The World Without Us: Imagining the Unthinkable

Alan Weisman's book, The World Without Us, has a mystical effect, perhaps not exactly what the radio producer and professor had intended when he wondered what would happen if all human beings suddenly disappeared from the planet.

Few other experiences compare to this book's effect. One, perhaps, is looking at the Zen garden at the Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto, Japan. The 15 stones arranged in a sea of raked white pebbles quickly become metaphorical rather than physical, teasing the mind away from the ordinary world into a place that expands into islands in an ocean or planets in a cosmos, and eventually into mere thoughts floating in a timeless expanse of endless universe. Worries and petty concerns drift away, ideologies disappear, self dissolves, and awareness is so transformed by the perspective that everything thereafter must be referenced to this boundless vision.

Weisman's book has this Zen-like effect, as if the idea of freeing the planet of all humans somehow liberates our creative imagination, allowing us to see things as they really are ˜ and to see ourselves as we really are. The effect is intense. Insights tumble over themselves in vivid realizations that could never be achieved with the personal investment of having ourselves in the considerations. Indeed, Weisman lures us into the realm of the mystical, the wordless place where thoughts are unconstrained by attachment to a human agenda.

This simple exercise by Weisman allows him to illustrate our profound influence on the planet and then to watch ˜ with the selfless detachment of a Buddha-like awareness ˜ as nature reclaims itself, no longer affected by the skewing and abusing that has been our disturbing influence. In this hypothetical exercise, we can suspend our vanity, lose our sense of self-importance and, by exercising some of the formidable imaginative talent we actually possess, begin to understand nature's grand workings.

Exactly how Weisman gets rid of 6.5 billion exuberant human beings is not clear. The inadvertent release of a genetically engineered virus that kills only people? (This is the real-world fear of the famous physicist, Stephen Hawking.) Whatever the cause, the results are immediate and nature is suddenly on its own.

One of the first things we realize is how much maintenance is required by this civilization of ours. The weeding of gardens and the removal of plants from cracks in sidewalks is just the beginning. If the millions of litres of water carried daily by 50 streams were not pumped from New York‚s subway, it would be inundated in two days. Within seven days, when the 441 nuclear reactors run out of diesel for their emergency generators, all of them would melt into heaps of radioactive waste. Within a year, about a billion birds would be saved from crashing into illuminated windows and communication towers. Within 20 years, the Panama Canal would fill with silt, and North and South America would be re-connected. Within another decade, wooden houses would begin to decompose as they were taken over by plants and heaved by trees. Concrete buildings, not designed to be unheated, would soon begin to crack and collapse. Within a few decades, trees would be growing in the streets of most cities, their roots hastening the breaking and lifting of asphalt and cement.

Within 300 years, most skyscrapers and bridges would have collapsed. Within 500 years, most cities would have reverted to old growth forests. Most dogs would have disappeared within a few weeks of our departure but many cats would become feral, joining the wolves, coyotes and deer wandering the remnants of our cities. Great herds of bison and buffalo would rebuild. If the next ice age arrives on schedule in 15,000 years, many northern hemisphere cities would be ground to dust.

In the longer term, 35,000 years would have to pass before the lead deposited from our coal burning is finally cleaned from the soil. Nature would take about 100,000 years to bring atmospheric carbon dioxide levels back to normal ˜ providing we haven‚t already started an irreversible warming. Plutonium from corroded bomb casings would return to the planet's background radiation in about 250,000 years. In 1,000,000 years, microbes might evolve to eat the one billion tonnes of durable plastics we have added to the biosphere. In 7,200,000 years, our chemically stable polychlorinated biphenyls and dioxins will still exist. In 4.5 billion years, about a billion years before Earth is finally engulfed by its dying and exploding Sun, the 500,000 tonnes of depleted Uranium-238 created by the United States will have reached its half-life ˜ that is, half of it will have decayed.

To complete this perspective, Weisman reminds us that some cataclysmic event 250 million years ago destroyed about 95 percent of life on the planet, putting an end to the 400 million years of the Palaeozoic era. This allowed 150 million years of dinosaur rule, until about 65 million years ago when another disaster, probably an asteroid collision, made way for mammals and us. As for ourselves, we are really a mammalian afterthought, less than 30,000 years in our modern form. Agriculture began only about 12,000 years ago and our oldest civilizations date back a mere 5,000 years. Given this perspective, we are not as important as we think we are. And given our present treatment of the planet, we do not have a promising future. "Let's put it this way," wrote one commentator, "if this were a rented apartment, we wouldn't be getting refund on our damage deposit."

But humans have created many beautiful things and we are an amazing species. So Weisman concedes we're worth saving, "But right now we‚re just wreaking too much havoc that affects everything else" (Globe & Mail, July 21/07). Before it's too late, he suggests we collectively decide to limit each couple to just one child. The human population by 2100, instead of being 9 billion, would be 1.6 billion, where it was in 1900. If we are smart enough to enact just this one planet-saving strategy, then perhaps we are smart enough to enact others, too.