The World Without Us

If we could do that—find a fertile planet somewhere big enough for all of us, holographically clone our bodies, and upload our minds across light-years—eventually the Earth would do fine without us. With no more herbicides, weeds (otherwise known as biodiversity) would invade our industrial farms and our vast monocultured commercial pine plantations— although, in America, for a while the weeds may mostly be kudzu. It’s only been around since 1876, when it was brought from Japan to Philadelphia as a centennial gift to the United States, and eventually something is bound to learn to eat it. In the meantime, without gardeners endlessly trying to uproot the ravenous stuff, long before the vacant houses and skyscrapers of America’s southern cities tumble, they may have already vanished under a bright, waxy green, photosynthesizing blanket.

Since the late 19th century, when, beginning with electrons, we got down to manipulating the most fundamental particles of the universe, human life has changed very fast. One measure of how fast is that, barely a century ago—until Marconi’s wireless and Edison’s phonograph—all the music ever heard on Earth was live. Today, a tiny fraction of 1 percent is. The rest is electronically reproduced or broadcast, along with a trillion words and images each day.

Those radio waves don’t die—like light, they travel on. The human brain also emanates electric impulses at very low frequencies: similar to, but far weaker than, the radio waves used to communicate with submarines. Paranormalists, however, insist that our minds are transmitters that, with special effort, can focus like lasers to communicate across great distances, and even make things happen.

That may seem far-fetched, but it’s also a definition of prayer.

The emanations from our brains, like radio waves, must also keep going—where? Space is now described as an expanding bubble, but that architecture is still a theory. Along its great mysterious interstellar curvatures, perhaps it’s not unreasonable to think that our thought waves might eventually find their way back here.

Or even that one day—long after we’re gone, unbearably lonely for the beautiful world from which we so foolishly banished ourselves—we, or our memories, might surf home aboard a cosmic electromagnetic wave to haunt our beloved Earth.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In July of 2003, tired of watching drought, bark beetles, and fires devour chunks of the Arizona forests I had long called home, I escaped to what I hoped would be more benign weather in upstate New York. The night I arrived at a friend’s cabin, so did the first tornado to ever hit the Catskills. The next day, while we were discussing how to remove a seven-foot-long section of spruce sapling that had skewered the eaves like a javelin, I got a message from Josie Glausiusz.

Josie, an editor at Discover Magazine, had recently reread an article I’d written for Harper’s years earlier, describing how when humans fled Chernobyl, nature rushed in to fill our void. Plutonium or not, the ecosystem surrounding the ruined reactor seemed better off without us. “What,” she asked me, “would happen if humans disappeared everywhere?”

It was a deceptively simple question that, I came to understand, lets us view our Earth’s current myriad stresses from the disarming vantage of a fantasy in which we supposedly no longer exist, yet somehow we get to watch what unfolds next. Watch, and maybe learn. The article Josie asked me to write led me to this book-length attempt to address her question more thoroughly, and I am ever grateful to her for posing it.

My agent, Nicholas Ellison, not only sensed a fascinating book in it, but found me the right editor. John Parsley at Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press has provided continual reassurance, especially when my research inevitably led to some dark places. I’m indebted to Nick and John, not only for their professional skill and counsel, but also for always helping me recall why I was writing this.

To produce a book that credibly evokes how our world would continue without people is to enter a paradox that ranks with any Buddhist conundrum: it can’t be done without the help of a large supporting cast of humans. Many have appeared in these pages, and I owe them enormously for helping me understand our planet through their eyes, hearts, and expertise. There were many others whose vital contributions are not obvious in the narrative, if only for the sake of economy: had I included everyone’s instructive stories, this volume would have been four times heavier than it is.