I’ve just finished reading Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us, and found it to be a wonderfully written book – an immensely enjoyable read, a true page turner (the companion web site to the book is here). As the title of the book suggests, the narrative revolves around a seemingly simple hypothetical question: what would happen if we humans were to disappear one day, suddenly, from the face of the earth? What would become of our cities and buildings, our cultural remains and technological artifacts? What would happen to the oceans and air, the forests and fields? What would happen to the species we hunt, and those we have domesticated?
The idea that we would disappear suddenly sounds like the stuff of science fiction, and so it is, but this little trick of the imagination allows Weisman to bring into relief and with unusual clarity the intricacies of our involvement in nature. He takes us on a whirlwind tour – much of the fun of the book is its travelogue aspect – of sites both familiar and strange: old growth forests in Poland, the ghost city of Varosha in Cyprus, the Korean DMZ, the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre (where millions of pounds of trash and plastic debris float, captured as runoff from the continents and deposited there by the Pacific currents), Manhattan, nuclear waste storage facilities in the American west, the vast chemical production facilities surrounding Houston, the fertilized fields of southern England, the Panama Canal, the Seregenti Plain, and so on. Everywhere, the complicated nature of our couplings with the natural world are clear. We have abused nature with abandon and disregard – but we’ve also domesticated and subdued it, rendered it productive, and even collaborated with it in ways intricately and astonishingly choreographed. We’re embedded in the world in ways extremely complex, a fact that would not lose its force were we to suddenly vanish; and were we to disappear, Weisman’s narrative suggests, the world as know it would become unravelled in ways both beautiful and terrifying.
This insight is what prevents the book from becoming just another screed, a simple fantasia in which the world is quickly rid of its most voracious and destructive species, and glad of it, too. This isn’t to say that Weisman doesn’t make his sympathies clear. Though it’s something of a romance and a fiction to think that previous human civilizations lived in ‘harmony’ with the natural world – traditional societies too threw their garbage over the side of the mountain while cutting down whole forests and hunting entire species into extinction – Weisman does see our technological prowess, expanding population, and material consumption as a cause for alarm and concern. The fact that our massive plastic pollution is a problem of but a scant fifty years’ making is just one example, and Weisman reminds us that except for a small percentage that’s been incinerated or recycled, virtually every piece of plastic we’ve produced in the past half-century is still around – it’s just been dumped either in landfill or in the oceans. Since most plastic is virtually indestructible (though new and partially biodegradable plastics are now coming onto the market), we’ll simply have to wait until some microorganism evolves that will make dinner out of the stuff. The world’s resources, and its inherent beauty, are under incredible strain, and the most poignant chapters of the book are descriptions of territories and lands where humans have been removed or prevented from entering whether by force or by circumstance, allowing nature to retain some of its original beauty or recover some semblance of rich biodiversity. Undeniably, Weisman takes some comfort in the fact that there are many species that would benefit from our disappearance: marine life, whose stocks are rapidly depleting with the advent of dynamite-fishing and other human-created stressors, would probably make a quick and healthy recovery. And I was convinced by his account that our buildings and even our most incredible engineering feats such as the Panama Canal are but temporary constructions waiting to be swallowed up by plants and animals in quick order, once we stop or are no longer around to maintain and care for them.
Of course, the idea that we can observe our world without us is a paradox: how can we observe the world if there are no observers left to observe? So much of the argument is surmise and conjecture, based in projection and extrapolation from what we can already see and what we already know to be true. If there’s anything that I took away from the book – it’s the lesson, familiar but terrifically illustrated here, that in nature, the only constant is change, even if change some times takes place slowly, over the eons of millions of years. But the history of change also suggests the inevitability of extinction: there are few species that have been so successful at embedding themselves so as to survive all of the sources and kinds of change thrown at them. So when we take up environmental ethics, a care for the earth, what processes of change are we trying to preserve, what processes are we trying to accelerate, what processes are we trying to prevent? And for what ends?
