‘End procreation to save Earth’, says ARU author in ‘The Ahuman Manifesto’

An Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) author believes she has solved the problem of over-population – by allowing humanity to become extinct through ending procreation.

Dr Patricia MacCormack, professor of continental philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU), has even invented a new term for a post-human world: the “ahuman” will avoid ecological collapse by “going beyond binaries of human and not human”, according to ‘The Ahuman Manifesto’ which is launched in Cambridge this week.

“Far from advocating mass death, genocide or eugenics, my manifesto is antinatalist,” says Dr MacCormack. “It boycotts human reproduction due to the damage humans have perpetrated on the Earth and its other inhabitants.

“The manifesto simply asks that humans no longer reproduce – no life is lost, no being is mourned. If we no longer reproduce, we can care for all inhabitants already here, human and non-human, as well as care for the Earth itself by mitigating the damage already caused. It’s an activism of care.

“It questions the value of human exceptionalism, asking are humans really the ‘best’ forms of life, or should we dismantle our understanding of life as a hierarchy for a more ecological, interconnected scheme of living things?”

The fundamental realignment of our future residence on planet Earth means, eventually, self-extinction, but it’s also intended to be joyful.

“My manifesto sees a joy in living the lives we have and developing strategies of care for the Earth’s next chapter,” she says. “This is an Earth that’s allowed to thrive not in spite of but because of the reduction and eventual absence of humans.”

Dr MacCormack suggests that “there is an ideological commitment to understanding having children as familial eugenics, ie ‘my DNA is more important than anyone else’s’ is the premise of having children”. It is this superiority complex, unchallenged, which is leading us to our demise.

“Ahuman is a term I invented which acknowledges we have human residue and accountability but shows we want to refuse human privilege and human-made hierarchies of life,” she told the Cambridge Independent. “It is a space between human and animal, human and post-human, human and earth. It may be the traitor to the species or the apocalypse of anthropocentrism.”

As we wind the clock down, suggests Dr MacCormack, society should allow adoption to be easier, and end the concept of ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ children.

The sensational new term actively embraces issues like human extinction, vegan abolition, atheist occultism, death studies, a refusal of identity politics, deep ecology, and “the apocalypse as an optimistic beginning” (albeit for other forms of life than humanity).

So how long did it take the book to write?

“It took a lifetime,” says Dr MacCormack, “but the current political global climate quickened its necessity.”

‘The Ahuman Manifesto’ is published by Bloomsbury at £21.99.