Evolution Needs Death More Than It Loves Life: Reflections on Extinction Rebellion

Poster by Extinction Rebellion Art Group

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What does it mean to rebel against extinction?

Ironically, it means one is opposed to the driving force of evolution; which is to say, one is anti-life understood in the immoral terms of difference and becoming.

For whether we like it or not, mass extinctions periodically destroy up to 95% of life forms in giant orgies of death and scientists think that 99.9% of all species that have ever lived have now - like the Monty Python parrot - passed on, ceased to be, joined the choir invisible. It's simply pointless protesting the fact that evolution needs death more than it loves life.          

We used to think the sun revolved around the earth. Then we discovered it wasn't so. Now there are young people who sincerely believe the earth revolves around them. The overly-privileged and self-righteous children of generation snowflake who talk about saving the planet are, ultimately, only concerned about protecting their own future.

But alas, everything isn't all about them - anymore than it's all about the polar bears or coral reef - and their will to conserve and self-preserve has become a form of mania expressed as moral and political alarmism.

Whisper it quietly, but every species is ultimately endangered and will one day topple into the abyss of non-existence. And if, as certainly seems to be the case, humanity is giving profligate Nature a helping hand by rapidly speeding up the extinction rate and destroying the environment, it might be remembered that we too are part of the biosphere and our actions just as natural as those of any other species.

In other words, there's no need to feel guilty or sinful; the so-called sixth extinction event lacks moral significance, even if we're the causal agents. Besides, as biologist R. Alexander Pyron has pointed out:

"Unless we somehow destroy every living cell on Earth, the sixth extinction will be followed by a recovery, and later a seventh extinction, and so on. [...] Within a few million years of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, the post-apocalyptic void had been filled by an explosion of diversity - modern mammals, birds and amphibians of all shapes and sizes. This is how evolution proceeds: through extinction."

Professor Pyron also reminds us that whatever effort we make to stabilise and maintain present conditions, sea-levels and temperatures will continue to rise and fall and the climate as we know it today will eventually be "overrun by the inexorable forces of space and geology".

Finally, it should be noted that even the most rebellious of extinction rebels doesn't object to the planned eradication of deadly diseases such as HIV, Ebola, and malaria, even though these are "key components of microbial biodiversity, as unique as pandas, elephants and orangutans". As indicated earlier, the campaign to save the Earth is really a campaign to save the Earth for us: Extinction Rebellion is just another exercise in anthropocentric conceit and hypocrisy.   

Thus, whilst it's true that climate change may have certain dramatic effects - such as coastal flooding and widespread famines - and whilst it makes sense to take action to mitigate these things, I refuse to be lectured by adolescent eco-warriors, bandwagon jumping celebrities, or grey-bearded old hippies with an apocalyptic worldview.

In fact, push comes to shove, I remain more sympathetic to the arguments put forward by members of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, founded by Les U. Knight in 1991. For like Rupert Birkin, I regard people as an obstruction and a hindrance to the future unfolding of evolution and believe that only our self-extinction will allow life to continue perfect and marvellous in all its inhuman splendour.


See: R. Alexander Pyron, 'We don’t need to save endangered species. Extinction is part of evolution.' The Washington Post (22 Nov 2017): click here.

And click here for my post on Voluntary Human Extinction (published 12 October 2013). 

On Voluntary Human Extinction

Rupert Birkin's reassuring fantasy of a posthuman future expressed in Women in Love is a vision that is shared by several groups on the radical fringes of deep ecology whose members believe, like Birkin, that mankind is an obstruction and a hindrance to the future unfolding of evolution and that only man’s self-extinction will allow life to continue perfect and marvellous and non-human.

Foremost amongst such groups is the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT), who want people to live long, happy, childless lives and then die out peacefully, proud in the knowledge that their own decision not to breed has helped to secure the diversity of life on earth.

The movement was founded in 1991 by Les U. Knight, after he came to a very similar conclusion as Birkin; namely, that the world would be better off without us. He neither dreams of a cataclysmic destruction nor calls for genocide; rather, Knight advocates the voluntary adoption of a non-reproductive future, so that we might first reduce population levels and, eventually, disappear altogether as a species.

According to VHEMT literature, this gradual phasing out of humanity via a programme of universal non-breeding, represents a positive alternative to the continued exploitation and wholesale destruction of the bio-sphere. The myriad plant and animal species currently being pushed towards oblivion due to human activity will be given an evolutionary second chance by this benevolent act of selflessness. Further, once man is no more, as Birkin recognised, countless new life forms will be able to evolve from out of the unknown. Man’s non-existence thus promises to secure not only the present, but also the promise of the future. However, as long as there remains a single breeding pair of homo sapiens then this promise is threatened.

