An interview with the author of a 2007 bestseller that imagined nature’s triumph in the aftermath of human extinction
Thirteen years ago, Alan Weisman wrote The World Without Us, an international bestseller that described in painstaking detail how our planet would repair itself were humankind suddenly absent. Heralded by the New York Times as “a morbidly fascinating nonfiction eco-thriller,” the exhaustively reported thought experiment predicted, for example, how quickly New York City’s subways would flood after our demise (two days), how long it would take the Panama Canal to fill in (20 years), and how many years it would take the global elephant population to increase twentyfold (a century).
When it came to explaining why humans might go the way of the woolly mammoth, Weisman didn’t give a definitive answer. Instead, he simply stipulated “a world from which we all suddenly vanished. Tomorrow.” But he did offer a few possible species-killers, leading off with the one he thought was the most likely: “A Homo sapiens–specific virus — natural or diabolically nano-engineered — [that] picks us off but leaves everything else intact.”
As the death toll from the coronavirus pandemic continues to rise around the world (and the air and water quality continue to improve), we sought out Weisman at his home in rural Massachusetts to see how it feels to be a modern-day prophet.
GEN: What’s it like to see a prediction you made more than a decade ago come true, to some extent, today? Are you surprised?
Alan Weisman: I’m shocked by what’s going on, but I’m not surprised. And that’s not because I am particularly prescient. Journalists who think they’re prescient can be dangerous. No, it’s because I, who knew nothing, went to sources who knew a lot. While I was reporting this book, epidemiologists and ecologists explained to me that nature always seeks a balance, and it’s going to happen. We think of diseases and epidemics as something really bad. For nature, it’s just a tool.
How did you come up with the premise for The World Without Us?
I had been covering a whole bunch of disasters all over the world. I went to Antarctica to do a piece on the ozone hole. I wrote about Chernobyl and the burning rainforests. And the connection between all these stories was humankind’s increasingly overwhelming presence on the Earth and the pressures that puts on the planet. I knew most environmental books that talk about crises are only read by people who already believe this stuff. They’re too depressing and scary for everybody else. But then I realized: If I kill off everybody right at the beginning of the book — as long as I can do it in a way that is remotely possible so it’s not science fiction — then I will be able to take a very dire topic and turn it into an entertaining read. The idea was to show people how beautifully nature could bounce back even in some of our most scarred places, like Chernobyl, and eventually heal our wounds. Everybody’s a sucker for the future.
The future is now, it seems. The New York Times recently reported that thanks to reduced travel and commuting, air quality is better in America’s biggest cities. Same with the canals in Venice, Italy, which have apparently gotten a lot cleaner without all the boat traffic.
The sediments have settled down. The vaporettos are not running, so there’s no gasoline leaking into the water. It’s like, wow. You take away the humans and nature very, very quickly starts to pounce.
Have you done much research into pandemics themselves?
I talked to the chief epidemiologist for the state of Wisconsin for the book. He echoed something that people at the CDC had also told me, which is pretty much what we are witnessing right now. They said viral pandemics tend to eventually burn out. They kill off the weak, but those who survive develop herd immunity. But the experts I talked to said the chance of an epidemic completely wiping out humanity isn’t very great at all.
Since the book came out, we’ve had both SARS and MERS, and some countries learned the hard way that, wow, we need to be really prepared. Those are the places — China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and others — that are now handling this one extremely well. Whereas our country is handling it extremely poorly. China tested everybody, using tests that were available from the World Health Organization. Our own president, as I’m sure you are aware, refused them. May he go down in flames. Please quote me on that.
In the book, you quote one source as saying, “Epidemics actually strengthen a species.” Do you agree with him? Is there a silver lining to all this misery right now?
Yes, because the survivors of any pandemic are the ones who, for one reason or another, either had the resilience to fight it off or had some kind of natural immunity, which is a nice gene to pass on. So, if this thing ever shows up again, or something similar, there’s an excellent chance for their descendants to continue on.
You end the book arguing that a universal “one child per human mother” policy would benefit the planet by shrinking the human population. You estimated that were this policy adopted, by 2100 Earth would have a population of 1.6 billion, a level last seen in the 19th century, and that the planet would be better off for it.
I actually tried not to argue for the one-child policy but just to leave the question hanging and let people think about it, and it turned out to be the biggest talking point of that book. Subtracting deaths from births, we add about 84 million people a year to the planet. That’s about a million more people every four days. How can we keep the population growing on a planet that doesn’t grow? Sooner or later, something’s going to crack. And that ultimately led to the book that I wrote next: Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? It delves into the question: How many people can fit on this planet without capsizing it?
It also raises other questions, like: How do you design an economy that can prosper without constant growth? This relates to what we’re really seeing now in such an interesting way. Economists measure economic health in terms of growth. You hear it all the time, even on the so-called progressive media outlets like NPR: “Good economic news this week! This many housing starts, new housing!” For God’s sakes. Housing starts mean sprawl. But sure, economically it looks really great. Economics depends on population growth. It’s a big Ponzi scheme. You always need to have more people, because you need more consumers.
But there’s another, darker reason why you need bigger populations: The bigger the population, the cheaper the cost of labor, because you’ve got more poor people competing against each other for the most miserable jobs. Anyway, writing Countdown made me understand that we are way beyond this planet’s caring capacity. Modern medicine has extended people’s lives. And modern agriculture has created ways of producing food that nature couldn’t match. And that’s terrific in terms of reducing human mortality and stopping famines from happening. But when you don’t have famines, people survive to have more babies. It was very clear to all the scientists I interviewed for that book that we could only stretch this so far.
Given all of that, do you see this coronavirus pandemic as Mother Nature forcing a sort of correction? Is Covid-19 nature’s revenge?
I’ve been using the word “correction” a lot in my communications with people lately. Right now, most people are just disappearing from the workforce temporarily, although if this plague really burns through us, there may end up being significantly fewer people on the planet. But this kind of pandemic is absolutely one of the mechanisms that nature uses to correct an imbalance of population. It happens in the animal kingdom. It happens in the plant kingdom. Just think of wheat rust, the fungal disease that attacks grains. So, yes, this is what nature does, and it’s natural and it’s wonderful, because nature works so well. It’s just really painful when the species being corrected is your own.
Your Wikipedia page says many people call you a misanthrope. Are you a misanthrope?
Oh, my God, no. First of all, I didn’t write The World Without Us because I want a world without us. Most of my best friends are Homo sapiens. One of the most wonderful parts about writing that book was thinking about not just the bad things we have done to this planet and how long it would take to repair them, but also about the beauty we’ve added to the planet. I found out that bronze is very close to elemental copper, which means that Rodin’s sculptures will be around hundreds of thousands of years from now. That’s a lovely thought.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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