With climate change, exhaustion of fossil fuels, and endless amounts of pollution being pumped into the air every day, there seems to be a race to figure out how to save the planet. Well, according to the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, there’s one obvious solution. People should allow the human race to die out so that Earth can recover. So, how would that work exactly?
- No, they don’t mean that people should end their own lives. The group isn’t calling for mass suicide. Instead, they’re asking for people to avoid having children, thereby naturally letting the human race die out. While this is definitely a way of playing the long game, it could provide a viable way to save the planet in the next 100 or so years.
- Lee Knight, a rep for the VHEMT, thinks the time to act is now. He wants all human beings to work together and vow to stop procreating. While he admits that the likelihood of this being possible is small, there are many who have joined up to the cause.
- He truly believes the planet would be better off without quite so many people. “If you look around and see what is going on and follow a train of logic, guided by compassion, you’ll eventually see that if humans were not here on the planet, things would be a whole lot better,” he told UNILAD. “Then you go – how are we going to do that? Mass murder is immediately out, so phasing out. The biosphere would definitely be better off without homo sapiens; one species is causing the extinction of millions.”
- Knight believes humans are actively causing “the sixth mass extinction.” The only way to stop that in its tracks is to bring an end to the human race as we know it. It’s an idea he’s believed in for the last 50 years and it’s finally gaining traction. “It’s not an organisation with members and everything, but I’d say there’s a few million, just based on extrapolating from the number of people who have contacted me,” he said. “Which is a pretty insignificant part of eight billion, which we’ll hit on November 15 [according to the United Nations].”
- He just wants to save the planet, not kill everyone off. Knight’s movement gets plenty of backlash on a daily basis, but he believes that’s down to a misunderstanding. It’s not that he’s advocating killing everyone, just choosing — and that’s the key word — not to bring any more people into the world. “The first thing people think of because of cultural conditioning is ‘you must want to kill people,'” he explained. “That’s because the idea that we can lower the population by not procreating just doesn’t pop into people’s heads. They have to think about it a while.”
