"The World Without Us"

What would the earth look like if humans suddenly disappeared? An audacious new book imagines a people-free planet, and restores our sense of awe.

By Gary Kamiya

Read more: Books, Environment, Science, Gary Kamiya, Reviews, Book reviews

July 23, 2007 | Most contemporary books about the environment end up being jeremiads. They may sing the praises of the natural world, but mostly to draw attention to the ways we are destroying it. The goal is to inspire social change, but that does not always result in creative or compelling prose. How do you avoid putting readers to sleep with yet another alarming tale when you're dealing with a subject that truly is alarming? One of the many virtues of Alan Weisman's "The World Without Us" is that it finds a brilliantly creative solution to this problem.

Weisman embarks on an audacious intellectual adventure: He tries to imagine what the world would be like if humans suddenly disappeared. "How would the rest of nature respond if it were suddenly relieved of the relentless pressures we heap on it and our fellow organisms? How soon would, or could, the climate return to where it was before we fired up all our engines? How long would it take to recover lost ground and restore Eden to the way it must have gleamed and smelled the day before Adam, or homo habilis, appeared? Could nature ever obliterate all our traces?"

Weisman opens his study with a parable, a scene set in the Amazonian jungle. A few dozen Zapara Indians are getting drunk on chicha, a sour beer made of fermented cassava pulp, and eating monkey meat. Once, generations ago, the tribe numbered 200,000 and fed itself by hunting the game that the jungle teemed with. That all changed after Henry Ford started mass-producing automobiles. The demand for rubber led to a genocide of the Zapara and other native peoples, and savaged the forest they lived in. Today, only a few hundred Zapara survive, and their ancient way of life is gone. They cut and burn down the towering forest to grow cassava. And although they believe themselves to be descended from monkeys, they have resorted to eating them -- a formerly taboo act. Only one old woman, Ana Maria, protests. "When we're down to eating our ancestors," she asks, "what is left?"

Weisman uses this grim tale to set up his thought experiment. "[L]ately, we have had a creeping sense of what Ana Maria means," he writes. "Even if we're not driven to cannibalism, might we, too, face terrible choices as we skulk towards the future?" Weisman admits that we can't know -- but he believes we should engage with the question. And he offers his thought experiment as a kind of creative spur to such engagement, a way of opening and focusing our minds.

By approaching the end of humanity from this unique angle, as a given, Weisman succeeds in throwing the spotlight on the earth itself -- and invests us in her fate. His thought experiment is so intellectually fascinating, so oddly playful, that it escapes categorizing and clichés -- in particular that earnest moralizing that can make environmental screeds so predictable. Written as if by a compassionate and curious observer on another planet, his book restores a sense of wonder not just to one little piece of the cosmos, but to the human race whose amazing deeds have transformed it, and whose equally monumental folly now threatens it.

"The World Without Us" taps into one of our deepest, if only furtively acknowledged, pleasures: imagining destruction. Just as Tom Sawyer sneaked deliciously into his own funeral, we gobble up Weisman's anecdotes about the decay and dissolution of everything human. It also appeals to our love of looking in the cosmic rearview mirror: Like "A Christmas Carol" or "It's a Wonderful Life," it sucks us in with a vision of what is, what has been and what is yet to come. The book is addictive: Just a few pages into it and I was as enchanted as I was by the imaginative books I loved as a boy, like "Paddle-to-the-Sea," the beautiful fictional story of the odyssey of a tiny canoe carved by an Indian boy, and "Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps," which starts from a picture of a girl holding a cat and moves in exponential leaps both far out, to the end of the universe, and deep in, to the subatomic realm.

That Weisman's book stirs such innocent page-turning joy may be a larger achievement than it at first appears. For that joy is somehow connected with our innocent feeling for nature, one we are always in danger of forgetting. And without that feeling, all the jeremiads in the world will not inspire us to take the steps that are so urgently necessary.

Paradoxically, it's the fact that Weisman envisions the Earth enduring that becomes motivation for us to change our ways. The twist, of course, is that his imagined happy ending for the Earth only comes about because mankind is absent. Yet this isn't depressing, as one might think, but oddly inspiring. Weisman concludes that many of those happy endings are possible even if humanity doesn't disappear -- as long we curb our appetites and our population. And even if we end up causing our own extinction, it is profoundly reassuring to think that the Earth will not only survive, but flourish.

By restoring our sense of awe about the Earth, and our connectedness to it, Weisman takes us out of the merely political and into a deeper realm. His book is a kind of time bomb: Its surface cheeriness conceals a much deeper pessimism. But in the end that pessimism, too, is transformed by a force even stronger than geology: hope.

So what would happen to the Earth if we were gone? In search of answers, Weisman travels to the Bialowieza Puszcza, the last remaining primeval forest in Europe; to the ancient underground cities of Cappadocia in Turkey; to Korea, where North and South Korean troops face off over a DMZ that has become home to wildlife that might otherwise have vanished; to Houston and its vast petrochemical plants; under New York City, where engineers struggle daily to keep torrents of water from flooding into the subway tunnels; to abandoned hotels on the Green Line in divided Cyprus; to the Panama Canal, one of the most extraordinary engineering feats of all time.

One of the reasons "The World Without Us" is so compelling is that Weisman, a veteran journalist, has a keen eye for locations and stories that are at once crucial and offbeat: I had never heard of the Bialowieza Puszcza before, had no idea that endangered species were finding refuge in the Korean DMZ, and if I had not just visited the amazing underground cities of Cappadocia myself, would have been ignorant of them as well. Weisman's vivid, well-written accounts of the places he goes and the people he meets make his meandering narrative as colorful and exotic as a travelogue.

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