The World Without Us

People have a hard time thinking about the end of themselves. Despite scant evidence, we are willing to believe that when we drop dead, we pop up somewhere else – The Happy Hunting Grounds, Valhalla, Heaven – and more or less go on living as before. Or an apocalypse – God-made or environmental disaster - destroys everything along with us.

The idea that one day we could cease to exist, and yet the rest of life might carry on, is possibly the most difficult for humans to grasp.

Alan Weisman takes it a few steps further. In The World Without Us, he starts with a very simple question, borrowed from Gustav Mahler: “But, man, how long will you live?”

Weisman decides: not very long. For the purposes of his brilliant, bold book, humanity flops tomorrow. He’s a bit vague on why – maybe an alien rapture sucked us all away, maybe a species-specific virus took us out – but the thing is, we’re gone, and the Earth chugs along.

Like a curious child dissecting a bug, Weisman uses detached prose to pull apart the post-human planet.

Soon, the sewers and subway systems of places like New York flood and spill up, turning avenues into rivers. Freeze-and-thaw cycles crack up the skyscrapers, pulling them to the ground, and every wooden structure will be gone in a century. In China, the Great Wall “will steadily melt away until just the stones remain.”

So who will take over the reins as top species? Our cousins the chimpanzees? Dolphins, shouting, “Thanks for all the fish” as they assume our vacant throne? Probably not.

But the mosquito population, freed from our pesticides and destruction of its wetlands, will soon swell and humanity’s total biomass “won’t be missed for very long.”

Who will mourn us? Not cats, who will just carry on their massacre of the songbirds. Probably dogs and cows, who have had most of their useful instincts bred out of them. But, embarrassing as it is to admit, the beast most likely to cry at humanity’s funeral is the lowly louse, though the cortege may be joined by the 200 bacteria species that call us home, and who would all die as soon as we did.

We fondly call our era the Information Age, but when we’re gone, and the power goes out, all those IPods and Blackberries and stereos will reveal the true name of our epoch: after Iron and Bronze, ours is the Plastic Age.

We only figured out how to make the stuff 50 years ago, but already it is everywhere. An Africa-sized continent of discarded plastic swirls in the middle of the Pacific Ocean; there are six other oceanic gyres. Some of it’s plastic bags, or pop bottles, or telephones, but most of it is nurdles: the tiny strands that plastic is reduced to, which look a bit like eggs, and so are consumed like McDonald’s on the oceanic buffet.

It is as if, Weisman writes, “plastic exploded upon the world from a tiny seed after World War II and, like the Big Bang, was still expanding.” After we’re gone, how long will it last? No one knows: no plastic has yet died a natural death. As Neil Young almost sang, it’s a case of the Nurdle and the Damage Done.

Weisman’s most ingenious ruse for imaging a post-human planet is to go to those no-man’s lands we’ve already made too dangerous for ourselves: the UN-patrolled Green Line in Cyprus, which halted a war between the Turks and the Greeks; Chernobyl, where a nuclear accident banished humans, but where a surprising amount of birds and flora have returned; and the Demilitarized Zone between Korea’s North and South.

“One of the world’s most dangerous places,” Weisman writes of that uninhabited land separating communism from capitalism, “became one of its most important – though inadvertent – refuges for wildlife that might otherwise have disappeared.”

One small complaint is that, for a book called The World Without Us, it has a lot of us. Rather ironically, our self-aggrandizing species crowds into almost every page, with an endless parade of quirky scientists telling us what we’ve done to the planet, and how that will play out over the millennia.

Weisman’s book will leave you “unbearably lonely for the beautiful world from which we so foolishly banished ourselves” – but at the end, you’ll put it down and realize it was all a dream. Humanity, that moronic genius of soul-stirring splendor, is still alive. For now.

First published in the Sunday Daily News August 5 2007.