'Radical' green thinking may in future pose a terrorist threat of genocide to
the human population. Witness the following conversation between Les U. Knight,
of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, and 'spokesorganism' of the Gaia
Liberation Front (GLF), Geophilus, reprinted from These Exit Times (Number Two,
1992, PO Box 86646, Portland, OR 97286-0646; $5 for this issue, cash only).
Monitored for the Institute by Roger Knights.
Geophilus: While we support all voluntary efforts to make the humans
extinct, we do not exclude the involuntary route. At the rate that the humans
are killing the Earth - and for all we know she may have already passed the
point of no return - a decision to not reproduce, by itself, even if adopted
immediately by every new human - as a result, say, of a new Gaia-worshipping
religious movement - would be just too damn slow.
Geophilus: If I merely believed in human extinction, then, of
course, you'd be right. But, in my judgement, the good I'm doing by promoting
the idea of human extinction outweighs the harm I'm doing by staying alive.
Les: How does the GLF differ from the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement?
'While we support all voluntary efforts to make the humans extinct, we do not exclude the involuntary route'
Les: What involuntary methods do you have in mind?
Geophilus: We support, for example, involuntary sterilisation, but we would also welcome the escape of any new anti-human viruses - such as the airborne version of AIDS that might result from AIDS research on mice. (Science, 16 February, 1991, page 809.)
Les: What about wars?
Geophilus: In the war of the humans against the Earth - the only war we're concerned about - we take the side of the Earth, so we have no problem in principle with the humans reducing their numbers by killing one another. It's an inefficient way of making the humans extinct - every quarter of a million humans killed represents only one day's growth of the human population - but every little bit helps. Our only concern is that, in the process, the humans do a lot of collateral damage to non-human life, so we want them to confine themselves to hand-to-hand combat or, better yet, to the use of biological agents that kill only humans.
Les: In practice, wouldn't involuntary human extinction take the form of genocide?
Geophilus: Well, sure, it might. You know what those humans are like. But remember that the outcome might be the same if someone released a new virus without targeting a particular race - or even if a new virus popped up on its own - just because one race might be genetically more susceptible. Humans can be egalitarian, but nature isn't. And while it matters from the point of view of human ethics whether a particular result was intended, it does not matter to the Earth. The taboo against genocide helps protect the humans from one another, so it's a good thing for them, but as soon as you stop seeing things from a human point of view and adopt the viewpoint of the Earth - and it helps here to see humans as having become a hostile alien species - things look rather different. If you want the humans to die out, is it so awful if some of them die out before the rest? Of course, if I knew that someone had targeted a particular race, I'd be happier knowing that that race was my own, because that's the one that's doing the most damage. But if it weren't, I wouldn't be unhappy, just less happy. As far as the Earth is concerned, it would still be a good start.
Les: I can understand your position when viewing the planet from the Moon, but I have to disagree when I think about the death and suffering down here on the ground. Shouldn't all of us be allowed to live out our lives?
Geophilus: Why? It's self-indulgent for the breeders to insist on their 'right' to have kids, but it's also self-indulgent for the rest of us to insist on our 'right' to live our allotted threescore and ten.
Les: So, why don't you just commit suicide?
'The good I'm doing by promoting the idea of human extinction outweighs the harm I'm doing by staying alive.'
Les: So you hope to live long before you die out. We do agree on some things. Thank you for sharing the GLF perspective with us.
Editorial comment
Information from an unsigned Statement of Purpose, in Snuff (Number 3), monitored for the Instiute by Roger Knights.How serious a threat do Gaia Liberation Front represent? Their Statement of Purpose certainly includes some hair raising opinions: Human beings, they maintain, are a 'hostile alien species' programmed to kill the planet, their effect analogous to a cancer on the face of the planet. In discussing strategies for liberating the earth from their alien oppressor, involuntary sterilisation, the example of the Jonestown mass suicide and genetically engineered viruses are all mentioned approvingly.
All very alarming. The suspicion does arise, however, that we may be being wound up. The subtitle for their manifesto is "A Modest Proposal", a clear allusion to Swift's famous pamphlet which satirically proposed eating babies as a means of relieving Irish famine. Could the Gaia Liberation Front be conducting the same kind of devil's advocacy, exaggerating the Earth First rhetoric in order to expose its callous inanity?
This is certainly a possibility, although lunatics such as the Unabomber (and his frighteningly large fan club), whose published ravings share a similar outlook, clearly have a rather less ironic commitment to slaughter.
Gaia Liberation Front, PO Box 127, Station P, Toronto, Ontario M5S 2S7, Canada.
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