I haven’t had anything to add to this Chicken Little category in a while, but Newseek brought it on themselves by invoking the apocalypse to begin this article titled “After we’re gone: If people were evacuated, the earth would flourish”:

The Second Coming may be the most widely anticipated apocalypse ever, but it’s far from the only version of the end times. Environmentalists have their own eschatology—a vision of a world not consumed by holy fire but returned to ecological balance by the removal of the most disruptive species in history. That, of course, would be us, the 6 billion furiously metabolizing and reproducing human beings polluting its surface. There’s even a group trying to bring it about, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, whose Web site calls on people to stop having children altogether. And now the journalist Alan Weisman has produced, if not a bible, at least a Book of Revelation, “The World Without Us,” which conjures up a future something like … well, like the area around Chernobyl, the Russian nuclear reactor that blew off a cloud of radioactive steam in 1986. In a radius of 30 kilometers, there are no human settlements—just forests that have begun reclaiming fields and towns, home to birds, deer, wild boar and moose..

As far as it goes, the book’s premise sounds like a romp. It might be cool to walk around a big city that had become a ghost town (A fun mural in San Francisco by muralist John Wehrle shows how a traffic jam minus all the people would eventually be a paradise of flora and fauna — the image at top of this post comes from that mural.)

The only thing that spoils the fun is, what happens to all the people? Well, maybe they’ll cooperate and just stop reproducing, right? The mention above of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEM) is relevant. A woman who used to be one of my favorite cartoonists, Nina Paley, is a VHEM member and produced this disturbing little cartoon manifesto for them called “The Stork”:

Fears of overpopulation aren’t new — Baby Boomers like me might be able to remember when overpopulation was the trendy thing to be hysterical about — the global warming of the 60’s, so to speak. And it’s not new that some people — animal-lovers and the environmentally-obsessed in particular, in my experience — end up hating other people, and eventually just people in general.

What is new is the dark little cloud gathering about what should be done. It’s not a good thing for misanthropes to become activists. People in the US have been hearing for decades that big families are somehow a bad thing for humanity, and yet it seems that it’s no longer enough just to keep harping on it. So what happens next? What happens if people in their errant pigheadedness won’t stop bringing children into the world, and if we can’t colonize other planets, as the author modestly proposes? Newsweek’s article hints at that too, but without my emphasis it goes by so fast you’d miss it:

Weisman’s intriguing thought experiment is to ask what would happen if the rest of the Earth was similarly evacuated—not by a nuclear holocaust or natural disaster, but by whisking people off in spaceships, or killing them with a virus that spares the rest of the biosphere.

Excuse me? I hate to tell a Newsweek guy how to write, but doesn’t that phrase require a little more explanation? That alarming proposition is tossed off as if it were an old cliche rather a global Final Solution. (”Yes, yes, using chemical warfare to eliminate the world’s population, blah blah blah. Can’t the Newsweek writers come up with anything new? Let’s get on to the good part and hear about the wild boar again!”)

And while I’m nitpicking: “…killing them with a virus…” Who’s “them”? Shouldn’t that be “us”? There aren’t any “them”s in this discussion of how to rid the planet of “history’s most disruptive species,” unless Weisman’s intended audience is my dog (who only reads “Touchstone”, BTW.)

So is the goal voluntary extinction or involuntary? Not to split hairs, but I’d like to get that straight, if only because in the era of secular attempts at Great Universal Policies, many of the promising theories began as the first but ended up as the second (see also: Communism). So … if we’re thinking this would be a voluntary program, I’d kind of like to see it in writing. Unless we think contracts are just another thing that will blissfully decay as human beings pass out of creation’s picture.

What a beautiful world it will be. Just wish I knew whether I was an “us” or a “them” so I knew whether I’d be around to see it.