Somewhere we got the crazy idea that it was all about us. You can even see it in the word we use to describe the world we're bent on ruining: the environment – the stuff that surrounds the mammal with the outsized brain who almost by definition (our definition, of course) is at the centre of things.
We're not the norm, though, whatever we pretend. Our presence has been brief, almost non-existent when measured against the planet's 4.5 billion years. And our long-term prospects are doubtful, even if we take advantage of global warming to resist the next ice age for a few measly millennia while managing to evade the killer asteroids, tectonic jolts and toxic habitats that did in our predecessors.
Still, believing we're at the centre of it all, we find it hard, if not logically impossible, to contemplate a world without us: Some of us deny our special genius for self-destruction, some of us wallow in fear – and some of us persist in thinking that salvation, when and if it comes, will be our achievement as well. Anthropocentric to the last, we can't conceive of a happy ending that doesn't include us as both the agent and the beneficiary, the giver and the taker.
But there could be a different solution, or at least another twist in the plot that would make the Earth's story much less self-serving and predictable. What if, Alan Weisman asks in his startling new book, The World Without Us, we all just disappeared? Annihilation has happened before (think dinosaurs) and it will happen again (probably long before the sun calls it a day). So why not now, while nature still has a chance to reclaim what was hers before we moved in?
Mr. Weisman, an author, radio producer and professor of international journalism at the University of Arizona, has decided to usurp the role that once belonged to deities impatient with the follies of the human race. He instantly eradicates the species with breathtaking detachment, which not only saves us from environmental death throes but also immediately puts the focus back where it belongs: on the awesome powers of nature to reclaim the Earth despite the human detritus of highways, skyscrapers, nuclear reactors and billions of pesky plastic bags.
It's a crafty paradox, and an oddly satisfying way of soothing the anxieties that the save-the-planet crowd necessarily trade in: We can appreciate the wonders of the natural world much more when we're not in the picture.
“The underlying message of the environmental movement,” Mr. Weisman says from his Seattle hotel room, fresh from talking to a group of Colorado Young Democrats who couldn't accept that the manufacturing of plastic bags should be made a criminal offence, “is that if we don't fix this thing, we're all going to die. That scares the hell out of people, unfortunately. They find it depressing and downright scary. If you preach that in a book, they're going to toss it out, turn on the TV, light up a joint – or do anything rather than read this stuff.”
And so the reassuring Mr. Weisman came up with a strategy to take the worry out of environmental catastrophe and shift our attention (for once) away from ourselves. “Let's assume just for fun that we're already gone. Aliens took us to some zoo in Andromeda or Jesus took us to heaven – being nice, he took everyone – or some disease just picked us off and left everything else. So we're all gone, but we get to see what happens next, as all our stuff is dismantled rather efficiently by nature.”
In The World Without Us, he describes in loving detail how human stuff will decompose and decay as nature rushes back in. The New York subway, no longer able to resist Manhattan's 40 buried streams, will be flooded in no time as pumps stop working and the roads above begin to heave, starting the slow, steady process that turns the city into a picturesque ruin populated by raptors in the upper reaches and whatever sea creatures gravitate to the waterlogged high-rent avenues.
