WorldChanging: Tools, Models and Ideas for Building a Bright Green Future: The World With Us

The World Without Us, Alan Wiseman’s new book, explores what would happen if humanity suddenly vanished. How long would it take for humankind’s works to be undone? How long would our cities last? Our tools? The chemicals and plastics we’ve left behind?

This premise allows him to have great fun imagining the stages of a suburban home’s decline and fall, exploring the fate of the New York subway systems and touring various involuntary parks (like the Varosha hotel complex in Cyprus). As a thought experiment, it’s fun and useful, if gruesome, allowing Wiseman to perform a post-mortem dissection of our current impact on the planet, and how long the consequences of that impact will carry on. There’s no information here that’s all that new. If you follow environmental issues, nothing in The World Without Us will shock or astound you, though the package makes for a good read.

But I found myself dissatisfied with it. In part, that’s because Wiseman doesn’t really tackle the essential ethical problem which underlies his premise: what happened to the people? Like many deep green types before him, he simply wishes them away.

That’s problematic for two reasons.