that we almost never talk about. We have dozens of books about how to raise children, where to send them to college, even what to name them; this is no less practical a topic.
And Im not saying that our governments should coerce us into reducing the size of our families. Thats repugnant and its unnecessary; weve barely begun to think about population in this country, and I think its likely that once the discussion begins we can develop some new social norms on our own, through gradual shifts in whats counted as desirable.
Im not saying that population is a problem for some other kind of peopleTanzanians or poor people or teenage welfare mothers. Because we live so large, North Americans (and Europeans and Asians of the quickly growing industrial powers) will largely determine what shape the world is in fifty years hence. Tanzanians can make their own lives more difficult through rapid population growth, but they can do very little to damage the basic fabric of the planet.
And by the same token, I dont consider population to be the problem, though that is what zealots have sometimes claimed. In the past Ive written about overconsumption and about efficiency, topics that will recur in this book. It is essential that we consume less, and consume more intelligentlythat we live in smaller homes, and heat them with sun and wind. But, as we shall see, if the population keeps increasing those difficult changes will be robbed of much of their meaning.
Im not saying this is a problem for women, though thats where the burden of decision-making about family size has usually fallen. Its a question for both halves of any couple, and sometimes for grandparents and friendsand in our case the conversation ended with me in a vasectomy clinic.
And of course Im not trying to pretend that single-child families are a solution that raises no problems. Conservative critics like the American Enterprise Institutes Nicholas Eberstadt have warned, correctly, that the world will feel very different to only kids as they age. A nation with a stable population will clearly have an economy very different from a rapidly growing one. And our nation will age more rapidly than it otherwise would, making it even harder to deal with things like shortfalls in Social Security. Some of this book is devoted to dealing with those problems, and some of it with arguing that they are small compared with the environmental troubles we face. But they are real, and wont be wished away.
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