The World Without Us

Eventually, we’d try that again. Our world would start over.

One day, perhaps, we will learn to control our appetites, or our duplication rates. But suppose that before we do, something implausible swoops in to do that for us. In just decades, with no new chlorine and bromine leaking skyward, the ozone layer would replenish and ultraviolet levels subside. Within a few centuries, as most of our excess industrial CO2 dissipated, the atmosphere and shallows would cool. Heavy metals and toxins would dilute and gradually flush from the system. After PCBs and plastic fibers recycled a few thousand or million times, anything truly intractable would end up buried, to one day be metamorphosed or subsumed into the planet’s mantle.

Nobility is expensive, nonproductive, and parasitic, siphoning away too much of society’s energy to satisfy its frivolous cravings.

Through all this menace float the cranes, landing in the sunny flats on both sides of the demarcation line to serenely graze on reeds.

you know that nature wasn’t fazed

the correct answer to whether this world would go on without us, says the Dalai Lama, is: “Who knows?”

The world has always changed. It’s not a constant place.

the most valuable library yet assembled—a half-million papyrus scrolls in Alexandria, some of them Aristotle’s—was perfectly preserved until a bishop lit a torch to expel paganism.

“By definition, we’re the alien invader. Everywhere except Africa. Every time Homo sapiens went anywhere else, things went extinct.”

Nobility is expensive, nonproductive, and parasitic, siphoning away too much of society’s energy to satisfy its frivolous cravings.