The World Without Us

“Suppose that the worst has happened. Human extinction is a fait accompli. Not by nuclear calamity, asteroid collision, or anything ruinous enough to also wipe out most everything else […]. Nor by some grim eco-scenario in which we agonizingly fade, dragging many more species with us in the process. Instead, picture a world from which we all suddenly vanished. Tomorrow. Unlikely perhaps, but for the sake of argument, not impossible.”

Weisman articulates the thought experiment that is the book’s premise. He specifies that humanity is eliminated without collateral damage because he wants to imagine how nature would respond in its present state, not in some future state of even greater degradation resulting from our prolonged, losing battle for survival.

“The matter is more complicated than a killer instinct that never relents until another species is gone. It involves acquisitive instincts that also can’t tell when to stop, until something we never intended to harm is fatally deprived of something it needs. We don’t actually have to shoot songbirds to remove them from the sky. Take away enough of their home or sustenance, and they fall dead on their own.”

This is another evolutionary analysis of human behavior, in this case explaining why we have caused so much environmental damage throughout the history of our species. The instinctual drive to hunt and to acquire useful possessions ensured the survival and flourishing of early humans, but it became maladaptive as mushrooming population and advancing technology expanded humans’ capacity to consume resources and transform nature.

“If human crops revert to a mosaic of woods and grassland, and if baboons fill our keystone slot, would they be satisfied to dwell in pure natural beauty? Or would curiosity and sheer narcissistic delight in their unfolding powers eventually push them and their planet to the brink, too?”

In Chapter 6 Weisman returns to the question, first posed in Chapter 4, of whether another species might evolve humanlike intelligence after our extinction. This quote takes the speculation a step further, asking whether such a super-intelligent species would necessarily replicate our environmentally voracious behavior, touching on the theme of Humans as Innately Destructive. The question is unanswered and unanswerable, but Weisman suggests that curiosity and delight in their own abilities might be sufficient to engender such behavior among baboons, the largest-brained of the nonhuman primates.

“Each month more steam shovels gobble coastline like famished brontosaurs, spitting out olive and carob trees along a widening blacktop now 30 miles east of Kyrenia, with no sign of stopping. The English language marches down the shore, dragging embarrassing architecture with it, one sign after another announcing the latest subdivision with a trust-inspiring British name, even as the seaside villas grow trashier: concrete painted, not stuccoed; fake-ceramic roof tiles made of tacky polymer; cornices and windows trimmed with faux stenciled stonework.”

This is Weisman’s contemptuous description of the retirement communities being developed along Cyprus’s northern coast. The image of “famished brontosaurs” sharpens Weisman’s critique of voracious development; the implication is that humans will go extinct like the brontosaurs—but due to our own activities. The description of the “trashy” subdivisions reflects Weisman’s disdain for the low-quality building materials and construction practices that characterize much contemporary real estate development.

“In a 21st century where more than half the human race lives in cities and where most people are poor, cheap variations on the theme of reinforced concrete are repeated daily: planet-wide piles of low bids that will come crashing down in a posthuman world […]”

This quote also targets the poor quality of contemporary construction, but whereas the previous quote implies the low quality is a product of the developers’ greed and impatience, in this case Weisman portrays it as a symptom of rampant urban poverty. Although Weisman ultimately poses a sole solution to the problem of humans’ impact on the environment, passages like this one point to the issue’s complex causes, which include (this passage implies) wealth inequality.

“They’re selling plastic meant to go right down the drain, into the sewers, into the rivers, right into the ocean. Bite-size pieces of plastic to be swallowed by little sea creatures.”

Weisman is quoting Richard Thompson, the University of Plymouth marine biologist studying ocean-borne plastic detritus. Thompson’s graduate student discovered that many cosmetic products use polyethylene granules for exfoliants rather than ground-up seeds, shells, or other natural materials. Thompson is dismayed because, when these granules end up in the ocean, they are small enough to be consumed by tiny organisms at the bottom of the marine food web, with unknown long-term consequences.

“Impossible as it is for us to fathom, all these colossal mountains will one day erode to the sea—every boulder, outcrop, saddle, spire, and canyon wall. Every massive uplift will pulverize, their minerals dissolving to keep the oceans salted, the plume of nutrients in their soils nourishing a new marine biological age even as the previous one disappears beneath their sediments.”

