‘Is That Hopeful? I Don’t Know’

In 2007, professor and bestselling author Alan Weisman wrote an enthralling book called The World Without Us. Here’s the back-of-the-jacket summary: “In this far-reaching narrative, Weisman explains how our massive infrastructure would collapse and vanish without human presence; which everyday items may become immortalized as fossils; why some of our earliest buildings might be the last architecture left; and how plastic, bronze sculpture and man-made molecules may be our lasting gifts to the universe.”

It’s an especially fascinating read in our current pandemic-defined moment. I recently spoke to Weisman via phone. I was sitting at my desk overlooking a sun-dappled Humboldt County meadow. He was in a hammock at his home in Massachusetts.

It was a tranquil break from the chaos around us, at least for me.

One of the takeaways from your book is that the Earth might be better off without us. Do you believe that?

I hear from a lot of people who say humanity is just a cancer on this planet. But that wasn’t my intent and it isn’t what I feel. I think that every species has a right to be here and to live long and prosper. That includes my own.

I am not a misanthrope by any means. I’m very fond of Homo sapiens. My best friends are Homo sapiens. My wife is one. Throughout the book I tried to make clear how much beauty we have added to this planet — our art, our music. I am filled with as much indescribable awe in the presence of a Beethoven symphony or a sculpture by Rodin as I am by being surrounded by nature. Humanity is capable of creating immense meaning and feeling and passion. I love that part of us.

What I don’t love is how destructive we have become, quite unintentionally. Our technology has always been about making life better. That was a driving force behind the inventors who came up with things. Oftentimes, though, the companies the inventors worked for then took that thing and distorted it into something that was profitable. I’m referring to the purveyors of coal, oil and gas. They’ve known for a long time how destructive these things were. I did the math and I realized that since my book came out, the amount of plastic on this planet has doubled.

I have young children and I’ve noticed they’re bombarded with two conflicting messages. One is, you’re the future, it’s up to you. The other is, it’s too late. There’s a tendency to default to nihilism. How do you respond to that, as the author of a book that galvanized people to think about these things? Are half measures enough? Or do we need to reinvent ourselves to survive?

You’ve asked a wonderful question that really gets to the core of everything. Oh, boy. [Pauses, sighs] At this point in my life — I’m now in my early 70s — I guess one of the fortunate things of being a freelance writer is we never get to retire.

That’s good to hear.

[Laughs] Until the pandemic hit I was traveling to research a new book. I didn’t get to travel to a lot of the places I’d planned to for obvious reasons. But as long as I’m still drawing breath, I am part of this world. I am not looking at it as a world I’m going to exit any time soon, though that certainly may be true.

I’m not so much trying to prolong my own life as to prolong my reason for living. All of us who are journalists, despite the cynicism that builds up after years of covering stories as an occupational hazard, believe in something. Ultimately, it’s the value of life.

The book I’m working on now is about where hope realistically lies in the coming years when your kids are going to grow up. And who are the people who, despite the odds, are doing their damndest to literally hold back the tide.

Is that hopeful? I don’t know. The title of my book is going to be Hope Bats Last. I think that your kids will have the opportunity to meet other people who aren’t going to let them give up on life. Just by the tenor of your questions, I can already tell they have a father who’s going to make sure that happens.

I hear from young people a lot who say, I don’t want to bring a child into this world. I don’t want to inflict this world on that child or I don’t want to inflict this child onto the world. We already have too many people.

But think of your own life right now. Yes, we have terrible problems. But think of all the beauty. Look at a tree. Look at a painting. Sit down and look at your partner. Let’s say, worst-case scenario, that in 30 years things become really intolerable. That child still has at minimum ten beautiful years to enjoy the thrill of being a human being on this planet that, as badly as we’ve made it, is still a beautiful place to be.

We tend to speak about nature as a thing outside of ourselves, something we shepherd or destroy or reflect with our art. But aren’t we merely a part of nature? Is there a point where we need to become more humble and view ourselves as a piece of the puzzle as opposed to the omnipotent species that will decide the fate of the planet?

I agree with you except for the choice of the word “humble.” Maybe it is our ridiculous pride that we can dominate something, but to me it’s ultimately liberating.

The transcendental poets got it. Whitman understood it; Thoreau understood it. To be part of nature is our exalted state. It’s in our vocabulary. We always refer to human nature. Literally half of that phrase is nature. We are part of it and we are subject to its laws. We have stretched those laws, basically in three ways.

