Alan Weisman

Why is the notion of humans disappearing off of the face of the earth so fascinating?

I tried to find a very readable way to write about serious stuff. It's a wonderful device, a fantasy: It tells the reader right off the bat that, Yeah, we're in serious trouble, but for the moment, let's not worry about what's going to happen if we eat ourselves out of house and home and planet. Let's do make-believe here. You wake up tomorrow and something has done away with us—aliens, a germ has sterilized us all, the Rapture—and we're gone. It takes the agony out of things. It doesn't matter how we got gone, but we're all gone—yet you get to watch what happens. Ninety percent of everyone I talked to in researching this said, 'Oh God, wouldn't that be a relief!' Whether conscious of it or not, it seems to be everyone’s secret fantasy. There is a strange genetic longing in all of us for the world the way it once was, when all species, including ourselves, were in balance with it. We long for the Garden of Eden, one of the most beautiful images that was sold to us as young children in most cultures, not just Judeo-Christian cultures. There are fragments of it still around. I begin the book in an extraordinary primeval forest on the Polish-Belarusian border. Every European should go and see how fabulous it is—they'll want to preserve it. It's what's in your mind's eye when you read Grimm's fairy tales as a kid. By far, what really got to me was that I walked into this place—I'd never seen a forest like this—except my body recognized it. My cells were screaming, Yes, this is the way it's supposed to be. It felt familiar. We have memories in our biology of the way the world was when the world was a little fresher and less trampled. Readers will get a sense that we still kind of have it, it's possible to have it. The second reaction I get after ‘what a relief it would be if humans were gone†is sadness. We’ve done some nice things, too, haven’t we? Beautiful architecture, artwork, whatever of our spirit might even go on in terms of radio and television emanations…have we left some lasting echo of ourselves that will always be there?

You propose a radical solution that will allow us not to disappear and yet not devour the planet.

We could have a world as fresh and beautiful, but with a terribly radical notion. People have said, 'If you told me that right at the beginning of the book, I would have said you're nuts, but having read it, it makes sense.' I've researched alternative energy—solar power, hydrogen—for ten, fifteen years and we just haven't gotten closer to coming up with really green forms of clean non-polluting energy that will let us have our lifestyle and not destroy anything. Limiting child-bearing [to one per family] isn't that much different. We should still do everything green under the sun to buy us more time, to see if a technological miracle we haven't stumbled upon yet shows up. But the fossil record and evolutionary biology histories show us pretty conclusively that a species will expand and expand given available resources, and then the population crashes. Sooner or later, the population of homo sapiens will crash. Do we want to be in control of it or do we want nature to do it for us? If nature does it for us, it ain't gonna be pretty. If we do it ourselves, well, the thought of limiting to one child without brothers and sisters makes me very sad because next to my wife, I love my sister, but I don't think we have the solutions for these problems. We keep talking about finding new green ways to do things when there are more and more and more of us doing those green things, and hey, even compact fluorescent bulbs use some electricity. If the world population keeps increasing by a million every four days, after a while, the sheer numbers game will defeat some of our best efforts.

There are so many unforgettable scenarios in your book that most people don't think about on a daily basis, everything from how wastelands like the Korean DMZ and Chernobyl are blooming with life to how there are seas you could cross for a week, the size of a small continent, consisting of floating plastic refuse being ground down into smaller and smaller particles by the tides, but never going away. What was the most unforgettable thing that you uncovered in your research?

There really are so many, but to realize that plastic is more than just one more material being deposited on the land by us…it's a light material that's washing its way out to sea in enormously significant quantities. It looks like there's a lot of it clogging landfills, but if all that was in the ocean were put back on land, it would be incredible. And it's amazing that all this happened so quickly, since World War II, and to think that it will all be around, maybe forever—every bit of plastic ever made, still here. There are no microbes that can break it down, except maybe it can get a little bit burnt or brittle or flakey in sunlight. But it doesn't disappear—the polymer chains just become shorter and get ingested by little creatures. We don't know how it's going to impact biology yet. What's quite clear is that when a living organism like a bird or sea turtle ingests a piece of plastic too big to pass through, it dies of constipation or choking. It was interesting to talk to Anthony Andrady, a plastic expert from North Carolina’s Research Triangle. He pointed out that when trees first appeared on earth and started creating lignin and cellulose, no microbes had evolved to eat that stuff either. Sometimes in old coal mines, the old coal is still in the form of trees, with the wood grain and rings, only compressed and metamorphosed into coal because there was nothing to decay it. That's where plastic is right now, buried or blown to sea because nothing can eat it.

