Please proceed to the nearest exit
Considering voluntary extinction
BRENDAN CATHCART, STAFF
Saturday morning. You’ve just awoken, the room is filled with soft sunlight and you’re feeling peaceful and well-rested. Next to you, the one you’ve chosen to share your bed with is also just waking and you take the opportunity to snuggle up to his or her warm body. For a few wonderful moments the both of you remember why you got together in the first place. Hands start moving about, non-linguistic murmurings caress the ears and the shared warmth begins congregating in highly specific areas of the body. Then, without warning, the bedroom door bangs against the wall, startling the early morning intimacy, and from the foot of the bed a child carrying a toy truck starts climbing right under the covers with reckless energy. If this sounds like the start to an unhappy day and the first thought that springs to mind is “kids should be illegal,” don’t worry, you’re not alone; you’re just selfish.
That, at least, seems to be the common sentiment among generations that worked themselves ragged building our skyscrapers of population here in Canada. Linking moral integrity to procreation has been an effective and highly propulsive cultural model for population growth, but for what reason? It might be a hangover from the biblical mandate to go forth and multiply, or a necessity back on the potato farm in the Ukraine, or it might just be a bunch of jealous old people stamping their feet and saying, “No! It’s not fair! If I had to do it, then you have to do it too!”
Whatever the reason, there are certainly already enough people in Canada, and we don’t even come close to the monumental piles of people in the developing world — if you stacked them one on top of the other you could measure the distance between the Titanic and the Hindenburg. This is the point being made by a group of conscientious people known as the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (www.vhemt.org); that vessels seriously pushing their limits are ill-fated to burst at the seams.
In a 2004 interview on MSNBC’s talk show The Situation, host Tucker Carlson asked VHEMT spokesperson Les Knight, “What do you say to your kids? Yes, I joined a group that is opposed to you?” Knight’s response was not as misanthropic as one might assume would come from a proponent of human extinction. “No, no,” he replied cheerfully, “We’re not opposed to existing children.” The website is clear on the point that they are not a terrorist organization and they are not actively engaging in ridding Earth of its people. No doomsday devices, no biological warfare, no genocide, fratricide, patricide, suicide, or euthanasia. In fact, the rallying cry for the movement is “may we live long and die out.”
Wanting to eat food and drink water are not unreasonable aspirations; most people generally enjoy surviving. If this most human of human drives can be satisfied securely and in supreme comfort, then gosh darn it, we’ll go for it. The problem is that at numbers like six billion, calculating the cost of materials needed to build the bed for the world to sleep soundly inside the First World dream is resulting in a declining balance, heading quickly down into the red. Arguing that having another child is like buying another Hummer, VHEMT claims, “[T]he decision to stop reproducing is the morally correct one” and argues, “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.” Poverty and starvation aren’t going away either, UNICEF claims that 40,000 children under the age of five die each day from malnutrition and vaccine-preventable disease, but what the heck, let’s get drunk and have more babies. Who doesn’t love babies? The world loves them so much that it’s produced tens of millions of orphans.
Is there much chance that enough people will get on board with VHEMT to make a significant or wholesale depletion? Not likely. Discussing population self-regulation in mammal species in Errol Morris’ documentary Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, mole-rat specialist Ray Mendez notes that while mole-rats will actively limit their numbers to manageable levels, humans instead will let their entire population die out rather than regulate it. What he means is that if a village has enough food for 10 people and there are already 12 people living there, instead of naturally allowing the number to drop to 10, they’ll increase to 15 or 20 and starve to death together. Sounds absurd, but that’s what VHEMT believes we’re currently doing, that such behaviour is damaging Earth in irreparable ways. According to VHEMT, it’s time for humans to respectfully bow out of the race and give Earth and the rest of its living organisms a fighting chance because, as they say, “Procreation today is like renting rooms in a burning building.”
