The World Without Us

As to the fate of the planet and its other residents after we’re finally done with it—or it’s done with us—religions are dismissive, or worse. The posthuman Earth is either ignored or destroyed, although in Buddhism and Hinduism, it starts again from scratch—as does the whole universe, similar to a repeating Big Bang theory. (Until that happens, the correct answer to whether this world would go on without us, says the Dalai Lama, is: “Who knows?”)

In Christianity, the Earth melts, but a new one is born. Since it needs no sun—the eternal light of God and the Lamb having eliminated night— it’s clearly a different planet than this one.

“The world exists to serve people, because man is the most honorable of all creatures,” says Turkish Sufi master Abdülhamit Çakmut. “There are cycles in life. From the seed comes the tree, from the tree comes the fruit we eat, and we give back as humans. Everything is meant to serve man. If people are gone from this cycle, nature itself will be over.”

The Muslim dervish practice he teaches reflects the recognition that everything, from atoms to our galaxy, whirls in cycles, including nature as it continually regenerates—at least until now. Like so many others— Hopis, Hindus, Judeo-Christians, Zoroastrians—he warns of an end-time. (In Judaism, time itself is said to end, but only God knows what that means.) “We see the signs,” Çakmut says. “Harmony is broken. The good are outnumbered. There is more injustice, exploitation, corruption, pollution. We are facing it now.”

It’s a familiar scenario: Good and evil finally spin apart, landing in heaven and hell, respectively, and everything else vanishes. Except, Abdülhamit Çakmut adds, we can slow this process—the good are those who strive to restore harmony and speed nature’s regeneration.

“We take care of our bodies to live a longer life. We should do the same for the world. If we cherish it, make it last as long as possible, we can postpone the judgment day.”

Can we? Gaia theorist James Lovelock prophesies that unless things change soon, we’d better stash essential human knowledge at the poles in a medium that doesn’t require electricity. Yet Dave Foreman, founder of Earth First!, a cadre of environmental guerrillas who had all but given up on humans deserving a place in the ecosystem, now directs The Rewilding Institute, a think tank based on conservation biology and unapologetic hope.

That hope both includes, and depends on, the consecration of “mega-linkages”—corridors that would span entire continents, where people would be committed to coexisting with wildlife. In North America alone, he sees a minimum of four: they would span the continent’s dividing spine, the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, and the Arctic-boreal. In each, top predators and large fauna absent since the Pleistocene would be reinstated, or the closest things possible: African surrogates of America’s missing camels, elephants, cheetahs, and lions.

Dangerous? The payoff for humans, Foreman and company believe, is that in a re-equilibrated ecosystem, there’s a chance for us to survive. If not, the black hole into which we’re shoving the rest of nature will swallow us as well.

It’s a plan that keeps Paul Martin, author of the Blitzkrieg extinction theory, in touch with Kenya’s David Western, fighting to stop elephants from downing every last drought-stressed fever tree: Send some of those proboscids to America, pleads Martin. Let them again eat Osage oranges, avocados, and other fruit and seeds that evolved to be so big because megafauna could ingest them.

Yet the biggest elephant of all is a figurative one in the planet-sized room that is ever harder to ignore, although we keep trying. Worldwide, every four days human population rises by 1 million. Since we can’t really grasp such numbers, they’ll wax out of control until they crash, as has happened to every other species that got too big for this box. About the only thing that could change that, short of the species-wide sacrifice of voluntary human extinction, is to prove that intelligence really makes us special after all.

The intelligent solution would require the courage and the wisdom to put our knowledge to the test. It would be poignant and distressing in ways, but not fatal. It would henceforth limit every human female on Earth capable of bearing children to one.