I spoke to Jonathan Stack, co-founder of World Vasectomy Day, while he was in Bali making preparations for World Vasectomy Day 2015, part of a larger tour of south Asia that includes Bangladesh and India which he referred to as “a global scrotal adventure.” In New York, there was a World Vasectomy Day event that took place at a bar where vasectomies from Florida were live-streamed.

Before preaching the gospel of male sterilization, Stack made dozens of documentaries, most of which were about human rights abuses and how we respond to them. He’s interviewed child soldiers in Liberia during the ongoing civil war, and his documentary The Farm: Angola, USA followed the lives of multiple inmates in one of America’s grimmest maximum security prisons.

For all his time spent in prisons, war-torn countries, and impoverished communities, it not altogether unsurprising that Stack would move from filmmaking to organizing a global health campaign. “I had become a little frustrated with filmmaking” he said, thinking back to the origins of World Vasectomy Day, “it was so hard to measure the positive impact a film had.”

Around 2010, Stack’s mind began to focus on climate change and the future of humanity. “I was getting into this idea of the inconvenient truth of humanity, which is that [in climate change] we’re both the problem and the solution,” he reflected, “not that numbers determine our destiny, but that all our problems are exacerbated by having more people.”

His concern for the fate of our species and planet coincided with a smaller, personal struggle: Stack wanted to get a vasectomy. “My life was a bit of a mess back then,” he admits. After having three kids from different women, finding himself single and not in a good position to be a father to any more children, he resolved to take himself out of the gene pool. Being a filmmaker, he documented his steps towards getting a vasectomy and his curiosity grew. His research brought him to a doctor named Doug Stein in Florida. “When I found him, he was traveling around the state in his Vasectomy Mobile,” Stack recalled.

While following Dr. Stein, who was working with No-Scalpel Vasectomy International, to Kenya, Stack had his “aha moment.” Stein had a habit of bringing levity to the operation rooms by engaging in small talk during the procedures, and Stack noticed a consistently upbeat tenor to these exchanges. “All these of guys were really positive,” he noticed, “they said they were doing this so their wife didn’t have to get pregnant again, or they were doing it to be a better father to their kids, or they were doing it to lessen the strain on the environment. Taken together, it was like a communal declaration of love.” And so, informally, Stack declared it the first World Vasectomy Day.

The first official event took place in 2013 in Australia, coinciding with the release of his documentary The Vasectomist (which Stack eventually extricated himself from: “I don’t like seeing myself on camera”). Since then, the slogan has had several permutations, from “Lowering Carbon Footprints One Vasectomy at a Time” to “World Vasectomy Day: An Act of Love," but the core message has remained the same: vasectomies are something men can do that will make the world a better place because, as Stack would put it, after seeing wars and poverty and prisons, “men are fucking up.”

“We’re not here to judge how many kids a person can have,” says Stack, “so much as we’re about getting men into this discussion. It’s about consciousness: how you bring kids into this life.” The message has, unsurprisingly, been well received by countries which struggle to provide resources for a massively growing population. India, without being asked to or provoked, recently declared World Vasectomy Day an official state event. “That wasn’t even me,” Stack says in mild disbelief of this fact, “it was just social media doing its magic.”

World Vasectomy Day also resonates with various national family planning associations and international organizations like the UN Populations Fund and Partners in Population Development. As the project becomes more successful, the hope is for more governments to become involved in these efforts. “What I’d really like to do is spend a whole year in a country that invites us and just build a complete self-sustaining campaign,” Stack says, envisioning training doctors so they can pass on their knowledge to future medical personnel, having annual outreach events and, his slightly warped personal ambition, “I’d develop a soap opera series. We could build up to the last episode which is ‘[which] character gets the vasectomy?’”

And for those like Ketut Sukanata, the campaign is a breath of fresh air. At 53, he is happily married with three grown children and neither he nor his wife would like more. He is also the executive director at the Bali chapter of PKBI (the Indonesian Planned Parenthood Association), which makes him one of a small cadre of men whose livelihood is tied to family planning. Like many couples in their 40s and 50s, Sukanata and his wife were in a period of being old enough to know they didn’t want a newborn baby, but young enough to conceive.

“My organization’s mission is to advocate for family planning. I want to be a motivator, especially for men, to see the burden of planning the family is not solely the burden of women,” Sukanata tells Hopes&Fears. When the opportunity to participate in World Vasectomy Day 2015 in Indonesia arose, Sukanata eagerly signed up.

On November 13th, Sukanata drove from his home to the WVD venue and was given a vasectomy by Dr. Stein who, in turn, was demonstrating his no-scalpel technique to a team of doctors. The entire procedure took about ten minutes. Afterwards, Sukanata drove himself home and was feeling well enough the next day to make his appointment for jury duty. “Now I feel more confident in encouraging men to get the procedure, having done it myself."