As VHEMT is neither a political party nor organization, it doesn’t have paid-up members. Rather, it simply has ‘supporters’ and ‘volunteers’. The former do not call for man’s extinction, but they accept that the continued rise in the level of human population is unsustainable and that reproduction is therefore irresponsible and unjustifiable at the present time. The latter, meanwhile, do support the VHEMT goal of total human extinction and have fully committed themselves to the dream of a childless future.

Unfortunately for VHEMT volunteers, whilst in some of the wealthier nations fertility rates have fallen below the level needed to sustain population numbers, in other poorer countries numbers continue to increase rapidly and Knight knows in his heart-of-hearts that his non-violent philosophy stands zero chance of popular adoption or success. Mankind, it seems, prefers to remain on its present path towards environmental catastrophe and the sixth species event. Nevertheless, Knight believes voluntary human extinction remains the morally right thing to advocate.

This moral component to Knight’s philosophy is often overlooked by opponents and commentators. Indeed, much of the media reportage on VHEMT has been sensationalist in nature, unfairly depicting it as a sinister suicide cult, despite Knight’s insistence that he and his supporters are not just misanthropes and anti-social, Malthusian misfits, taking morbid delight whenever disaster befalls humanity. Indeed, it might be argued that Knight is actually a type of pessimistic idealist acting in the name of love – even if zero population is an extreme development from the old idea of zero population growth.

Interestingly, when pressed, Knight admits to feeling a sense of sadness when contemplating the prospect of a posthuman world and the passing of a species of such fantastic potential, but which, in his view, has screwed everything up. This rather mournful confession contrasts sharply with Birkin’s sense of jubilation. However, Knight also writes that returning the Earth to its natural prehuman splendour is a happy thought and primarily he wishes to encourage a practice of joy before death, not sorrow.

In order to foster this cheerful approach to human extinction, Knight avoids the use of aggressive rhetoric and seeks to gain new supporters and volunteers via gentle persuasion, coupled to the hard facts concerning human impact upon the biosphere. He doesn’t want people to kill themselves individually in a state of despair, or move collectively towards a violent and terrible end via war, famine, or disease (as seems likely if we continue along the path we’ve chosen). Thus the VHEMT newsletter, These EXIT Times, calmly calls for an end to reproduction.

In other words, the goal is not to abort the human race, so much as prevent its future conception. And if they would like to establish anti-natal clinics, this doesn’t mean they are rabid baby-haters. On the contrary, VHEMT volunteers love babies – but they value young birds, beasts, and plants as much as human offspring. Their argument, in a nut-shell, is this: if life matters at all, then every life matters equally and human presence or non-presence doesn’t determine the ‘blessedness’ of anything. Again, the religious character of the language used here is conspicuous, as it is in Birkin’s speech in Women in Love.

To some people, of course, to equate human life with that of other species is mistaken and offensive. Even Heidegger suggested that human being is uniquely rich in world and has a privileged relationship to Being. Others would assert that the desire for children is the most natural desire of all. Obviously, VHEMT supporters and volunteers would reject such claims and I have to confess that I would also regard any argument that relies upon anthropocentric conceit and/or the language of nature as being highly suspect and in need of careful but relentless deconstruction. VHEMT supporters and volunteers are right to say, after Darwin, that all life forms are ‘netted together’ and that there is no abyss of essence between us and other living beings. They are also right to claim that even if the desire to fuck is a ‘natural instinct’, the desire to procreate is culturally conditioned and enforced.

For just as there is an underlying moralism so too is there is a fierce logic to Knight’s position; a logic that contrasts tellingly with our frenzied consumption of resources and seemingly insane destruction of the natural environment. Knight’s ‘final solution’ might not be one many people will give serious consideration to, but surely most would concede that something has to be done in the face of climate change, loss of habitat diversity, and melting ice caps. Unfortunately, despite what our supermarket retailers tell us, recycling carrier bags and buying their fair trade coffee isn’t going to halt the Holocene extinction event; nor does environmental friendliness and acting locally slow population growth, or reverse global warming.

Activists and politicians who espouse ‘green technologies’ and increased government intervention as the key to saving the planet, are essentially liars or fantasists dreaming of universal harmony when the lion will at last lie down with the lamb. The fact is, we are not going to develop a cosy symbiotic relationship with all God’s creatures when there are ever-more of us demanding to be fed, housed, and accorded our right to shop and fly-drive round an air-conditioned world.

Like it or not, humanity is a walking environmental disaster: a violent and destructive parasite. Quite simply, Birkin was right: we have to go! And if Les Knight had been around to do so, whilst he might not have torpedoed the ark, he would certainly have encouraged Noah and his three sons to have post-flood vasectomies.