Would our planet be better off if humanity ceased to exist?
That is quite a morbid question, but today an increasing number of intellectuals are bringing it up, because they are convinced that we are the source of everything that is wrong with our world.
According to these zealots, humans are the primary source of climate change and if we do not alter our course the planet will be destroyed. But since humanity apparently lacks the will to end the behaviors which are destroying the planet, many of them also believe that it would be a good thing if we were to be completely wiped out somehow. Most normal people would never think this way, but these are the sorts of discussions that intellectuals and elitists are now having all the time, and sometimes this bleeds over into the mainstream media.
For example, the New York Times just published a very long article by Clemson University professor of philosophy Todd May entitled “Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy?” The following is a brief excerpt from that article…
To make that case, let me start with a claim that I think will be at once depressing and, upon reflection, uncontroversial. Human beings are destroying large parts of the inhabitable earth and causing unimaginable suffering to many of the animals that inhabit it. This is happening through at least three means. First, human contribution to climate change is devastating ecosystems, as the recent article on Yellowstone Park in The Times exemplifies. Second, increasing human population is encroaching on ecosystems that would otherwise be intact. Third, factory farming fosters the creation of millions upon millions of animals for whom it offers nothing but suffering and misery before slaughtering them in often barbaric ways. There is no reason to think that those practices are going to diminish any time soon. Quite the opposite.
Humanity, then, is the source of devastation of the lives of conscious animals on a scale that is difficult to comprehend. – READ MORE