The World Without Us

Many other friends, relations, and colleagues sustained me at key moments through the research and writing of this book, with contributions ranging from practical to intellectual, moral, and mystical (to say nothing of culinary)—all prompting ideas and bolstering my energy when I most needed them. For advice, critiques, insights, affection, faith, food, and spare bedrooms, thank you Alison Deming, Jeff Jacobson, Marnie Andrews, Drum Hadley, Rebecca West, Mary Caulkins, Karl Kister, Jim Schley, Barry Lopez, Debra Gwartney, Chuck Bowden, Mary Martha Miles, Bill Wing, Terri Windling, Bill Posnick, Pat Lanier, Constanza Vieira, Diana Hadley, Tom Miller, Ted Robbins, Barbara Ferry, Dick Kamp, Jon Hipps, Caroline Corbin, Clark Strand, Perdita Finn, Molly Wheelwright, Marvin Shaver, and Joan Kravetz, and very special thanks to my able research aide, Julie Kentnor. This list also includes some entire families: Nubar Alexanian, Rebecca Koch, and Abby Koch Alexanian; Karen, Benigno, Elias, and Alma Sánchez-Eppler; and Rochelle, Peter, Brian, and Pahoua Hoffman.

I am indebted, too, to the artists whose work graces these pages. Digital magician Markley Boyer brings data to stunning life for the Mannahatta Project. Janusz Korbel has long photographed the splendors of Poland’s Białowieza Puszcza for the same impassioned reasons that inspire Vivian Stockman to document the missing mountains of West Virginia. Archaeologist Murat Ertuğrul Giilyaz and biologist Jim Maragos each contributed images evoking their respective subsurface specialities: the underground cities of central Turkey and the Pacific coral reef. Arizona Republic photographer Tom Tingle provided an interior glimpse of a realm that few would dare enter, but one to which we are literally connected daily—the core of a nuclear generating reactor.

Peter Yates’s image of decaying Varosha, Cyprus, has special poignancy: three decades earlier, he met his wife there. Perhaps symbolically, as he snapped the picture a foreground sprig of wild grass blew in front of his lens, partly obscuring the abandoned hotel’s facade; with his assent, it was photo-surgically removed by Ronn Spencer of ’Sole Studios. Ronn and his colleague Blake Hines also expertly processed color photographs into black-and-white renditions for this book.

The reproduction of Annapolis illustrator Phyllis Saroff’s resurrected passenger pigeon in flight doesn’t fully reflect her delicately colored original, but the gray-scale version she kindly provided has its own haunting power. And I can never thank Carl Buell enough for creating original drawings of a litoptern, a giant sloth, and of our forebear Australopithecus, for this book.

Artist Jon Lomberg’s contribution here goes far beyond the reproduced silhouette he drew for the interstellar Voyager spacecrafts. Jon’s vision exemplifies how art can literally soar beyond our supposed limitations and surprise us with manifestations of spirit that feel linked to eternity. His act of preserving sounds and images that embody such spirit is truly one of humanity’s enduring achievements. I am deeply thankful to him, and to Manhattan art conservators Barbara Appelbaum and Paul Himmelstein, for what they bring not only to this book, but to us all.

At MetalPhysic, their Tucson studio and foundry, Tony Bayne and Jay Luker preserve human expression in that most enduring of metal alloys, bronze. I met them through a sculptor who, to my miraculous good fortune, is my wife, Beckie Kravetz. To know that bronze sculptures such as the graceful figures she conjures have a better chance than nearly anything else we humans do of lasting until the end of Earthly time feels utterly fitting and proper to me. Here’s a vast understatement: without her, this book simply would not exist.

Here’s another: All of us humans have myriad other species to thank. Without them, we couldn’t exist. It’s that simple, and we can’t afford to ignore them, any more than I can afford to neglect my precious wife—nor the sweet mother Earth that births and holds us all.

Without us, Earth will abide and endure; without her, however, we could not even be.

—Alan Weisman

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

BOOKS

Addiscott, T. M. Nitrate, Agriculture, and the Environment. Wallingford, Oxfordshire, U.K.: CABI Publishing, 2005.

Andrady, Anthony, editor. Plastics and the Environment. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2003.

Audubon, John James. Ornithological Biography, or an Account of the Habits of the Birds of the United States of America. Edinburgh: Adam Black, 1831.

Benford, Gregory. Deep Time. New York: Avon Books, 1999.