The Human Extinction Movement
Rudyard Kipling, in his Second Jungle Book, has a chapter entitled "Letting in the Jungle" in which Mowgli chants his "Song against People": "I will let loose against you the fleet-footed vines / I will call in the Jungle to stamp out your lines / The roofs shall fade before it / The house-beams shall fall / and the Karela, the bitter Karela, shall cover it all." In my youth I was deeply impressed — and horrified — by the image this created, of a silent, all-powerful, all-pervasive victor over mankind.
Reading this book by Alan Weisman, a science journalist, recalled that childhood memory. With chilling detail he describes at length what would happen if we disappeared from planet Earth. To do this requires a sustained feat of the imagination; indeed, it is almost a contradiction in terms, since without man, the language-bearer, "nature" has no meaning.
But Weisman, the quintessential 21st century man, whose imagination is both shaped by Darwin and fuelled by global warming — but not by thoughts of God — has much scientific data on hand to show us both the ravages man has caused the Eden we inherited and how "nature" will take her revenge on our hubris. We tend to think of nature-worshippers as people who enjoy sunbathing or as the poet Wordsworth, praising the natural glories of the Lake District. Weisman worships nature — and worship is not too strong a word — in an altogether more intense and sinister fashion.
"The thought of rural Europe reverting one day to original forest is heartening," he writes, describing primeval woodlands between Belarus and Poland which "are still undisturbed by man." Again, he says, "After we're gone, nature's revenge for our smug, mechanized superiority arrives waterborne," offering a dramatic description of what will happen to New York (built in defiance of nature) when the subways eventually flood and the skyscrapers topple. The author delights in the thought that "gradually the asphalt jungle will give way to the real one."
His book is full of violent scenarios that will follow in the wake of man's demise. Writing of oil refineries, he asks, "What if the automatic emergency generators ran out of diesel, so that no signal tripped the shut-off valves?" And what about the 441 nuclear plants, unchecked and unmonitored by their human guardians? Look at the poisoned earth around Chernobyl.
This is the stuff of science fiction movies, except that such films depend on human intervention to give them meaning. What possible interest could we have in the world, say, of One Million Years BC without the actress Raquel Welch, fetchingly clad in animal skins, to whom we relate? And what does it matter if the Sahara will once again be covered with rivers and ponds if there are no humans around to notice? This is something the author seems not to grasp.
Although he has a grudging respect for the engineering exploits of men, such as the Channel Tunnel or the Panama Canal — "the most stunning engineering feat in human history" — he clearly feels on safer ground when he is, paradoxically, describing the dissolution of terra firma. So the thought of the slow crumbling of magnificent human artefacts such as the Great Wall of China or the pyramids fills him with perverse satisfaction. Bronze, he thinks, will last a little longer.
Behind his lament for the violence men have done to virgin soil is a deep pessimism about humanness itself. The author, a vivid and imaginative writer who has done a great deal of research, clearly suffers from a kind of spiritual despair. This should not surprise us. For Weisman, Homo sapiens has barely evolved from Homo erectus and there is only a tiny amount of DNA that separates us from chimpanzees. He speculates whether the cranial capacity of baboons has been suppressed "because we got the jump on them, being first out of the trees" and quotes paleoecologist Paul Martin: "If homo sapiens had never evolved, North America would have three times as many animals over one ton as Africa today."
We exterminated them, an act he calls "genocide." This word, more usually applied to the destruction of peoples — such as the Holocaust or the inhabitants of Darfur in the Sudan — is here applied to the slaughter of animals, "a fact of nature that we humans . . . pretend our codes of civilization transcend." We have slain fellow creatures, a crime against our species.
Furthermore, humans make the mistake of being noisy. This annoys the author. He writes of "the din of humanity" and welcomes a time when "cars have stopped for good and factories go dark and stay that way." It will be a silent world, that is for sure, but it will be eerie and creepy, with the silence of death.
If this book had been a straightforward case for ecological responsibility and proper stewardship of the natural world, it would have much to commend it. Chimpanzees can't be stewards, after all. Nobody argues about the effects of pollution or denies our often careless attitude towards waste products (the author creates a Dickensian sense of decay when he describes the miles of plastic debris in the North Pacific Gyre). Photos of the trash left by tourist climbers of Everest should and do shock us.
But his book has an altogether more disturbing underlying theme: that man is always the enemy of nature, that he has committed crimes against the world he inhabits that will take eons to eradicate, and that he will be the author of his own extinction. Why did the advanced and flourishing Mayan civilization of Central America collapse within 100 years? Because, the author suggests, it broke the balance between ecology and society through wars, over-intensive cultivation and a too-large population — just like us.
Dr. Rowan Williams, present Archbishop of Canterbury, has written in his recent book, Tokens of Trust, that our present ecological crisis has "a great deal to do with our failure to think of the world in relation to the mystery of God." This is Weisman's failure. He is that most modern of persons, Homo sine deo, acutely conscious of man's capacity for folly but refusing to recognize his capacity for self-transcendence. In his final chapter he makes explicit what has been largely implicit throughout the book: his population death-wish. He longs for a world in which the population will "gradually subside, until we reach a world with far less human impact."
How is this to be brought about? Citing Doug Erwin, "extinction expert," and someone called Les Knight, founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, he quotes the latter as stating "we have too many active breeders" and proposing "we all agree to stop procreating." Knight, described by the author as "thoughtful, soft-spoken, articulate and quite serious," sounds like the fictional mad scientist of the movies, except that he is real.
Weisman himself intones: "Worldwide, every four days, human population rises by one million." He thinks it somehow unlikely that the human race will agree to voluntary human extinction, so he has another suggestion of his own — "to limit every human female on Earth capable of bearing children to one." Even China's draconian attempts to enforce this notion did not work, so it is hard to envisage how it could be universally applied, even if it were not such a crazy and bad idea. But the thought makes the author lyrical in his "growing joy of watching the world daily become more wonderful" — even if it grows greyer and emptier and more desolate at the same time.
He seems not to know that the old, potent, propaganda image of the world as an overloaded lifeboat, with too many sinking, starving people trying to get aboard, has been exploded. Many of the world's populations are shrinking, not expanding — in Russia, Europe and Japan, to name but a few — and some governments now beg and bribe women to have babies, the only real remedy against a country's gradual decline. I was about to ask what planet this author is living on, when he gave me his answer: "Maybe we could . . . build a human in space." Paranormalists, he tells us in a curious lapse into alchemy, insist that our minds are transmitters, so with a concentrated bit of thought-projection anything is possible.
There is a passing reference to the "Church of Euthanasia," with its four pillars of abortion, suicide, sodomy, and cannibalism. Weisman does not say he endorses this, but mentioning it at all in a book purporting to be a serious addition to the ecological debate is outrageous. What did I learn from this volume? To beware of experts bearing gifts such as these sterile prognoses. Mowgli's petulance against people has transmogrified into something much more deadly.
Francis Phillips writes from the United Kingdom.
This item 8195 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
