NYTs Op-Ed Piece Makes a Case for the Positive Side of Human Extinction

Allow me to introduce you to Clemson philosophy professor Todd May, who has a column in the New York Times about the possibility of the complete extinction of the human race. And asks the question whether that would be a bad thing.

If you agree with me that he asks just about the most obvious question possible, with only one logical answer we can all agree on and it’s a resounding “Fuck yeah, that would be bad,” well then you, like me, are not professional philosopher material:

Would human extinction be a tragedy?

To get a bead on this question, let me distinguish it from a couple of other related questions. I’m not asking whether the experience of humans coming to an end would be a bad thing. …

[W]hat I am asking here is simply whether it would be a tragedy if the planet no longer contained human beings. And the answer I am going to give might seem puzzling at first. I want to suggest, at least tentatively, both that it would be a tragedy and that it might just be a good thing. …

To make that case, let me start with a claim that I think will be at once depressing and, upon reflection, uncontroversial. Human beings are destroying large parts of the inhabitable earth and causing unimaginable suffering to many of the animals that inhabit it. This is happening through at least three means. First, human contribution to climate change is devastating ecosystems, as the recent article on Yellowstone Park in The Times exemplifies. Second, increasing human population is encroaching on ecosystems that would otherwise be intact. Third, factory farming fosters the creation of millions upon millions of animals for whom it offers nothing but suffering and misery before slaughtering them in often barbaric ways. There is no reason to think that those practices are going to diminish any time soon. Quite the opposite.

Humanity, then, is the source of devastation of the lives of conscious animals on a scale that is difficult to comprehend.

You want to make the world colder than it is, we disagree because I like it warm better than I like it cold. But fine. I won’t stand in your way. You want Yellowstone to be pristine, I’m with you. I recycle all my plastic and always bring reusable shopping bags the 2 percent of the time I remember to take them out of the back seat. I like a world that’s clean more than I like one that’s dirty.

Where I part ways with these self-loathing humanity-hating lunatics is when they start bitching about how there are too many people and how we shouldn’t be feeding ourselves with delicious animals. Because what exactly are they saying with this stuff about “increasing human populations” isn’t that they are one person too many. They think there’s the exact correct number of themselves, there’s just way too much of you. And me. And poor people. They hate the population of poor people. Everyone loves to point to how populated cities in places like India and China are. No one complains about the crowd sizes on the Upper West Side or how packed the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion is on Oscar Night.

And if you say “Well the problem with poor people is they can’t afford to feed themselves,” I’m with you. Which is why all the more reason for the existence of the factory farm they’ve got their panties in a bunch about. If you’re a parent in say, Appalachia or sub-Saharan Africa and you’re putting your kid to bed hungry most nights, the last thing you should be worried about is the dying thoughts of some chicken. The way the world gets saved is with cheap, plentiful, mass produced agriculture. Not all the philosophy professors in the world writing all the Op-Eds in the world about the morality of human existence and rooting for an asteroid to wipe us out.

Besides, since when did Nature ever promise animals their lives would all be cream cheese without humans? I hate to break it to these fans of Human Extinction, but Nature sucks. It’s built on cruelty. Just ask any bug that caught in a spiders web, any creature that gets swallowed alive by a snake, the seals you see getting ripped apart on Shark Week or the fish that those same seals lived off of before karma and the Great White caught up to them. Thinking that the world would be one big animal preserve once the humans were no longer running around killing Bambi’s mom and vines grew all over the cities is the kind of thing Poison Ivy tells Batman when she’s about to feed Robin to a Venus Flytrap. The major difference her and these eco-freaks is she’s the only one who believes it.

So let’s just state the obvious. That these Captain Planet crackpots don’t believe a thing they say, otherwise they’d run away from the creature comforts mankind has created for them, never use electricity or fossil fuels again, throw away their clothes and live in the forest like woodland creatures as Gaia Mother Earth intended. Or they’d kill themselves, thus giving the flora and fauna one less nasty human to make their existence terrible. If they want humans to go extinct, be my guest. You go first, I’ll go last.