41 pages • 1 hour read
The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here
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BetaPart 1, Chapters 2-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Life”
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary: “Who We Are”
Global society has long held fears about overpopulation, the central topic of Chapter 2. Jahren provides a parade of past societies that feared they were getting too big. In Mesopotamia, a society that thrived around 1800 BCE, they feared there would not be enough resources to feed their communities. In Ancient Greece, Aristotle expressed the same anxiety. In 1798, Thomas Robert Malthus published An Essay on the Principle of Population, which “really took overpopulation neuroses to the next level” (11). In the mid-19th century, John Stuart Mill also feared a lack of food for a growing population.
Historically, these concerns have often been unfounded. In the 21st century, however, what was once a fear is now more of a reality. There are currently seven billion people living on Earth. The women who are most likely to have a large number of babies are those living in countries or societies with extreme gender inequality, including low female wages and limited access to healthcare and other opportunities—these are what Jahren calls “high gap” countries (12). Jahren supports efforts to curb global population growth through the education of women: “It makes sense that the most effective and long-lasting mechanism for curbing global population growth revolves around an elimination of gender inequality” (13).
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary: “How We Are”
Jahren tells a story about a close friend whose baby died at a few weeks old, which she uses as an introduction to the larger topic of infant and mother mortality. On average in the United States, one mother dies for every 1,000 live births; that rate is better than the global average, where one mother dies every 500 live births. Despite such variation, child and maternal mortality has broadly improved across the world in the last 300 years. “If we envision ourselves on a global journey toward eliminating the agony of loss that our grandparents endured,” she notes, “we should rejoice at how very far we have traveled, even while acknowledging the distance ahead” (17).
Not only have infant and maternal life expectancies improved, but so has life expectancy for all people. Children born in the 1920s were expected to reach their late fifties. Children born in the early 2000s, however, should expect to live into their eighties.
On the topic of life expectancy, Jahren journeys through the major causes of death in the present day. Death by suicide kills more people annually than war and homicide combined. In 2016, there were 800,000 suicides around the world. “For all the violence we perpetuate against one another,” she writes, “we inflict much more upon ourselves” (18). However, disease is the number one reason why people die across the globe.
Death from illness affects all people, regardless of their region or economic status. Not everyone gets the same type of disease, however. People from wealthier countries such as America more often die of strokes, heart attacks, diabetes, cancer, and kidney disease: “Each of these diseases is dreadful in its own way, but they have something important in common: none of them are contagious” (19). Without access to better sewage systems, antibiotics, and immunizations, people living in poorer countries more often die from contagious diseases and at a younger age than wealthier populations. These numbers, however, are improving.
Part 1, Chapters 2-3 Analysis
Some scholars might argue that the parallel Jahren draws between a growing population and environmental destruction creates a false equivalency. The two do not necessarily go hand in hand. Evidence shows that large populations of people do not necessarily consume more resources. For example, India has a much larger population than the United States, but Americans consume far more fossil fuels and therefore have a greater global footprint. Although Jahren frequently notes this disparity in consumption, she does not explicitly discuss its implications for sustainable population size.
Historically, discussions of population control in certain countries or among particular populations but not others have often bolstered the forces of imperialism, white supremacy, and capitalism. In the US, for example, the early 20th-century eugenics movement disproportionately targeted poor women and women of color, even subjecting them to involuntary sterilization. This trend persists in contemporary critiques of population trends that lament declining birth rates in higher-income countries while voicing concern about population growth in those with lower incomes. While Jahren does not support this type of thinking, readers should be aware of the complex and problematic history of population control in certain regions of the world—a topic that Jahren does not fully explain or engage.
By contrast, Chapter 3 does begin to gesture toward the disparate effects of capitalist consumerism in high- and low-income countries. The diseases responsible for the majority of deaths in wealthier countries correlate strongly with the patterns of consumption that national (though not necessarily individual) affluence facilitates: high sugar intake, reliance on highly processed and prepackaged foods, etc. Contagious diseases, on the other hand, tend to have the most devastating effects in poorer countries—often those that global superpowers have exploited and continue to exploit for resources and labor—resulting in lower life expectancies overall. The mortality burden of consumerism therefore falls on most regions of the world, but not equally or in the same ways. However, Jahren does not yet explicitly note this connection to the book’s central argument: that we consume too much.
By the third chapter, it’s clear that Jahren will open every chapter with a personal anecdote—often a story of her youth in Minnesota or a story about a close friend or family member. She uses this method to humanize the grim data that she then shares throughout the rest of the chapter. Here, as throughout the book, Jahren peppers her sentences with statistical facts that create a stark dichotomy between her personal anecdotes and the grim reality of mortality.
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