My friend Teddie and his wife Joan are just back from Vietnam. Whenever he returns from their travels, he has a stack of these newspapers, and he reads my columns right through. Teddie was a college friend and after we separated he became the go-to Shakespeare guy at the University of Maryland. I sat in on one of his classes years ago, and, as I suspected, his students were respectfully frightened of the guy. Not only is he tall and thin, like something hanging from a trellis, with hair like Eistein, but his facial features were formed in removed antiquity, in a dark cave somewhere on the edge of the Arabian Peninsula. Formidable. Even when he is trying to be nice, it is hard for people to accept that he may be harmlessly encouraging them. He never scared me. We communicate a few times a year via technology, and, recently, after my last column, he reminded me of a group called the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, (VHEMT).

The movement was initiated in 1991, long after the “one baby policy” implemented in China by the CCP, and it states the best thing for the planet would be for people to voluntarily stop having offspring altogether. (I seem to remember a number of old girlfriends suggesting, as they broke up with me, that I join.) The movement holds that our species is so destructive of the planet and so dangerous towards the lifeforms that have been doomed to cohabit the planet with us, that the best thing we could do for Planet Earth is to leave it. Naturalists estimate that 800 animal species have gone extinct in the last 500 years, many of them directly attributable to human activity. That’s one point six species per year, on average. When Teddie and I were kids, we learned of the passenger pigeons that once darkened the skies with their thick clouds of migrating members. So many birds were killed willie-nilly for their meat that their population crashed below a critical support level (they needed large numbers to feel secure and reproduce) that they went from 5 billion birds to zero. The last passenger pigeon was named Martha (after Martha Washington) and she died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. She was stuffed and sent to the Smithsonian. There really was a Tasmanian devil.

The list goes on. In 2021, 22 species of animal and one plant were removed from the Endangered Species List and declared extinct by the US Fish and Wildlife Service. For most of my adult life, people have searched for the Ivory Billed Woodpecker in the cypress swamps of Louisiana and Mississippi. Not without controversy, (people claim to see it), the giant woodpecker was placed on this 2021 extinction list. Woody Woodpecker, riding that big pine box to the clouds.

Nature magazine suggests human activity – farming giant monocrops fueled by poison, and a singular drive to eliminate anything competing with our food products, pollution from Forever Chemicals, climate change, other forms of human generated habitat loss – will lead to the extinction of one million species within the coming decades. We are the one species that leads to the direct extinction of our fellow species. Eagles eat fish, but they don’t wipe out the entire population of land-locked salmon. Humans have no balance.

Humanity’s energy, intelligence, verve, and willpower are on a collision course with all that it holds dear within itself: our appreciation of landscape and portraiture, our desire for family and security, a wish that life be better for those that come after us. Something doesn’t add up. Our arithmetic is screwy. I love watching the stock market, and try to remain intelligently invested, but it is all based on “growth.” We have not figured out how to be comfortably sustainable without the attendant corollaries of a progression of destruction speeding step by step towards our own extinction, voluntary or not. There is a great cartoon by Marc Benioff of a guy in a tattered suit jacket sitting around a campfire with a bunch of kids, a dystopian empty horizon behind them, saying like a storytelling grandfather, “Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for our shareholders.”

I find it one of the funniest cartoons of all time. I don’t have the energy to dissect it.

I never joined VHEMT. I don’t know. I guess I have a little bit too much hope. Hope that we can develop fusion energy, or learn to harvest hydrogen from the earth, providing unlimited cheap energy for everyone, and with that energy we can develop vertical farming where open space can be preserved in a state of diversified precreation. Or something. Futurism is exhausting. I admit it. I want a drink. Where’s Tommie Steed when you need him?