This quote, referring to the Rocky and Sierra Madre mountains, illustrates a point to which Weisman returns again and again: the immensity of geologic time. The fact that entire mountain ranges have been created, eroded, and replaced during the nearly 5 billion years of Earth history puts into perspective how brief humanity’s time on the planet has been and almost certainly will be.

“Today’s amount of plastic will take hundreds of thousands of years to consume, but, eventually, it will all biodegrade. […] It’s just a matter of waiting for evolution to catch up with the materials we’re making. […] [And if not,] the upheavals and high pressure will change it into something else. Just like trees buried in bogs a long time ago—the geologic process, not biodegradation, changed them into oil and coal. Maybe high concentrations of plastics will turn into something like that. Eventually, they will change. Change is the hallmark of nature. Nothing remains the same.”

This quote, from the plastics researcher Tony Andrady, serves a dual purpose. On the one hand, Andrady highlights the fact that humans’ plastic waste will pollute the planet for an extremely long time, but on the other, he reassures readers that eventually it too will be transformed by either biologic or geologic processes, just as today’s fossil-fuel deposits were once trees. Because Nature Is Flux, nothing is permanent.

“Beneath these soils, and periodically disinterred by ambitious root systems, will lie three centuries’ worth of various heavy metals and an alphabet soup of POPs, substances truly new under the sun and soil. Some engineered compounds like PAHs, too heavy to blow away to the Arctic, may end up molecularly bound in soil pores too tiny for digesting microbes to enter, and remain there forever.”

This passage highlights the longevity of certain industrial pollutants and synthetic chemicals. Whereas Andrady assures readers that no human waste is truly immortal, here Weisman warns that microscopic remnants of some toxins may remain in the soil forever.

“The capacity of organisms to ensconce themselves in the world’s most inhospitable places—from lichens on Antarctic glaciers to sea worms in 176˚F sea vents—may symbolize the meaning of life itself.”

This quote highlights the resilience of the life force. The fact that organisms can survive in extreme environments seemingly inhospitable to life reassures readers that no matter how severely humans alter ecological systems, life itself will continue in some form.

“It was no less than the human race defying plate tectonics by tearing apart two continents that floated together 3 million years earlier.”

Referring to the construction of the Panama Canal, Weisman uses a vivid image to convey just how stunning an engineering feat this was—a seemingly superhuman effort to rip apart North and South America. Earth-moving projects of such massive scale and consequence are one of the ways in which humans have become a “force of nature” in the Anthropocene.

“The resurgence of bald eagles in North America after DDT was banned bodes hopeful for creatures that cope with residual traces of our better life through chemistry. However, while DDT is toxic at a few parts per million, dioxins become dangerous at just 90 parts per trillion—and dioxins may remain until the end of life itself.”

This is another double-edged quote. The recovery of the bald eagle offers hope for at least some of the countless species currently threatened with extinction by human activities. However, the fact that humans have since invented other chemicals that are far more toxic and persistent than DDT undermines that hope, suggesting that some damage may never be undone.

“When we humans become extinct ourselves, part of our legacy will live on in the predators we introduced.”

Intentionally and unintentionally, humans have transported countless plant and animal species to new continents throughout our history. In the case of exotic predators, these introductions can have profound impacts on the structure of existing ecosystems, as when Australian brown tree snakes eliminated more than half of Guam’s bird species and several native lizards within 30 years of arrival.

“You want them to fly away, fast and far. At the same time, it’s mesmerizing that they’re here. It seems so normal, as if apocalypse has turned out to be not so bad after all. The worst happens, and life still goes on.”

Weisman is describing himself watching barn swallows fly around the remains of the exploded reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine. All of the birds disappeared when the disaster occurred in 1986, but they began returning the following spring and have remained ever since despite the still-high levels of radioactive contamination in the area. The fact that “life still goes on” after the worst nuclear disaster in history is encouraging, but Weisman adds that “the baseline has changed”: The returning swallows showed signs of genetic mutation.

“Not just animals but people too have crept back into Chernobyl’s and Novozybkov’s contaminated zones. […] Like the swallows who returned, they come because they were here before. Tainted or not, it’s something precious and irreplaceable, even worth the risk of a shorter life.

It’s their home.”

After the Chernobyl disaster, all residents were permanently evacuated from a 30-kilometer-radius Exclusion Zone around the reactor, but some, mostly elderly villagers, illegally returned to their homes. Their attachment to place was evidently stronger than their fear of contamination and illness. By ending the chapter on this note, Weisman is perhaps encouraging the reader to reflect upon how our collective home, planet Earth, is “precious and irreplaceable.”

