"May we live long and die out." - VHEMT slogan
We've poisoned the air, the water, the earth. When we're not busy hunting other species to extinction, we build parking lots, malls, and suburban housing over their natural habitat. We leave a swath of destruction behind us wherever we go. Sometimes the analogy comparing humankind to a vicious parasite seems especially apt.
The majority of environmentalists espouse green technology and government regulation as our salvation, envisioning a utopian future in which humans live peaceably and harmlessly in a hunky dory symbiotic relationship with the rest of the planet - commensalism at its finest. The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (abbreviated as VHEMT and pronounced "vehement") takes an entirely different approach. What is VHEMT? Exactly what it sounds like.
The underlying principle behind the movement is that humanity is beyond redemption. We've simply caused too much damage, and no matter how good our intentions, it is an intrinsic part of our nature to cause more. VHEMT believes that we should do the gentlemanly (or gentlewomanly) thing - admit that we've had a good run and then bow out gracefully by voluntarily abdicating our right to reproduce. According to their literature, not only would this approach solve the thorny ecological problem, but it would also conveniently take care of famine, poverty, overpopulation, and war (of course, we will not enjoy these fruits of our labors, because no one will be around to see it).
When I first stumbled upon their website, I thought it was a particularly good joke, on par with Swift's suggestion that the Irish consume their infants to solve the problems of overpopulation and famine in one fell swoop. However, the members of VHEMT are quite serious about their proposition.
A man known by the punny pseudonym "Les U. Knight" created VHEMT in 1996. The movement's goals were originally promulgated through the Internet and their periodical publication These EXIT Times. The official spiel put forth by the VHEMT website is that the movement is as old as Man, and Les U. Knight is not a founder, but merely a modern-day spokesperson. Mr. Knight claims that if one absolutely must tie the origins of the movement to some historical event, one might as well place the movement's roots in the biblical story of Noah and his Ark, stating, "the creator-god realized his mistake in making humans and was going to flush us from the system, but in a weak moment he spared one breeding family. Oops!" The movement does not intend to repeat that mistake.
VHEMT is not an organization, per se. There are no official initiation procedures, membership dues, or leaders. The movement is "a state of mind," and all you have to do to join is believe. Thus, the website is able to manufacture the claim that VHEMT has 6 billion followers, the entire population of the planet. They are able to do so by classifying their members in three categories: Volunteers (people who give up reproduction in the interest of human extinction), Supporters (people who give up reproduction not for extinction, but because they believe the world doesn't need any new humans at the moment), and Potential Volunteers and Supporters (in other words, everyone else. You may not have known it, but according to this definition, you're already a long-standing member of VHEMT). There is a dearth of objective data related to VHEMT membership, but the fact that there are only 230 active subscriptions to These EXIT Times indicates that their numbers are quite small.
That humans have disrupted the planet's ecology is indisputable. Obviously, this is a Bad Thing, but isn't calling for the extinction of the entire species a tad extreme? One could argue that we're just another part of nature, albeit one that has gone crazy as of late.
VHEMT states that while we started out as part of nature, the human species has stepped outside the bounds of ecology. We exert control over the environment in an unprecedented manner, and we have no natural predators. We exploit many ecological niches to the exclusion of all other species. Of course, one solution to this problem would be to downsize the human population to the point that the world can comfortably sustain us without serious detrimental effects to global ecosystems (this is the view of the Supporters). However, VHEMT Volunteers believe in an all or nothing scenario - they assert that a reduced population will just breed itself back to today's density. The VHEMT website labels humanity as an "exotic species" and points out that "the introduction of one breeding pair of an exotic species is all it takes to disrupt an ecosystem."
The method by which the movement achieves its goals is twofold and deceptively simple: sterilization and publicity. Once someone has decided to become a Volunteer, they should submit to a vasectomy or tubal ligation. Having thereby ensured one's personal inability to reproduce, members are encouraged (though not required) to spread the word, either by word of mouth, distribution of VHEMT publications, or creating a new publication in support of the movement's goals. This not only convinces others to join the movement, it also ensures the movement's continued survival once the sterile members die off without passing their views to their nonexistent progeny.
The VHEMT website is careful to explain that the movement is both voluntary and pacifistic. They support evolutionary suicide as a species, not physical suicide as individuals. They do not suggest that members kill themselves or others in the interest of furthering the goal of human extinction. In fact, they expressly discourage such practices, noting the historical correlation between increased death rates and subsequent increased birth rates. The VHEMT website refers to involuntary methods of extinction (e.g. war, famine, and "reproductive fascism" such as the population control policy of China) as the Terrorist Human Extermination Movement or THEM.
Unsurprisingly, public reaction to VHEMT has been less than favorable. The movement earned an entire chapter in the book Kooks: A Guide to the Outer Limits of Human Belief by Donna Kossy. There have been a plethora of sensationalized news stories about the movement that rightly portray the group as extremist, but incorrectly depict them as a misanthropic suicide cult. Some environmentalists have come out publicly in support of VHEMT's ideas, but many wish they would shut up already, as conservatives point to VHEMT as an example of why environmentalism in general is crazy and dangerous.
In direct contrast to VHEMT is the Church of Euthanasia, an organization started after the founder was supposedly abducted by aliens. The Church of Euthanasia advocates human extinction through the voluntary suicide of the existing population, among other things (their slogan is the catchy "Save the Planet, Kill Yourself"). Lying somewhere in the middle is Zero Population Growth, a movement that advises couples to have no more than two children as replacements for themselves, thus curtailing the population explosion.
Sources:
http://www.vhemt.org
http://home.pacifier.com/~dkossy/kooksmus.html
http://www.disinfo.com/pages/dossier/id831/pg1/
http://dir.salon.com/mwt/feature/1998/08/17feature.html
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,30834,00.html
http://www.churchofeuthanasia.org/
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