The first is we came up with modern medicine, which allowed our infant mortality to plunge and our life expectancy to nearly double. Then we came up with ways to grow much more food than nature ever could, largely by force-feeding the planet with chemistry. Some of it was clever crossbreeding that gave us the green revolution. That had the effect of quadrupling our population, which no other large mammal had ever done in history.

It’s like those locusts that are currently eating their way across northern Africa and the Indian subcontinent. They’re going to run out of stuff to eat eventually and there’s going to be a giant population crash. That’s already starting to happen to us.

The third thing we did was to realize nature creates an awful lot of energy it doesn’t need, so it buries it away because it doesn’t need it to power its cycle. We’ve dug up 250 million years’ worth of it and burned it in 250 years, which is why we’re facing something that’s really catastrophic.

I was a political science major. I read Thomas Hobbes, who said the state of nature is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Yet separating ourselves from nature seems futile.

It reminds me of the Woody Allen quote. [“One day the sun will burn out. Earth will be gone and further down the line the entire universe will be gone. Everything we’ve created will have gone: Beethoven, Shakespeare. It’s a meaningless thing.”]

But I don’t think there’s any futility in it. The point, obviously, is now. We are alive at this moment. One hundred percent of species go extinct eventually, just as we’ll all eventually die. Does that mean we should just give up? No, of course not. Every moment that we’re alive we have the opportunity to be part of this thing called life. That is wonderful.

I’m not a Buddhist, but The World Without Us became a big Buddhist hit, because it was about how impermanence is inevitable. Once you realize that, you transcend into a state of realization and acceptance that is deeply peaceful. That was certainly my experience when I wrote the book.

As a journalist covering an awful lot of environmental destruction — from the ozone hole in Antarctica to the melting polar ice caps to burning rain forests to the Chernobyl disaster, which was very near where my father was born — I was really worried about the planet.

By the time I was done with the book, I wasn’t worried about the planet anymore. The planet is going to be fine. Life is such a powerful force. It’s been through five enormous extinction events, probably bigger than the one we’re perpetrating right now. Certainly the Permian extinction, which almost wiped out everything. But life crawled back from that one and we had this massively successful age of reptiles. For 125 million years they roamed over this lush, fertile planet. Then an asteroid arrived. I was in the [Yucatan peninsula’s] Chicxulub crater where that asteroid hit, and there’s a little monument there talking about how all these reptiles suddenly vanished and left a great, wide niche for a relatively minor character called mammals, which evolved in all sorts of ways. And here we are.

After we’re gone, life will continue on. That gave me a great deal of inner peace. I’m not saying that at an intellectual level. It’s a feeling I have. I’m not a creationist, but I get why these creationists look around and think it’s proof of God. Life is truly an awesome force. I’m not ready to die anytime soon and I’m not ready for my species to go extinct. I am totally comfortable with the fact that nothing will stop planet Earth until our medium-sized star becomes a red giant.

OK, let’s talk about the COVID-19 pandemic. What’s your take?

I’ve done a lot of interviews, from Europe to South America to India to the United States and one of the questions I get all the time is, you start your book with a prediction that a Homo sapiens-specific virus will wipe humans off the planet. Are you prophetic? No, I’m a journalist. It’s not a question of if it could happen, it’s when it would happen. It has happened often enough. We know about the bubonic plague and the Spanish Flu. And when you meet up with this thing, you realize how much it has shaken the structure of our vaunted economy and is now creating social collapse in so many places.

My hometown of Minneapolis is in flames right now. And part of that tension is cops trying to live in a world that is scary every time they go out, because they could get infected, and people who are burdened not just by the color of their skin but by unemployment. We need to understand how desperate everyone is getting. These are crazy times we’re in, and if anything it’s showing us that nature is a lot more powerful than we are.

The bacteria and viruses will outlive us, right?

Microbes were the first things to show up and they’ll be the last things to go.

On a personal note, I really appreciate you as an example of what freelance journalists can do to shape the conversation.

One of the things that inspires me is that, despite the desperate state journalism is in, the journalism schools are packed, even at a time when things couldn’t be worse for the profession. Journalists will find a way. Journalism will survive.

My son has gotten involved with his school newspaper. I told him if he wants to get rich, he should work on his fastball. But if he wants a fulfilling life, he could do worse than journalism.

Good for him. Journalism is gonna kill us all, but what a way to go. What an interesting way to live. I couldn’t figure out what to do for a living, and being a journalist has allowed me to poke my nose into all these different corners.