The Journalist Who Predicted a Pandemic Eerily Similar to Our Own
An interview with the author of a 2007 bestseller that imagined nature’s triumph in the aftermath of human extinction
Thirteen years ago, Alan Weisman wrote The World Without Us, an international bestseller that described in painstaking detail how our planet would repair itself were humankind suddenly absent. Heralded by the New York Times as “a morbidly fascinating nonfiction eco-thriller,” the exhaustively reported thought experiment predicted, for example, how quickly New York City’s subways would flood after our demise (two days), how long it would take the Panama Canal to fill in (20 years), and how many years it would take the global elephant population to increase twentyfold (a century).
When it came to explaining why humans might go the way of the woolly mammoth, Weisman didn’t give a definitive answer. Instead, he simply stipulated “a world from which we all suddenly vanished. Tomorrow.” But he did offer a few possible species-killers, leading off with the one he thought was the most likely: “A Homo sapiens–specific virus — natural or diabolically nano-engineered — [that] picks us off but leaves everything else intact.”
