Natural Selection

6:22 pm, 11/24/07

Natural Selection

We don't have to stop them before they reproduce, environmentalists are taking care of that themselves:

Had Toni Vernelli gone ahead with her pregnancy ten years ago, she would know at first hand what it is like to cradle her own baby, to have a pair of innocent eyes gazing up at her with unconditional love, to feel a little hand slipping into hers - and a voice calling her Mummy.

But the very thought makes her shudder with horror.

Because when Toni terminated her pregnancy, she did so in the firm belief she was helping to save the planet.

What, like "The Seventh Sign"?

Vernelli, who works for an environmental organization and has been a vegetarian since 15, went on to have herself sterilized at 27, after "relentlessly hunting down a doctor who would perform the irreversible surgery". (Few, it seems, were willing to follow through once they found out why she wanted it done, possibly doubting her competence to give informed consent.)

Incredibly, instead of mourning the loss of a family that never was, her boyfriend (now husband) presented her with a congratulations card.

While some might think it strange to celebrate the reversal of nature and denial of motherhood, Toni relishes her decision with an almost religious zeal.

"Having children is selfish. It's all about maintaining your genetic line at the expense of the planet," says Toni, 35.

"Every person who is born uses more food, more water, more land, more fossil fuels, more trees and produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases, and adds to the problem of over-population."

While most parents view their children as the ultimate miracle of nature, Toni seems to see them as a sinister threat to the future.

It's the only logical conclusion of their ideology, one not shared by any other living thing in nature: existence is wrong.

Still, given that none of the alarmism over overpopulation has held up, maybe these people are a self-correcting problem, just like overpopulation itself. By removing herself from the mating population, she's guaranteeing that whoever she would've otherwise reproduced with will partner with someone who is not nearly as zealous an environmentalist. If there's a genetic component here at all, she's removed her ideological purity from the gene pool, but certainly had no net impact on mankind whatsoever. For all intents and purposes, in a world of six billion people where you can doubtlessly find someone else to mate with, Verelli's uterus is a fungible commodity. Even if she adopts, she's just taking pressure off the rest of the population, open to mating, that might have considered adoption out of charity, and thus heralding the arrival of another tiny carbon footprint. The coal and oil her child would've consumed, will be cheaper for everyone else's children, encouraging them to be just a tiny bit less efficient. Humanity is the Borg, resistance is futile, and her messianic exaggeration of her importance to the fate of the world changes nothing. However, the surgery really kicks up her sense of commitment a notch or two.

Other similarly afflicted individuals are noted in the article:

When Sarah Irving, 31, was a teenager she sat down and wrote a wish-list for the future.

Most young girls dream of marriage and babies. But Sarah dreamed of helping the environment - and as she agonised over the perils of climate change, the loss of animal species and destruction of wilderness, she came to the extraordinary decision never to have a child.

"I realised then that a baby would pollute the planet - and that never having a child was the most environmentally friendly thing I could do."

Taking their worldview at face value, suicide would be even more so. If having a baby is selfish because it "takes" from the planet, then living one's own life is no less immoral.

Whenever somebody asks you, "even if the claims are wrong, how can it hurt to care", this is the answer. People, terrorized from childhood, so warped with irrational fear that they can't have normal human relationships and feel obligated to do things they'll likely regret later in life.

Personally, I'm all in favor of propagating my genetic lineage. I'll spread it o'er the land like Niall of the Nine Hostages, should the opportunity arise to do so without the assistance of the welfare state. People should do whatever they want when it comes to having children, but they should do what they want for real, rational reasons, not what some fool at a magazine tells them they should want because it's their duty to the hive. That's what makes "overpopulation" a self-correcting problem: We're already wired to want what's best for us, once we have the facts. Lions do not throw themselves into rivers for fear of overfeeding on gazelles, and whales do not beach themselves for the sake of plankton. They challenge the equilibrium daily, and sometimes, the equilibrium wins. That's how it's supposed to work.

Update: Vernelli's "environmental charity" appears to be PETA.

"Serving a burger to your family today, knowing what we know, constitutes child abuse. You might as well give them weed killer." - Toni Vernelli

This is the same "mainstream" group that fronts for ELF/ALF terrorists, and whose founder, Ingrid Newkirk, wants to have part of her skin made into leather purses upon her death and one of her eyeballs shipped to the head of the EPA. She has also compared having children to the "vanity" of "having a purebred dog".

Update: Apparently, these lunatics have a name, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.