“We must act now [by] having fewer children” to prevent environmental catastrophe, including the extinction of millions of species. That’s according to a recent CNN segment on the newly released report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. To emphasize the supposed link between population growth and a planetary disaster, CNN interviewed the Stanford University biologist and author of the 1968 bestselling book, The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich.

Ehrlich, who has been warning of a link between overpopulation and a series of environmental catastrophes for over five decades, has previously stated that Earth can only sustain 500 million people. There are currently over 7.7 billion people on the planet. Surely there are better ways to deal with environmental problems than reducing the human race by 94 percent. Alas, in spite of Ehrlich’s long record of failed predictions, more and more people are embracing his anti-humanist agenda.

Whether it’s Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s questioning the morality of childbearing, a birth-strike movement that encourages people to forego parenthood despite the “grief that [they say they] feel as a result,” or political commentator Bill Maher claiming, “I can’t think of a better gift to our planet than pumping out fewer humans to destroy it,” a misanthropic philosophy known as “anti-natalism” is going increasingly mainstream.

The logical conclusion of this anti-humanist ideology is, depressingly, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (Vhemt). According to its founder, activist Les Knight, Vhemt (pronounced “vehement”) is gaining steam. “In the last year,” Knight told the Daily Mail, “I’ve seen more and more articles about people choosing to remain child-free or to not add more to their existing family than ever. I’ve been collecting these stories and last year was just a groundswell of articles, and, in addition, there have been articles about human extinction.”

Over 2,000 new people have “liked” the movement’s Facebook page since January and, more importantly, the number of people fulfilling the movement’s goals (regardless of any affiliation with the movement itself) is growing. The U.S. birth rate is at an all-time low. According to the latest figures from the Center for Disease Control, the total U.S. fertility rate for 2017 was 1.77 babies per woman (i.e., below the replacement rate of 2.1 babies per woman needed to maintain the current population).

Recent examples of writings that are warming to the idea of human extinction include the New Yorker’s “The Case for Not Being Born,” NBC News’ “Science proves kids are bad for Earth. Morality suggests we stop having them,” and the New York Times’ “Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy?” which muses that, “It may well be, then, that the extinction of humanity would make the world better off.” Last month, the progressive magazine FastCompany<