O’Sullivan

Several weeks ago, I wrote that humans must curtail reproduction in
order to save the planet. This prompted both accolades and the
accusation that I was advocating eugenics, which I wasn’t. The only
people who should definitively and forcefully be curtailed from
breeding are real bastards, absolute shitheads and mean, nasty
sons-of-bitches. Unfortunately, there’s no foolproof way to identify
them.

Clearly, there’s no way to force a reduction in the number of
humans. The Chinese tried it with their one-child-per-couple policy.
This only resulted in a lot of murdered girl babies—perhaps
millions of them—since Chinese culture values boys more. In the
United States, a country that does not value one gender over another,
but does value wealth, the poor would be overwhelmingly pressured.
Eventually, we would be nothing but a country of powerbrokers, toffs,
pissy aristocrats and people like Donald Trump. This would be as
intolerable as genocide and indeed might prompt mass suicide among
decent people who couldn’t bear the strain.

So we’re still left with a tremendous problem: too many people. In a
recent issue of The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert put another
fine point on it. In “The Sixth Extinction?” she documents the fact
that in the past, the Earth has gone through six mass extinctions of
most life. These were the results of events like giant meteorite
impacts and atmosphere-destroying volcanic eruptions. Afterward, life
emerged and evolved anew, albeit in altered forms.

Kolbert and much of the scientific community agree that this time
around, the natural cataclysm is us. It began about 50,000 years
ago, coinciding with the arrival of human beings in Australia. This
caused the extinction of virtually every marsupial weighing more than
200 pounds. Some 20,000 years later, humans arrived in North America.
Three-quarters of its indigenous animals became extinct. The rate at
which species are dying off is accelerating, and if it continues to do
so, the Earth as we know it is doomed.

What to do?

Enter VHEMT, or the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. Their
motto, “May we live long and die out,” is a perfectly benign one;
bumper stickers available at their Web site (www.vhemt.org) include phrases like, “Thank
you for not breeding.” Their philosophy is very simple, that “crowded
conditions and resource shortages will improve as we become less
dense.”

This is one of the most compassionate and logical ideas I’ve seen.
VHEMT is neither nuts nor dogmatic; it simply recognizes the fact that
a reduction in human numbers is the only chance this planet has, and
asserts that the inevitable result of vast quantities of human life is
contrary to maintaining any quality of life. VHEMT’s position is
ultimately a moral one: If the current trajectory of human populations
continues, the extermination of not just the human race, but virtually
all other species, is inevitable. In other words, we owe it to the
biosphere to back off.

This is a difficult concept for most to understand. We’re so
ingrained with the notion of human birth as a joyous event: The goal of
having children, and even desiring grandchildren, blinds us to the fact
that there are other options—options which entail neither
genocide nor brutality. These options simply require education and a
serious moral recalculation of our duties to each other and the planet.
The mechanism of VHEMT’s philosophy is simple: In achieving the
capacity to understand the problem, people of good will do the right
thing.

I won’t speculate whether this is realistic or not, but I hope it
is. The idea that we’re as inexorable as a giant meteorite impact or
massive volcanic eruption is disturbing.

Someone once said that the measure of a good life is whether the
world is better off when you leave it than when you came in. May we all
strive to lead good lives.

This article appears in Jun 11-17, 2009.