“How can we even contemplate a world without us? […] To imagine our big, overwhelming civilization really ending—and ending up forgotten under layers of dirt and earthworms—is as hard for us as picturing the edge of the universe.”

As in the Prelude, Weisman notes the psychological difficulty of actually imagining human extinction. Humans can intellectually comprehend the notion of extinction but can’t picture it. The analogy Weisman offers underscores this: It is hard to imagine the “edge of the universe” because it raises the question of how something infinite can have an “edge,” and if it did, of what would be on the other side. Likewise, humans can’t truly grasp the vastness of geologic time.

“Nobility is expensive, nonproductive, and parasitic, siphoning away too much of society’s energy to satisfy its frivolous cravings.”

Weisman is paraphrasing the archaeologist Arthur Demarest’s theory of why the ancient Mayan civilization disappeared. Demarest maintains that the number of elites, all of whom pursued wealth and luxury goods and waged dynastic wars against each other, ultimately demanded more resources than their available farmland could provide.

“Might the current explosion of extinctions—invariably pointing to a sole cause, and not an asteroid this time—suggest that a certain dominant mammal’s turn may be coming to an end? Is geologic history striking again?”

Weisman is referring to the mass extinction event contemporaneous with the book’s writing, known variously as the Holocene extinction, the Anthropocene extinction, or the sixth extinction. The “sole cause” of elevated extinction rates today is that “dominant mammal”—namely, humans. There is a note of apocalyptic dread here, as Weisman encourages the reader to wonder whether, by making Earth so inhospitable for so many life forms, we will eventually render it uninhabitable for ourselves.

“By definition, we’re the alien invader. Everywhere except Africa. Every time Homo sapiens went anywhere else, things went extinct.”

This is a statement from Les Knight, founder of the VHEMT. If the “Blitzkrieg” theory of the Pleistocene extinction is correct, then this description is factually accurate: When early humans migrated from their native continent, they hunted countless species to extinction on the other continents. Knight pejoratively characterizes this migration as an “alien invasion,” though from the perspective of those prehistoric forebears, they were not “invading” but simply spreading out in search of food and shelter.

“Microbes don’t really much care whether we—or anything else—are here or not. We’re just a semi-interesting niche for them. In fact, there’s been just a very brief period of time when there were anything but microbes on the planet. For billions of years, that’s all there was. And when the sun starts to expand, we’ll go, and it’ll only be microbes, for millions or billions of years more.”

Here Weisman is quoting the microbiologist Forest Rohwer discussing the slimy algae that takes over coral reefs when nutrient pollution increases the bacterial content of ocean water. By reminding readers that life on Earth began with microbes and will end with microbes, the quote contrasts the briefness of human history with the vastness of geologic time. It also touches on Reverence for the Earth and Life, asking the reader to more deeply appreciate the uniqueness of Earth’s complex life forms, humans included.

“I’m so amazed by the ability of life to hang on to anything. Given the opportunity, it goes everywhere. A species as creative and arguably intelligent as our own should somehow find a way to achieve a balance. […] Even if we don’t: if the planet can recover from the Permian [extinction], it can recover from the human.”

This quote from the conservation marine biologist Enric Sala celebrates the tenacity of life. Sala is optimistic that life on Earth will manage to endure no matter how severely humans degrade the natural environment.

“The vision of a world relieved of our burden, with its flora and fauna blossoming wildly and wonderfully in every direction, is initially seductive. Yet it’s quickly followed by a stab of bereavement over the loss of all the wonder that humans have wrought amid our harm and excess.”

Weisman is responding to the claims of VHEMT founder Knight, who considers humans so innately inimical to the rest of life on Earth that self-extinction would be a virtuous act of service to the planet. Weisman is not willing to discount humans’ intrinsic value so severely, though his response to the idea of human extinction—a “stab of bereavement”—is brief and understated.

“[E]very dam on Earth would silt up and spill over. Rivers would again carry nutrients to the sea, where most life would still be, as it was long before we vertebrates first crawled onto these shores. Eventually, we’d try that again. Our world would start over.”

Weisman once again prompts the reader to take a very long view of Earth’s history, recognizing that the hydrologic cycle and other fundamental natural processes will continue after humanity’s demise. The expression “we vertebrates” encourages humans to move beyond a species-centric perspective and cultivate a sense of kinship with all living creatures, mitigating the sense of grief over our own eventual extinction.