A Canadian man has opened up about his decision to be sterilized and have all of his sperm deposits destroyed, with the goal of stopping climate change. Yet in the same interview, he admitted to jet-setting around the globe with his wife for three years.
Darryl Whetter wrote for the CBC about how he knew his wife, Gisele, was the one when he found out she didn’t want to have children either, and described himself as a “planet worrier since my early teens.” After a year and a half, she finally agreed to his pleas for a vasectomy. “News of rising temperatures on the kitchen radio? Finger snip,” he wrote. “Atlantic Ocean looking more and more disturbed? Finger snip. Even back then in 2007, the North Atlantic hurricane season was intensifying due to climate change. Snip-snip.”
Before undergoing the vasectomy, he chose to freeze his sperm just in case he changed his mind. He and Gisele then spent three years jet-setting around Asia.
“We got married and moved, in a kind of working honeymoon, to sweaty, equatorial Singapore. Admittedly, our next four years of travel around Asia made us more part of the climate crisis problem than the solution,” he wrote. “Every single inch of Vietnam’s 15-kilometre Bãi Trào Beach had a high-water mark of plastic litter: toothpaste caps, tampon applicators and shampoo bottles. Bali was indeed blissful, at least until we swam around drapes of ocean plastic. Given how rarely plastic is recycled even here in Canada, some of the bobbing water bottles we swam around could have been ours.”
Once they had their fill of traveling around the world — a rather environmentally unfriendly pastime — they decided to stop paying for Whetter’s sperm to be stored. “After 15 years of paying to keep my genes on ice, with wildfires and hurricanes brewing, Gisèle and I agreed to cease the payments to store my sperm samples and also any more false hopes or delusions,” he said. “The world, our world, was never going to be more welcoming to yet another child.”
Is Whetter truly choosing not to have children to save the environment? It seems unlikely, as he’s willing to stop worrying about the planet when it suits him. He seems to be more at home in the growing anti-natalist movement, calling for all human reproduction to come to an end, and arguing that it is cruel and unjust to bring children into the world today. Ostensibly, people in this movement aren’t willing to do much to fix these problems; they’re only willing to not have babies.
Yet the oft-ignored reality is that overpopulation is a myth. In fact, there is a much bigger problem, and that is of low fertility rates around the world. Last year in the United States, for example, death was at a record high, while birth was at an all-time low since 1986. The population growth is at its lowest rate in 100 years. Nearly half of all countries in the world are below replacement rate, meaning the population is falling… not rising. Countries like Japan, China, Denmark, Italy, Norway, Germany, and Hungary are all facing what is being described as a “demographic time bomb.”
This can have drastic consequences; when there are more elderly people than there are young, the economy suffers, social net programs are strained, and there is no one to care for the elderly as they age. This, coupled with numerous countries’ move toward legalizing assisted dying, is not likely to make for a hopeful future for aging populations.
Villages disappear, young people cannot find work, and governments end up being forced to raise the retirement age just to keep economies afloat. And, as Professor Ibrahim Abubakar of the University College London told the BBC, there’s also the emotional toll of seeing populations being erased as elderly people die with no one to replace them.
“To be successful we need a fundamental rethink of global politics,” he said. “The distribution of working-age populations will be crucial to whether humanity prospers or withers.”