But the book isn't all doom and gloom. There is also a positive message.

Talking to John Lomberg, the artist who devised a package of artworks, sounds and images that flew off on the Voyager spacecraft into intersteller space, was one of the most uplifting and inspiring moments for me. Despite the fact that we understand how finite we are, there is something in our spirit that wants to reach out and communicate and immortalize, not for human hubris, but because humans have created such greatness. It's easy to listen to Mozart or indigenous music or see a photograph or sand painting and see that we have done glorious things. It was really thrilling to talk about the vision that he and Carl Sagan and Frank Drake had: After the earth is a cinder, there will still be stuff out there and someone will tap into it. People find that strangely comforting. What also blew my mind was how resilient life is. Life can take hold in a crack between two pieces of steel on a bridge. It can grow out of a bird dropping in urban soot clinging to cinders next to an abandoned track. Then there’s Chernobyl. There are few things worse that humans have done to nature than building a nuclear plant so incompetently, without a containment dome, and letting fire spew all that horrible stuff around and killing everything in the immediate vicinity so quickly. By the time I saw it, even one year later, birds were nesting there. That was utterly amazing, and changed my attitude toward what is going on with the planet. They did studies on voles, which are little rodents, and found there is obviously genetic damage and shortened life spans, but nature has responded to that by sexually maturing them earlier and making bigger broods. Somewhere in all those bigger broods is a vole or two with a radiation-tolerant mutation and someday—five years or five million years from now—there may be a whole lot of Chernobyls around, yet they will not kill the planet, life will adapt. Including us—nearly everything that we've done can't be erased, but will be adapted or worked around or incorporated. Chuck Peters, the curator of the New York Botanical Garden says that people get into a tizzy about the all the exotic species that can invade. But chinaberrries are not going away. So what, the forest has changed. It's still an ecosystem, it still filters air and water and will provide a habitat for wildlife, and it's alive. Things always change in nature. Homo sapiens have jet-propelled a lot of changes but planet will absorb these.

My favorite parts of the book had to do with the various "Edens" on earth that still exist, or have reverted.

Some Edens I didn't include in the book. I once did a story for an Arizona magazine about a pristine canyon under lock and key on a private ranch. No one is allowed to identify it. It's 20 miles long, bracketed on either end of the canyon by high waterfalls with sides so steep, cows and burros can't get into it. Down at the bottom, there's a fabulous cottonwood-walnut-oak forest with bears and eagles nesting; it's utterly sensational to be camping out and be in there for one night. It could have been 1500 years ago, because homo sapiens never messed with this one. But the Korean DMZ, the Mosquito Coast in Nicaragua, and Varosha on Cyprus have been abandoned because of warfare, which chases people away and curtails human activity, so the land goes fallow and nature seizes the opportunity. Another one of my huge thrills in life was standing above the DMZ and seeing red-crown cranes, the holy bird of Asia, what the Japanese have drawn on silk and painted on tapestries for centuries, with wings a radiant white so pure and a cherry cap, gliding into the middle of this zone that is seething on either side with such hostility. You can feel the tension in the air and even hear it blaring on loudspeakers, propaganda flashing on marquees and guns everywhere, and these birds just float in. They just land and tiptoe around so lightly that the land mines don't go off. It's a little touch of heaven on earth, in one of the most violent places. You see something like that and walk away changed.

Do you have a surprising eco-sin—a luxury or indulgence you can't give up yet isn't green at all?

That would be travel. I justify it by calling it research, but I addictively love crawling all over the world, learning more about it, trying to find how distant places and creatures connect. Takes a lot of jet fuel.

How are you green in your own life?

We've just moved to a new home and have lots to do before we get around to solarizing, but in previous houses we've heated our water with solar energy and even via radiant pipes under the floor. We've also used on-demand propane heaters for water when, due to topography, solar wasn't sufficient. By the way, every fueled water heater in the world should be on-demand, either electric or gas, rather than the usual wasteful practice of keeping a 40-gallon cylinder constantly hot, whether anyone needs it or not. We also compost everything, re-use plastic bags, recycle to the law's limit. When we were temporarily stuck living in a city the past few years, the saving grace was making most trips by bicycle. I filled my tank about every 5 weeks.

What do you wish was green but isn't (yet)?

A clean, cheap, abundant, concentrated source of energy. After years of research, though, I fear that might defy a few laws of physics. Please feel free to prove me wrong.