Free Republic

As I say, the above demographic audit has become something of an annual tradition in this space. But here's something new that took hold in the year 2007: A radical antihumanism, long present just below the surface, bobbed up and became explicit and respectable. In Britain, the Optimum Population Trust said that "the biggest cause of climate change is climate changers – in other words, human beings," and professor John Guillebaud called on Britons to voluntarily reduce the number of children they have. "Every person who is born," says Toni Vernelli, "produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases and...

Self-loathing is one of the symptoms of being a leftist. Specifically, a self-loathing that causes one to wish for the extinction of the human race. Case in point: the voluntary human extinction movement (VHEMT), an organization that, true to its name, calls for humans to voluntarily work toward our eventual extinction. Most leftists don't come out and say that they long for the day when humanity will be wiped off the face of the earth. Many of their policies, however, reveal that longing: abortion, same-sex marriage, and economic policies that will cause society to revert back to the time when...

VHEMT (pronounced vehement) is a movement not an organization. It’s a movement advanced by people who care about life on planet Earth. We’re not just a bunch of misanthropes and anti-social, Malthusian misfits, taking morbid delight whenever disaster strikes humans. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Voluntary human extinction is the humanitarian alternative to human disasters. We don’t carry on about how the human race has shown itself to be a greedy, amoral parasite on the once-healthy face of this planet. That type of negativity offers no solution to the inexorable horrors which human activity is causing. Rather, The...

"May we live long and die out" is the unofficial motto of a new movement that seeks to improve the Earth's ecosystem by ensuring that the human species does not survive. The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, or VHEMT, consists of volunteers who have made active life decisions to remain childless for the benefit of the Earth, thereby preventing the extinction of millions of species of plants and animals. While no one person takes credit for being the founder, Les U. Knight created its name and is the spokesperson for the movement. "We've already exceeded Earth's carrying capacity for humans by...

"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,...