On Liking Other Human Beings, Mostly

Rosalind Little is a fairly bad environmentalist.

Mostly because I have all this laziness to work against. I worry about this a lot. I have been trying to be more conscientious about my footprint on the earth. For one, my husband and my friends are significantly more diligent than me, and folks, it's REALLY not going to be a good world if I can't assume the moral high ground in conversation.

That said, I still like to think that I do understand that we are in the midst of a global environmental crisis. I get that the stakes are high. I'm not one of these I'm-a-freaking-idiot-who-hates-those-liberals-so-much-that-I deny-what-is-absolutely-obvious folks who denies there is an environmental problem. But that doesn't make the reaction to Alan Weisman's new book The World Without Us any easier for me to understand.


Do you all know this book? Here's the description from the web site:

"In The World Without Us, author Alan Weisman takes on an irresistable concept: How our planet would respond without the relentless pressure of the human presence. Breathtaking in scope and filled with fascinating detail, this is narrative nonfiction at its finests that will change the way you view our world -- and your place within it."

This is a very smart idea for a book. Everybody vanishes. Like it was the Rapture, but everybody was saved. What happens to the world that is left behind? The book apparently describes how soon the New York subways would flood without human beings to operate the pumps, when biospheres would start to repair themselves from all the human damage, etc. It is a unique way of getting at the consequences of human action. Sounds intriguing. A good read.

What I don't understand is why so many people apparently think that this hypothetical premise is, like, a good idea. That there is beauty in the notion that humanity would disappear, giving the earth a chance to recover. That this is more than a thought experiment; that it is something that would ultimately be preferable to the survival of the human race.

I guess I feel like this: if you're not rooting for the survival of the human race, I don't know what to make of you.

Because I don't care if nature recovers beautifully if there's no human around to see it. I have a real soft spot for humans, you see. Call me sentimental for the species from which I sprung, but I dig their language and their societies and their food and their arts and their cultures. Individual people might annoy me, but I like the human race.

If there was really going to be a world without us, it by definition wouldn't be a good one. It would be a world of unspeakable loss. That's just my bias.

And since when did eliminating a species become an environmentally desirable solution to anything? If I proposed eradicating another animal species for the good of the whole, I would get lectured about biodiversity and the possibility of unforseen impacts. At the end of the day, aren't we just another animal species?

So often when people speak about the devastating effect of humanity on the natural world, they seem to be forgetting that humanity is also, really, part of the natural world. We are animals that evolved out of the same materials as all of this other plant and animal life around us. Our behavior is motivated by survival just like everything else's. In rhetoric, we might talk about how humanity exploits or suppresses or rapes nature, but in reality, we aren't separate from nature at all.

We are nature, and nature is us.

Granted, we're a species that has done really well in terms of survival. We have figured out ways to protect ourselves from predators, to eat well, even to achieve comfort and satisfaction. We have developed relationships to the rest of the natural world that seem to benefit us, but that have particular long term impacts. Hopefully we are a species that has developed reason enough to see that our current course is not consistent with our collective survival.

The strongest case for environmental sanity, to me, is that it is in the long-term interest of humanity.

Am I in error to admit that? Is it more noble to privilege the interest of the earth as a whole? Am I betraying my ignorance of the subtleties of these arguments?

Because this is certainly a classic case of Rosalind Little writing vehemently on a topic about which she knows very little. The margins of her knowledge: where one is prone to generalization.

Yet I cannot help but to wince when I hear people on the radio speaking wistfully of the end of humanity. Just call me a people person.