Sometimes you don't know what you've got until it's gone. And that's the thought-experiment author Alan Weisman presents in his book The World Without Us — TIME's #1 Non-Fiction book of 2007. What if humanity were to vanish? What would happen to our planet? TIME's Amy Lennard Goehner discusses these and other end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it questions with the author.
TIME: What's behind this enduring fascination with the end of the world?
Weisman: People are scared that we may have gone a little too far on this planet. Systems are breaking down — that could be cataclysmic. The warming of the atmosphere has gotten everybody's attention. I'm speaking to you from Western Massachusetts where the thermometer hit 60 yesterday and was four degrees below zero three days before. Weather is going crazy everywhere. Ice caps are melting, and we're hearing that could push sea levels up. You know the drill.
What's your particular take on this? And why did you take the approach that you took in your book?
I wanted to write a book that was intentionally not apocalyptic. Apocalypse means destruction and the whole world ends. That's kind of scary and depressing, and usually the people who read books like that are the ones who are already into that stuff [and want] to get more detail or affirmation for what they already believe and fear. I wanted to write a book that was going to reach a much wider audience.
So instead of writing a book that preaches, "If we don't change our ways, we're all going to die," I wrote a book in which...something has already happened and we're already dead. ... I say, "Let's assume we're already gone, but now having cleared us away, we get to see what happens next." ... We get to see how nature would deal without us heaping more stuff on it every day, including stuff that we build and pump up our chimneys, and how it would deal with all the stuff we left behind. Part of that is fun — [seeing] what it takes for New York City to turn back into a forest. And the other part is all the toxins, poisons, carbon dioxides — how long would it take for all that to get reabsorbed, and for nature to really heal itself? — which is really the meat of this book: a backward way of looking at what we do by looking at what nature would do if we weren't here doing it anymore.
I did not write this book because I want human beings to disappear, I wanted to remove us temporarily so we could see how well the world could and would heal itself, restore itself without us, and then figure out how can we reinsert ourselves in harmonious balance with everything else, not in mortal combat with everything else, which is what we have right now.
There's so much interest right now in this end-of-the-world topic. You talked about global warming, but what about terrorism? How do you see that figuring in?
I'm pretty scared. ... There's a black market of nuclear material out there. And we know there are some crazies who are willing to blow up entire civilizations because they feel they'll get rewarded in heaven for it. It's just one more level to be scared about, on top of the environmental thing. Nuclear destruction or being poisoned — one of our nuclear plants could just go kablooey because there are flaws in them. Pesticides, herbicides, all these different chemicals that we've [let loose] on the environment could reach some kind of critical mass and do us in.
I stick to the rules of the journalist in this book. I don't preach and say, "Here's what we have to do." I simply go to experts all over the world and [present] interesting facts and let readers draw the conclusions. ... One thing I've discovered is that everybody is concerned about the number of human beings on the planet. Whether you are an environmentalist or just somebody who likes to go out and ride a three-wheel bike or go hunting, all the places that you remember as a kid that you could hang out in are now filled with strip malls and industrial parks. At the end of the book I drop one last interesting fact: Every four days there's a million more people on the planet. That's difficult math when you think how we've already stretched everything to the edges of our resource base.
So, there's another thought experiment in the end: What if we tried the Chinese experiment and there was only one child per family from now on? I'm not saying I advocate that — it's uncomfortable — but the numbers are amazing. We were 1.6 billion people at the end of the 19th century and now we're at 6.6 billion people, and we're heading to 9 billion people at the middle of this century if we keep going this way. If we all went down to one child per family, within a century we'd be back to 1.6 billion. We used to talk about population control ... until forces like the anti-abortionists made it politically difficult.
Everybody is noticing we're really crowded. Everybody understands that crowded societies breed crime and violence and possibly terrorism and frustration. ... I manage with this book to tap into this collective fear we have, but neutralize the fear factor, with the "just suppose we're already dead" thing.
This fascination — this obsessive telling and retelling of the end of the world — does it conceal a secret longing for it to actually happen?
On one level, yes. Who among us has not at one time or another thought, what a great relief it would be to end his or her own life — but for the most part, we want to live. ... In my book I show in many different settings how beautiful things could get, and how quickly, if we weren't around — how things revert to wilderness, almost like the Garden of Eden.
At one point I interview the head of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. This secret longing is no longer a secret to him. He's a sweet and thoughtful, intelligent guy, a schoolteacher, who’s already in mourning for the human race; he believes its gone wrong. We were great for a while, then we got too big and now we're eating up everything, and ultimately we're going to undermine ourselves, and the end is going to be agonizing. He said, "If we stopped having babies now, every decade as there were fewer people left, the world would become wilder and more beautiful." I realized that's kind of what my book is about, the world would heal if we weren't here. But at the same time, hearing him put it that way reinforced what my impetus for writing the book was: I don't want that to happen. I don't want us to disappear. I'm a human being. I love life. I love lots of other human beings. I just want us to find our proper sustainable level in place with all living creatures.
On some level people have this secret longing: "Let's just give it up. What a mess we've made, and just by being alive, I'm part of that mess." We all have this footprint now, we've redefined original sin. But an even stronger part within all of us really wants to set things right and we want to be able to remain here. And that's what I want. The reason my book is resonating is because it's really frightening but really hopeful — it shows that life will go on and there's the potential for humans to find the right balance and continue on as well.
I'm glad to hear you talk about a happy ending.
There really is. I just got back from a book tour in China, where, obviously they have grappled with [population control] and learned the difficulties of imposing it. With luck, those will be instructive lessons. Every species in the history of biology that has reached the end of its resources has suffered a population crash. And we are going to. We've been stretching our food supply, ... force-feeding our soils with chemicals, and we've gotten to the point where it's starting to really bite back at us. There will be a population crash of humans. Either it's one we manage ... or nature is going to do it for us, and that's not going to be pretty. There's going to be famine, there are going to be droughts, epidemics, mass responses to chemicals, and ultimately a few fit ones will survive and the human race will continue on that way.
Nine billion [people] isn't going to work — not unless we come up with utterly free or cheap and abundant zero-emission energy, and I've written enough about energy to know that ain't around the corner. It's been five or 10 years away — as long as I've been looking at it. I think we can survive and will, and could do it in a manageable way. But until we start taking steps, people will be more and more frightened about what we're facing — and that's why you're seeing this spate of end-of-the-world stuff.