When I arrived at Cathedral Park to meet Les Knight, I figured I’d be able to pick his face out of the crowd. I had, after all, watched an interview Knight did with Tucker Carlson in 2005, during which he was dressed in a shade of khaki that only a soft-spoken environmentalist would wear on-camera.
“If you think Greenpeace is radical,” Carlson said, opening the segment, “brace yourselves.”
Later, when mentioning this interview to Knight, he chuckles.
“Whoever thought Greenpeace was radical?” he retorted. “I’ll introduce you to some real radical people, Tucker.”
Unlike in his TV interview, Knight wasn’t wearing anything at all when I met him. I’d contacted him for an interview just days after reading a Guardian article about his involvement with the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT), but was given a narrow window to make his acquaintance.
“My time is pretty full these days,” he wrote back, “but if you want to meet at Cathedral Park tomorrow evening, I’ll be hanging out with a few thousand other naked beach apes, getting ready to ride the most efficient form of human transportation ever invented.”
I found my way to him just under an hour before the World Naked Bike Ride departed from the park. I drove there.
VHEMT (pronounced “vehement”) has no official founder, Knight explained, but I gather he’s the movement’s most active and persistent renegade. Since 1991, he’s written and circulated its newsletter; he oversees its website and runs the informational booths; he appears for interviews. Knight is, in essence, the mouthpiece for a humanitarian cause that’s promoting the end of the human species, so he fields a lot of questions. Less of an organization and more of an ideology, VHEMT aims to peacefully root out the planet’s crises by convincing people to no longer procreate.