The World Without Us

The rediscovered Ecuadoran Zápara became an anthropological cause célèbre. The government recognized their territorial rights, albeit to only a shred of their ancestral land, and UNESCO bestowed a grant to revive their culture and save their language. By then, only four members of the tribe still spoke it, Ana María Santi among them. The forest they once knew was mostly gone: from the occupying Quichua they had learned to fell trees with steel machetes and burn the stumps to plant cassava. After a single harvest, each plot had to be fallowed for years; in every direction, the towering forest canopy had been replaced by spindly, second-growth shoots of laurel, magnolia, and copa palm. Cassava was now their mainstay, consumed all day in the form of chicha. The Zápara had survived into the 21st century, but they had entered it tipsy, and stayed that way.

They still hunted, but men now walked for days without finding tapirs or even quail. They had resorted to shooting spider monkeys, whose flesh was formerly taboo. Again, Ana María pushed away the bowl proffered by her granddaughters, which contained chocolate-colored meat with a tiny, thumbless paw jutting over its side. She raised her knotted chin toward the rejected boiled monkey.

“When we’re down to eating our ancestors,” she asked, “what is left?”

So far from the forests and savannas of our origins, few of us still sense a link to our animal forebears. That the Amazonian Zápara actually do is remarkable, since the divergence of humans from other primates occurred on another continent. Nevertheless, lately we have had a creeping sense of what Ana María means. Even if we’re not driven to cannibalism, might we, too, face terrible choices as we skulk toward the future?

A generation ago, humans eluded nuclear annihilation; with luck, we’ll continue to dodge that and other mass terrors. But now we often find ourselves asking whether inadvertently we’ve poisoned or parboiled the planet, ourselves included. We’ve also used and abused water and soil so that there’s a lot less of each, and trampled thousands of species that probably aren’t coming back. Our world, some respected voices warn, could one day degenerate into something resembling a vacant lot, where crows and rats scuttle among weeds, preying on each other. If it comes to that, at what point would things have gone so far that, for all our vaunted superior intelligence, we’re not among the hardy survivors?

The truth is, we don’t know. Any conjecture gets muddled by our obstinate reluctance to accept that the worst might actually occur. We may be undermined by our survival instincts, honed over eons to help us deny, defy, or ignore catastrophic portents lest they paralyze us with fright.

If those instincts dupe us into waiting until it’s too late, that’s bad. If they fortify our resistance in the face of mounting omens, that’s good. More than once, crazy, stubborn hope has inspired creative strokes that snatched people from ruin. So, let us try a creative experiment: Suppose that the worst has happened. Human extinction is a fait accompli. Not by nuclear calamity, asteroid collision, or anything ruinous enough to also wipe out most everything else, leaving whatever remained in some radically altered, reduced state. Nor by some grim eco-scenario in which we agonizingly fade, dragging many more species with us in the process.

Instead, picture a world from which we all suddenly vanished. Tomorrow.

Unlikely perhaps, but for the sake of argument, not impossible. Say a Homo sapiens-specific virus—natural or diabolically nano-engineered—picks us off but leaves everything else intact. Or some misanthropic evil wizard somehow targets that unique 3.9 percent of DNA that makes us human beings and not chimpanzees, or perfects a way to sterilize our sperm. Or say that Jesus—more on Him later—or space aliens rapture us away, either to our heavenly glory or to a zoo somewhere across the galaxy.

Look around you, at today’s world. Your house, your city. The surrounding land, the pavement underneath, and the soil hidden below that. Leave it all in place, but extract the human beings. Wipe us out, and see what’s left. How would the rest of nature respond if it were suddenly relieved of the relentless pressures we heap on it and our fellow organisms? How soon would, or could, the climate return to where it was before we fired up all our engines?

How long would it take to recover lost ground and restore Eden to the way it must have gleamed and smelled the day before Adam, or Homo habilis, appeared? Could nature ever obliterate all our traces? How would it undo our monumental cities and public works, and reduce our myriad plastics and toxic synthetics back to benign, basic elements? Or are some so unnatural that they’re indestructible?