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VHEMT -- Voluntary Human Extinction Movement |
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Written by Grant Schreiber
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Okay, here?s the drill: too many people using too many resources damaging the planet beyond hope of repair. And here?s the VHEMT ? pronounced ?vehement? -- solution: stop breeding. Their motto of ?May We Live Long and Die Off? is charmingly simple. By all means, live your life, (in an ecological friendly manner), have as much sex as you want, but don?t reproduce.
The idea is that war, disease and famine are only temporary and almost always result in more people making more babies and ever more demands upon the planet. But by choosing to not have any children, the cycle is broken. As the population dwindles away, people will move to smaller and smaller centers, using less by virtue of there being less people. Nature would recover as forests would be left alone, farms would go wild, suburbs and small towns would be abandoned.
This would be the sunny-side view from P.D. James? ?The Children of Men? where worldwide sterility had left a grief stricken and doomed planet in the hands of a government that felt the need to become more and more brutal. No act of cruelty was left undone because it just didn?t matter any more, because a world without children was a world without a future or hope.
Of course the VHEMT version states right up front this would be VOLUNTARY, a choice to make, and not something forced upon anyone. And certainly a lot more cheerful than involuntary human extinction, which is the track we?re currently racing on.
A consideration in between the two ends was suggested by Alan Weisman in ?The World Without Us?, where every female would be allowed a single child. This cuts the population in half in a single generation. And then cuts the population in half again and again. If this policy was started today, we would be reducing the human race to more manageable numbers so that by 2075 there would be 3.43 billion of us, and by 2100 there would be 1.6 billion of us. If left unchecked, we hit 9 billion roughly by 2050.
The main warning from several groups boils down to ?You can?t have your planet and eat it too.? And population control by consent certainly beats population control by decree. It doesn?t take a genius or even a person with average intellect to realize there?s only so much pressure a closed system can take. Earth is a closed system, finite with a thin skin of life on the surface. We?ve been overheating that surface to the point where it can rain at the North Pole. Even if we reduce our numbers willingly, the planet will continue to heat up. But less people, means less power, and more chances for survival. More importantly, if we don?t chose to reduce ourselves, the planet will choose to do so. We will be swallowed up and chewed to pieces by our excess. It ain?t going to be pretty. Leaving with some dignity sounds better all the time.
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