Synopsis:
In The World Without Us, Alan Weisman offers an utterly original approach to questions of humanity’s impact on the planet: he asks us to envision our Earth, without us. In this far-reaching narrative, Weisman explains how our massive infrastructure would collapse and finally vanish without human presence.
In a time when we are being bombarded with both religious and secular doomsday prophecies, (not to mention a wide variety of lousy science fiction) devoted to worrying us about how exactly the doomsday will arrive and the world as we know it will cease to exist, Alan Weisman’s sensible scientific thought experiment provides a well-deserved breath of fresh air. Rather than being fearful and shocking, the approach is thoughtful and reflective – an interesting story brilliantly told to give us perspective.
The non-fiction piece, being lauded as one of the best in recent years, tells the hypothetical story of how the world would continue after its current caretakers are gone. How or why did they disappear, an Internet scholar of Nostradamus might ask, is almost beyond the point. In order to fully tap into the hypothetical scientific potential of the experiment, the author, Alan Weisman, takes it for granted that the humans have disappeared. And that’s it. No doomsday scenario, no terrifying anxiety as we attempt to consider all of the awful things that can happen to us. Just simply that we are not present in the thought experiment – so then, what happens?
And this is the crux of the book. Humans have been the librarians of the world for a long time, but considering how brief that time has been on the full scale of Earth’s existence is humbling, and how miniscule the Earth’s existence is on the full scale of the universe’s experience certainly can shift someone’s perspective dramatically.
The book does a fantastic job at analysing the somewhat tumultuous relationship that we have had with the planet: how have we used the resources given to us? how have we made an impact on our world? would alien invaders thousands of years into the future look upon our planet and realize that we were even here at all? All of these are fascinating ideas, and ones explored in a way that is never disheartening but always provocative.
I walk away from the book with one solid thought: that our time on this planet is borrowed. Nature is the true state of our world and one day it will return to it, no matter how much money we pour into conditioning it to fashion or our peculiar “needs.”
The implication of that idea establishes our place in the universe as guests. There are a thousand reasons, many of them outlined in this book, that we are only temporary guests here as opposed to temporary owners, and as being such we have an obligation to be good guests to our gracious hosts. To be polite and respectful to our home, cleaning up after ourselves, making sure that we leave our campsite looking exactly as we did when we entered it.
That last one’s likely impossible, but as long as we remain humble in our role here, respectful in our treatment of the world around us, we might just be able to live in a place of which we can be proud.
