Les U. Knight is not his real name, but rather, it represents his wish for humanity: to unite in order to make the world a better place. I’m withholding his real name, because his affiliation with VHEMT could lead to professional reprisal (for reasons that will become evident shortly).

Knight was born in central Oregon to the biggest family in his small town. Despite his stance on reproduction, he has never given his parents a hard time for having so many children. That’s what people did in the years after World War II, he figures. They had babies. As the middle child of five, Knight often wound up by himself. His older brother and older sister would play together, as would his two younger sisters. But he didn’t mind; Knight relished the solitude and freedom. And, growing up in a small semidesert town where environmental devastation can’t hide behind tree farms, he was well aware of the impact humans were having on the planet.

The seed for VHEMT was first planted when Knight was 12. He was at a family picnic, and the conversation turned to things that were becoming obsolete and needed to be disposed or replaced. “That was the mood of the country after World War II,” Knight recalls. It was the dawn of the age of disposable goods. Amid this discussion, Knight’s uncle Richard — a jazz musician and “really outrageous guy” — stood up and said, “I think mankind is no longer economically feasible and should be phased out!”

“Taking care of the humans that are already here is a major part of VHEMT. We can take better care of those who are here by not creating more,” Knight says.

Nobody took Uncle Richard’s outlandish remark to heart, except for Knight. The very idea that humans should be phased out turned in his mind for years.

When Knight graduated from high school, it was at the height of the Vietnam War. His options were to go to college or get drafted, so he went to college. He likes to joke that he majored in draft dodging for two years and then flunked out. “I wasn’t prepared for college. I was way over my head,” he says. Knight was drafted thereafter. When he joined the military, he was sent to Germany and Indiana with the rest of his platoon to work as support personnel instead of being sent to Vietnam. That type of work drove him mad. “It was just mindless obedience, an example of the constant insult of being forced to do what you’re told,” he says.

After spending a little under two years in the military, Knight was able to live off the GI Bill and went back for his degree at Oregon College of Education, a teacher’s school now known as Western Oregon University. He majored in secondary education with a focus in social science, which fascinated him, particularly the question of why people procreate. He saw no reason for it, no benefit.

After college, Knight took a job as a live-in counselor in a halfway home in Hood River, Oregon, helping four boys and four girls through a challenging period in their lives. After his short stint there, Knight started substitute teaching. At first it was just another job to live on while he looked for something longer-term, but Knight soon realized he enjoyed teaching, and his experience with kids in the group home helped him relate to students in schools — most of whom seemed to be having a hard time.

In 1986, Knight took a side job writing ads for an industrial company, where he was given a desktop computer with publishing tools. His time spent teaching children had not diminished his obsession with the idea of a world without humans, and five years later, he used those tools to publish the first issue of the newsletter for VHEMT, called These Exit Times, under his pseudonym. In it, he estimated that if enough people made a commitment to not procreate, population growth could start decreasing as early as the beginning of the 21st century. “In choosing to phase ourselves out of existence,” Knight wrote, “we are choosing a better life for all.”

The idea that the planet would be better off if humans weren’t a part of it wasn’t new; Knight was just the first person to think to organize it into a movement. (In fact, he launched VHEMT in part because he was worried that someone would beat him to the punch.) But since then, membership has grown steadily. He doesn’t think that he or the movement is necessarily changing people’s minds about having children, but that it’s attracting people who realize they don’t want to have children. “It’s not so much that people are joining the movement, but rather, the movement is joining them,” Knight says.

Today, Knight still works as a substitute teacher in Portland’s public schools. Although some might think nourishing the minds of children runs counter to the philosophy of VHEMT, he disagrees. “Taking care of the humans that are already here is a major part of VHEMT. We can take better care of those who are here by not creating more,” Knight says. He argues that he’d only be contributing to population growth if he was encouraging students to procreate, which he avoids doing directly. “I don’t try to put my ideas into their heads. I try to help them form their own concepts,” Knight says. “But if some student says, ‘I’m never having kids,’ I can’t help but to say, ‘That’s not required, so congratulations,’ because they won’t hear it from anyone else.”