The World Without Us
By Alan Weisman
(Thomas Dunne Books, 336 pages, $24.95)
IT IS A COMMON FANTASY among the more zealous environmentalists
that some strange and lethal virus will someday snuff out every
Homo sapiens on the planet, but leave all other species unscathed.
In time, say a few centuries — a mere geological blink-of-the-eye
— the Earth heals and reverts to its pre-Hominid state.
Such thought experiments are the stuff of Alan Weisman’s new
book The World Without Us. Weisman’s treatise would be an
interesting read if it weren’t for the nagging suspicion that there
is something rather fatuous about its very premise: that a world
without human beings could possibly matter.
An associate professor of journalism at the University of
Arizona, Weisman’s big revelation is that things will fall apart if
left untended. I’ll give you the basic outline. Man is whisked away
by aliens, or zapped by a death ray, or eaten by a virus, or taken
up to paradise during the Rapture. Centuries pass and the Great
Wall of China crumbles, skyscrapers catch fire or their waterlogged
foundations fail, bridges collapse, dams burst, and the Panama
Canal silts up. Fifty years after man’s disappearance humanity’s
ill effects continue to be felt, as radioactivity from the
disintegrating nuclear reactors begin to seep into rivers. With
man’s extinction everything he has touched, including domesticated
livestock, dogs and cats, is made short work of by increasing
numbers of predators. Man-made plants, flowers, and crops quickly
die off or devolve to their wild form. There is one bit of good
news: “The invincible cockroach, an insect that originated in the
hot climes of Africa, would succumb in unheated buildings. Without
garbage, rats would starve or serve as lunch for peregrine falcons
and red-tailed hawks. Pigeons would genetically revert back to the
rock doves from which they sprang.”
It is, nonetheless, diverting to read how most signs of
civilization would be quickly swallowed up by nature, much like
Guatemala’s Mayan pyramids or certain former colonial areas in
Africa. North America would revert to a pre-Columbian Eden of
forests and grasslands populated with bison and deer, bear and
wolves. In his travels Weisman finds a few such pristine places
extant today: Chernobyl, the Korean DMZ, the Cypriot Green Line, a
virgin forest on the Polish-Belarus border once the private hunting
grounds of a wealthy Lithuanian duke, now a federal preserve. Even
so it would be impossible to wipe out all traces of Homo sapiens’
ambiguous legacy. Bronze statues will endure for millions of years.
Plastics are likewise virtually indestructible. And automobile
tires — which last on my car about three years—will be around
forever. Worse, radio waves broadcasting asinine shows starring
Paris Hilton will float around the galaxy for all time.
ITS ENTERTAINMENT VALUE aside, The World Without Us is a
prime example of the wrongheaded, extremist views of the Greens who
regard Man as Nature’s main adversary, an indefatigable villain who
is responsible for fouling the oceans, overheating the air, raping
the forests and committing “specicide.” David Graber, a research
biologist for the U.S. Parks Service, seemed to anticipate Weisman
when he told the Los Angeles Time, that “Human happiness,
and certainly human fecundity, is not as important as a wild and
healthy planet….Some of us can only hope for the right virus to
come along.” What we call pristine today, paleoecologist Paul S.
Martin at the University of Arizona says, is a poor reflection of
what would be here if Homo sapiens had never evolved.
“When people got out of Africa and Asia and reached other parts of
the world, all hell broke loose.”
Weisman’s premise is reminiscent of the popular conundrum: “If a
tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it
make a sound?” In this case the answer depends on your definition
of “sound.” Is sound simply waves troubling the air, or is a better
definition waves perceived through a sense of hearing or touch? To
the idealist philosopher only that which can be perceived is real,
therefore the answer is a resounding “No.”
And that’s why Weisman’s thought experiment ultimately strikes
me as philosophically unsound. As Bishop George Berkeley observed
centuries ago, all we can know about an object (such as a planet)
is our perception of it. This idea was summed up in Berkeley’s
famous dictum, “Esse est percipi” (to be is to be
perceived). Therefore, if there is no human mind left to perceive
Earth’s existence, the Earth cannot “be.” Earth exists only as an
idea in man’s mind — no more and no less. Put simply, the mental
world is the real world. And no, Bishop Berkeley cannot be refuted
by kicking a stone.
Ultimately this may just be a complicated way of stating the
obvious. What would the world be like without us? It doesn’t
matter.
