In the category of “recovering depressed environmentalist,” Bell says he and others like him did have their views shaken by a recent essay titled “The Irreconcilable Acceptance of Near-Term Extinction” by Daniel Drumright of Portland, Oregon.

Drumright, who did not want to be interviewed for this story, envisions a day when those left in a collapsing civilization will see “suicide, not as a stigma of cowardice, or a failure of character, but as altruism in the last ethical act left us.”