A World Without Humans

As Alan Weisman imagines in his book A World Without Us, the world without humans would quickly change. The physical infrastructure of nations would begin to crumble almost immediately, without people to tend to its maintenance. Despite the short-term disasters that would accompany the end of humanity, the earth would begin to heal itself, and plant and animal life would flourish.

One of the paradoxes embedded in the term Anthropocene is the fact that human history is incredibly short-lived. As Peter Brannen notes in his article "The Anthropocene is a Joke,"  “Geological time is deep beyond all comprehension,” so immense that “all of recorded human history is [geologically] irrelevant.” To name this epoch the Anthropocene, Brannen suggests, is either absurdly hubristic or wildly optimistic, suggesting that we are at the very infancy of an existence that will persist on a geological timescale, rather than rapidly hurtling toward our own extinction. It is much more likely that, far into the planet’s future, humanity’s existence will exist in a few centimeters of ocean rock littered with trace isotopes. We are an event more than we are an epoch. And yet, this, too, is paradoxical; whether humanity continues to live on this planet for another 50 years or 50 million years, we have undeniably initiated monumental change. As Brannen ultimately concludes, the earth will go on, with or without us, but we have irrevocably impacted its future.