This is the question as it was asked in its original form: “Will something like the “voluntary human extinction movement” become more and more popular in the future as the Earth’s destruction due to our unending greed becomes more difficult to ignore?”

So… Every human who voluntarily refuses to reproduce does so from a motivation of compassionate care for the environment to lay the entire future of human reproduction at the feet of those who don’t care about our impact on the environment.

This sounds very much like people choosing not to vote in an election because they feel their government is too corrupt, so they decide not to participate in the corruption as a form of protest. The result of that strategy is for the corrupt psychopaths among us to take up the slack of government operations. Abstention facilitates government transformation into a sociopathic entity that the abstainers chose to rebel against by stepping aside and letting the corruption continue without resistance.

Self-sacrifice may seem humane as a movement, but it merely hands unrestrained power to wreak ecological havoc over to those most responsible for environmental destruction.

By culling the portion of our population who have the most developed sensitivities of empathy and compassion, we leave behind a world of psychopaths and sociopaths who are free to do as they please without resistance.

As noble as people may want to make themselves out to be by adopting this attitude, it neither solves the problem of protecting the environment nor does it result in the extinction of humanity by attrition. What it accomplishes is to breed out the most crucial qualities of humanity that would protect our environment while allowing us as a species to achieve a balanced cohabitation with all other life on this planet.

This isn’t a solution to the planet’s problems. It’s a way of hastening them and the destruction of our environment.

It’s doomed to fail as a long-term strategy, but as a form of protest, it might successfully make a statement that could motivate the rest to rise and fight against corruption.

It is otherwise a way of stripping humanity’s only hope for evolving beyond our most destructive impulses. We need to encourage the development of empathy, not cull it from our population.

The main problem with the notion of passivist approaches toward resolving issues created by the psychopaths among us is the naivety involved in believing the most vile amongst us will experience a magical epiphany and become woke enough to care about their destruction.

They won’t.

They’ll destroy everything, and when they’re done, they’ll bemoan their fate while blaming something other than their actions for the consequences of those actions.

This would be like expecting Donald Trump to end up in prison and realizing, “Gee, maybe I should have behaved better.”

Not a friggin’ chance in hell that will happen.

If he ends up in prison, he’ll rail against the injustice of a witch hunt and believe himself unfairly persecuted until his last breath.

Neither cowardice nor apathy are solutions to saving our asses.

A democratic form of governance demands engagement, while the quickest way to destroy democracy is apathy. We’ve been doing a remarkable job of dismantling our democracies since Reagan by meekly handing over power to the powerful predators that have been reshaping human society into a collection of sociopaths who think nothing of exploiting their neighbour for a minor trinket serving as a temporary distraction from despair.

We must do the hard work of facing our monsters and reigning them in.

No shortcuts exist that will save humanity from itself.

No peaceful Kumbaya has ever prevailed against the barbarians at the gates.

This movement may signal a voluntary extinction of humanity, but it’s an extinction that will take every other creature with us. It won’t save them from our psychopathic predations.