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.