(Extract taken from The World Without Us, Alan Weisman)

Les Knight, the founder of VHEMT, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, posts charts that acknowledge U.N. predictions that, worldwide, population growth rates and birth rates will both decline by 2050--but the punch line is the third chart, which shows sheer numbers still rising.

"We have too many active breeders.  China is down to 1.3% reproduction, but still adds 10 million a year. Famine, disease and war are harvesting as fast as ever, but can't keep up with our growth."

Under the motto "May we live long and die out", his movement advocates that humanity avoid the agonizing, massive die-off that will occur when, as Knight foresees, it becomes brutally clear that it was naive to think that we could all have our planet and eat it too.  Rather than face horrific resource wars and starvation that would decimate us and nearly everything else as well, VHEMT proposes gently laying the human race to rest.

"Suppose we all agree to stop procreating.  Or that the one virus that would try to be effective strikes and all human sperm loses viability.  The first to notice would be crisis-pregnancy centers, because no one would be coming in.  Happily, in a few months, abortion providers would be out of business.  It would be tragic for people who keep trying to conceive. But in five years, there would be no more children under five dying horribly."

The lot of all living children would improve, he says, as they became more valuable rather than more disposable.  No orphan would go unadopted.

"In 21 years, there would be, by definition, no juvenile delinquency."  By then, as resignation sinks in, Knight predicts that spiritual awakening would replace panic, because of a dawning realization that as human life drew toward a close, it was improving.  There would be more than enough to eat and resources would again be plentiful, including water.  The seas would replenish.  Because new housing wouldn't be necessary, so would forests and wetlands.

"With no more resource conflicts, I doubt we would be wasting each other's lives in combat." Like retired business executives who suddenly find serenity by tending a garden, Knight envisions us spending our remaining time helping rid an increasingly natural world of unsightly and now useless clutter, in pursuit of which we would have once swapped something alive and lovely.

"The last humans could enjoy their final sunsets peacefully, knowing they have returned the planet as close as possible to the Garden of Eden."