I applaud Ramona Wise’s letter of Jan. 6 explaining why she didn’t have kids. I, too, made a conscious decision not to have children and don’t regret it. I was once accused by a former high school classmate when we were both grandparent age, that my not having children proved I was “selfish.” My classmate insisted that I was put on this Earth to procreate.

“That’s your purpose for living,” he insisted vehemently. My response was to point out that since his children were all grown and on their own, by his logic, he no longer had a purpose for living, so why didn’t he commit suicide? Of course he disagreed with my view but offered no cogent rebuttal other than repeating his absurd assertion.

Our species, Homo sapiens, has been wearing out its welcome on the planet for a long time. Despite our current admiration for Indigenous peoples and their reverence for nature, their ancestors in a brief amount of evolutionary time killed off thousands of megafauna we now find frozen and fossilized. With our population as the world’s most efficient killers now approaching eight billion, we are on the threshold of mass suicide by nuclear war or heating our planet to the boiling point. I have confidence that our brilliance as a species will certainly find a way to kill us all off. Mother Earth will simply shrug and wait for the next infestation.

Rene Tihista

Springfield