In 2005 Alan Weisman wrote an essay in Discover magazine entitled "Earth Without People". In it he imagines what would happen to the earth if humans were to suddenly just vanish. Most houses, for example, would collapse within 50 to 100 years, but our aluminum pots and pans would last 500, and pottery and bathroom tile would be buried indefinitely, awaiting the next intelligent species to develop an interest in archeology. Weisman has now expanded his people-less earth speculation into a full length book, The World Without Us. His Discover article was an intriguing thought experiment, but ... an entire book devoted to a hypothetical human extinction? It's like one of those movies where a pathogen knocks off most of humanity, only in this scenario there's no band of hardy survivors, and the basic feeling about it all is not horror but a sort of serene relief that Homo sapiens is done in at last.
To be sure, most of the book describes the world with us. Weisman visits the DMZ in Korea and the town of Varosha on Cyprus to witness what happens when humankind abandons an area. He brings us to ancient underground cities in Turkey, refineries near Houston, ancient Mayan ruins, the Rothamsted agriculture experimentation station in England, the evacuated area around Chernobyl, the Kingman Reef in the Pacific, and other places to map out our historical relationship with the planet. Like most journalists, he is not a particularly talented writer, pigeon-holing most of the experts he encounters with one or two colorful lines ("Dr. Steven McGrath hunches over his corner computer, deep-set eyes beneath his gleaming pate crinkling through rectangular reading lenses") and then getting on to the facts. Most of those facts involve the ways in which humans have altered earth's environment: by overhunting, by turning forests into farms, by manufacturing plastics and burning hydro-carbons, by overfishing and introducing non-native species to every corner of the globe. Weisman does not even try to hide his true feelings about all this human hegemony, and his sardonic tone sometimes verges on outright hostility, as when he describes how the common house cat kills millions (or billions) of birds per year:
Whatever the actual sum may be, cats will do very well in a world without the people who took them to all the continents and islands they didn't already inhabit, where they now outnumber and out-compete other predators their own size. Long after we're gone, songbirds must deal with the progeny of these opportunists that trained us to feed and harbor them, disdaining our hapless appeals to come when we call, bestowing just enough attention so we feed them again.
One problem with the book is that Weisman, though fond of handing out predictions, does not back his speculations up with much in the way of logic or evidence. For example he states, without explaining why, that dogs will not last long without us. Yet we know that the dingoes of Australia were once domestic dogs, and wild dogs kill more livestock than wolves or coyotes in Minnesota right now. If nothing else, dogs would have all those bird-murdering cats to prey on.
When he has scientists or other experts backing him, Weisman is able to sift the data and present a convincing case—for example in a chapter entitled "The Lost Menagerie" he narrates how early American Indians, apparently excellent big game hunters, were responsible for the extinction of most large mammals on our continent, species that far outshone the lions and elephants in Africa today. Also fascinating is the list of our creations that will last into the geologic record, including dioxins, Mount Rushmore, and the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft. At times, The World Without Us seems more like the dark fantasy of an environmentalist misanthrope than a book of serious research or activism. But Weisman is, in the end, realistic regarding the low chances of humanity exiting the stage soon, and philosophical about the future earth, comparing our reign to the more devastating Permian Extinction. As marine paleoecologist Jeremy Jackson explains, "The world has always changed. It's not a constant place."
- Joel Van Valin