No child left behind...

Yes friends, the earth will not be safe as long as there is ONE BREEDING COUPLE left alive! This is the full logical extension of the Enviro-Death-Cult belief system.

“We can’t be breeding right now,” says Les Knight.

"We can't be breeding right now," says Les Knight. "It's obvious that the intentional creation of another [human being] by anyone anywhere can't be justified today."

Knight is the founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, an informal network of people dedicated to phasing out the human race in the interest of the health of the Earth. Knight, whose convictions led him to get a vasectomy in the 1970s, when he was 25, believes that the human race is inherently dangerous to the planet and inevitably creates an unsustainable situation.

"As long as there's one breeding couple," he says cheerfully, "we're in danger of being right back here again. Wherever humans live, not much else lives. It isn't that we're evil and want to kill everything -- it's just how we live." sfgate.com

And no, this is not a joke.

This is serious Environmental thinking.

Who can deny the inevitable environmentalist logic? Certainly this article's author had some thinking to do.

Knight's position might sound extreme at first blush, but there's an undeniable logic to it: Human activities -- from development to travel, from farming to just turning on the lights at night -- are damaging the biosphere. More people means more damage. So if fewer people means less destruction, wouldn't no people at all be the best solution for the planet?

I've been thinking about this a lot lately because my wife and I have been talking about having a child. We're the kind of people who reduce, reuse and recycle. We try hard not to needlessly fritter away resources. We think globally and act locally in our day-to-day decisions. So while the biggest quandary of most couples in our shoes might be what color to paint the nursery, we have to ask ourselves, Is the impact of a new person justified?

The problem is stark: The United Nations estimates that the human population, currently at 6.5 billion, is well on its way to 9.1 billion in 2050. Many estimates place a sustainable population in which most of the people on Earth are able to enjoy their lives at between one and two billion.

By nearly every measure -- pollution, carbon emissions, forest loss, fishery depletion, soil fertility, water availability and others -- the growing population is wreaking havoc on the Earth's systems. And it's setting our civilization up for a big, hard fall.

He goes on, but I won't bore you with his vegan diet and his quoting about how much of a waste American lives really are. Suffice it to say that: Human Life is unsustainable.

Sounds like a plan

The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement certainly has pegged the ideology. But they state in the article that they have no illusions about how many people are going to follow this course of action 'voluntarily'.

The one thing about this article that does my heart good is to know that it is the granola-eating-vegan-environmentalist-types who are the most likely to voluntarily stop breeding. We certainly don't need anymore of those!

Each time another one of us decides to not add another one of us to the burgeoning billions already squatting on this ravaged planet, another ray of hope shines through the gloom.

When every human chooses to stop breeding, Earth's biosphere will be allowed to return to its former glory, and all remaining creatures will be free to live, die, evolve (if they believe in evolution), and will perhaps pass away, as so many of Mother Nature's "experiments" have done throughout the eons. Good health will be restored to the Earth's ecology... to the "life form" known by many as Gaia.

It's going to take all of us going. vhemt.org

This, of course, begs the question... if vehement (vhemt) loved the earth so much why wait? Why continue to live in cities and drive cars, etc? It's crass to ask such a question I know, but it seems as though perhaps Gaia might ask the same question, just as I would ask it of any cancer growing inside me.

Posted by Eric Simonson at May 1, 2006 03:32 AM

[H]egemonic Word count: 714

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