The World Without Us

Weisman opens Chapter 17 by gently mocking the extreme but ultimately futile lengths to which modern societies go to protect human remains from the elements. These efforts to preserve individual bodies stand in sharp contrast to what follows: a discussion of various ways in which the entire human population might go extinct, failing to preserve itself even as a species. Weisman assures readers that the likelihood of a pandemic disease eliminating the species is extremely low, but he is less optimistic about the possible future impacts of novel technologies like artificial intelligence and nanotechnology. Because the latter are something genuinely new under the sun, humans can’t draw on past experience to predict their impact with any certainty. As Weisman puts it, “[A]lthough humans have obviously survived every pox and meteor that nature has tossed at us until now, technology is something we toss back at our own peril” (241). The discussion of VHEMT raises thorny ethical questions about how to weigh the costs of all the damage and suffering humans impose on other species and ecosystems against our intrinsic value as a species, while the final section on transhumanism invites musing on the very nature of humanness.

Chapter 18 continues in this speculative vein, widening the perspective to the cosmic level, before Chapter 19 reimmerses readers in Earthly reality. Weisman concludes the book, as he began it, in a place where nature is relatively unaltered by human endeavor: in this case, a remote and pristine coral reef positively teeming with life. The chapter’s tone is optimistic and marked by Reverence for the Earth and Life. The ocean is where life emerged in the first place, and it remains “beleaguered but boundlessly creative” (266), bursting with evidence of life’s resilience. On the last page of the chapter, however, Weisman considers Johnston Atoll, which, as a former US nuclear testing range and chemical-weapons incineration site, is like “a marine Chernobyl and Rocky Mountain Arsenal rolled into one” (267). Weisman reports that, despite some obvious genetic damage to resident species, the wildlife “seems reasonably healthy” (267). However, he then abruptly flips the tone: “At Johnston Atoll, as at Chernobyl, the worst insults we hurl at nature may stagger it, but nowhere as severely as our overindulged lifestyle.” In other words, the impacts of modern humans’ everyday behavior—the nutrients from Christmas Island farms and toilets, for example—are cumulatively far more damaging to the natural world than are our deadliest weapons and poisons.

In the Coda, Weisman offers his sole policy prescription for altering the unsustainable trajectory of industrial civilization, and it is a controversial one: severe population reduction via a global one-child policy. The environmental journalist and author Michael Grunwald derides this suggestion as “preposterous,” not only because it would be impossible to enforce but also because it is “a draconian one-size-fits-all solution to a variety of complex problems” (Grunwald, Michael. “Lonely Planet.” Washington Post, 2007). Most environmental scholars today consider consumption rather than population as the main driver of environmental change. Because the average resident of a rich country consumes vastly more resources than the average resident of a poor country, imposing the same reproductive limit in both countries would reduce consumption—and consequently environmental impact—far less in the latter, making it both unjust and ineffective. “Humanity’s goal should be to limit our impact on the Earth, not to limit our presence on Earth,” Grunwald contends. Weisman, however, seems to believe that the former is not possible without the latter: Humans cannot possibly bring our total consumption down to a sustainable level without also massively reducing our numbers.