Suicide is brainless
Try telling a greenie that environmentalism is a sort of secular religion, in which we are sinful and worthy of nothing better than death. Try pointing out the startling sociopathy inherent in fantasies of an afterlife without people to sully the purity of the Virgin Earth Mother. Spluttered protests of innocence are all you’ll get. Yet despite remonstrations that they’re all for human beings, the theme resurfaces time and time again. Humans aren’t part of the ecosystem, symbiotically participating in the evolution of life. Theirs aren’t lives worth celebrating, achievements worth honouring and innovations worth admiring. Humans are parasites, sucking the life out of the planet. Like children, wishing for release from the pressure and complexity of the world, they stamp their feet and scream, “I wish I’d never even been born!”
Variations on the sociopathy tantrum keep appearing. Last year, it was New Scientist, which implored us to imagine Earth without people. This year, a new version appeared in the form of Alan Weisman’s new book, The World Without Us, to glowing reviews from the likes of Salon.com (Full text only available to paying subscribers). Surprisingly, four out of five people he spoke to thought humanity disappearing was not a bad idea. James Lovelock famously described earth as a living organism - the classical mother goddess, Gaia. He also wrote of people as a cancer: “Humans on the Earth behave in some ways like a pathogenic micro-organism, or like the cells of a tumor or neoplasm.”
The perversity of such a notion - that human progress and survival is equivalent to nature’s regress and decline - is quite shocking. Yet the vain belief that we’re all that prevents the earth from returning to its blissful Garden of Eden state is, ironically, contradicted in the very same morbid fantasies. Every time someone does consider a world without us, they conclude that the environment isn’t the unstable, finely-tuned system it is made out to be. That our choice of checkout bag or lightbulb or motor vehicle hasn’t irrevocably tipped the balance after all. They look at the spontaneous return of plant and animal species even to a severely damaged environment, such as the exclusion zone around Chernobyl, and are surprised to find that the environment is remarkably resilient. Nature is quite capable of dealing with most of the supposed depredations our appropriation and management of natural resources have inflicted.
The guilt-tripping about the impact we’ve had and the suggestion that we adopt a sort of Chinese one-child-per-woman policy is strongly reminiscent of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (or its more satirical and tasteless counterpart, the Church of Euthanasia). These types claim that carrying on about our greed and amorality is pointless negativity, but killing off the human species would achieve something. Most perverse of all, they propose to achieve this extinction by “voluntarily ceasing to breed”. Either they’re not getting any, or they’re not doing it right.
[Edited at 12:10 on 24 July 2007: added link to Michael Crichton’s Commonwealth Club speech.]
