Homo extinctus

>> Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us
takes an in-depth look at a human-less earth

by Juliet Waters

“Let us try a creative experiment,” Alan Weisman suggests in The World Without Us. “Suppose that the worst has happened. Human extinction is a fait accompli.” What would happen? Would the earth go back to pretty much the way it was before humans? If it could, what would that look like? How long would it take? And if it couldn’t, what would remain? How would nature damage and destroy our accomplishments, and how would it heal the damage and destruction we’ve inflicted? The answers to these questions are compelling and not nearly as depressing as one might think.

To get an authentic picture of what that process would be like, Weisman, a science writer who takes the genre to the level of art, guides us on a visceral journey through what the world looked like before humans evolved, and what it looks like just after war and disaster, natural and unnatural, have done their work. The journey includes northern European forests that have barely been visited by humans; contemporary Chernobyl, where swallows have returned to sing and, probably, die of radiation; ancient underground cities that will probably remain as some of the last evidence of our existence; and modern underground cities that would likely disappear with surprising speed.

Weisman’s chapter on New York City takes on a spooky relevance. The day I finished the book, a tornado hit Brooklyn and flooding shut down the subways. One of the first interviews in The World Without Us is with Paul Schuber, superintendent of hydraulics, and Peter Briffa, the level-one maintenance supervisor of NYC’s Hydraulic Emergency Response Team. Every day, they keep 13 million gallons of water from overpowering New York’s subway tunnels. “That’s just the water that’s already underground,” notes Schuber. “When it rains, the amount is…incalculable,” says Briffa.

Without a vigilant maintenance crew, let alone the human race, NYC’s subway system would be full of water in 36 hours. As Weisman imagines it: “Before long, streets start to crater. With no one unclogging sewers, some new watercourses form on the surface… Within 20 years, Lexington Avenue would be a river.”

In many ways, post-human New York would be a more beautiful place. Coyotes and bears would return and flora would invade and demolish buildings. That is until fires are sparked and left unattended. New Yorkers would be missed by rats and cockroaches until vermin become extinct from lack of food and from being picked off by the rising population of birds and wild animals. Domestic dogs wouldn’t last long, but feral cats would thrive on the ever-returning swallows.

In the rest of the world, endangered mega fauna, elephants, bison and the other big animals might thrive again without the lazy, greedy humans who have been compulsively exterminating them for longer than we realize. A fascinating chapter takes us on a tour of magical mutant beasts that once existed and were in all likelihood eliminated by early humans and their love of hunting easy prey: giant sloths, camels with trunks, armadillos the size of small cars, to name a few. Would the mutants return? Whether they would or not, evidence of our impressive weaponry, and pretty much anything else we’ve invented, would disappear long before the disintegration of McDonald’s happy-meal toys and our miniature plastic mutant creations.

Weisman probes into the havoc that humans have unleashed upon the world with a mostly gentle misanthropy. He’s clearly more impressed by nature than humans, and he’s unflinching about the odds that we will become extinct one day—whether we destroy the planet, or it destroys us.

But this creative exercise proves a fertile ground for brainstorming about the best, and only way, to save ourselves. Weisman sees any hope as deriving from one fundamental decision. We need to cull the human population radically and quickly. Ideally, not through war or disaster but through a major slow down in our breeding. If we don’t, there’s little doubt nature will do that for us, and in ways that we might not find as fascinating.

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman,
Harper Collins, hc, 323pp, $32.