The World Without Us

"I absolutely love this book. It’s a wonderful hybrid of speculative nonfiction, nature writing, science. The World Without Us describes what would happen not if human society collapsed but if humans simply disappeared overnight. Say some disease wiped out all humans or, you know, an evil wizard snapped his fingers and humans disappeared. He moves meticulously around the world—through different environments, from cities to suburbs, different materials—and asks what would happen next. How long would it be before our warm, dry, comfortable houses deteriorated? Before trees grew up through the motorways and buddleia colonised the streets? There’s an abandoned house on my road, an old row of Victorian terraces. One of the houses, quite strangely, has been derelict for three years or so. Local rumour has it that the owner has some kind of painful association with the house. They don’t want to sell it but they also don’t want to live in it. It’s amazing to see, among all these houses, this one where ivy is pushing through the doors and an old Christmas tree thrown out into the garden has taken root and is now growing. It’s almost a window into what the whole street could look like if it were abandoned one day. It’s a very ancient impulse. In the epilogue of my book, I try to do this: to look ahead at what the collapse of modern industrial society might look like. Obviously the enormous challenge we are facing in the next century is climate change. That really overshadows all other threats. We are probably looking at widespread ecological damage that may result in cascading collapse, runaway climate change. Our society may simply not be resilient enough. It may not be a thunderclap collapse, it may be a kind of slow deterioration, a coming apart of what we think of as the world. It’s important that people are clearheaded about this: that the machine that we have built that is our modern industrial society is a machine that will destroy the world if it is allowed to continue. The question is whether it is dismantled in an unscheduled, chaotic manner or whether it can be dismantled purposefully and safely. It’s like we are flying on a rocket and trying to dismantle it at the same time. It’s an incredibly dangerous situation."