My previous posts on Alan Weisman’s World Without Us were a little skeptical towards the concept of this book. Well, I finally mustered enough grit during my just-before-bed-reading to make it through Part I, which was actually very enjoyable and informative.
It’s not all gloom-and-doom. Some species will likely thrive in a world without us (house cats and elephants). But besides the speculation on what will happen if we magically disappear, which isn’t that constructive of a thought experiment, it does an excellent job of introducing very arcane subjects to a broad audience, namely, human evolution and early life. I have always held firm the idea that contemporary, technologically-enabled humans were the most destructive humans the world has seen, but in fact that might not be entirely true. Our oldest ancestors wiped away millions of years of evolution in only a few short generations. Weisman focuses particularly on those humans that arrived in the Americas about 13,000 years ago.
In that short time, we killed (to the point of extinction) pretty much every large mammal, from mammoths to giant ground sloths (below).
Not that those humans could be blamed, they lacked the foresight to realize their survival tactics were changing the world. However, what’s our excuse when 50,000 species go extinct annually because of human activity? Is it the same as our ancestors, for human survival? Maybe, but some would argue that our actions to ‘enhance survival’ are only making it worse for humans of the future.
Ugh, maybe I would start sleeping better if I stopped reading these horror stories before bed…
Some species will likely thrive in a world without us (house cats and elephants)
I put this to Jack. He asked if elephants knew how to open tins, ’coz some species will have to learn.
Insects will do pretty well whatever else is about (or not).
True, although supposedly cockroaches won’t last too long…
A world without humans will (continue to) be run by microbes :-).
Tech enabled humans seem to be affecting things on a broader scale, but yeah, we have a very long history of drastically reshaping everything around us. I recommend “Changes in the Land” by William Cronon if you’re interested in reading more about this history (it’s a good account of how New England was transformed over the course of human presence there.)