This week, the Sears Tower in Chicago collapsed, London was swallowed by the Thames and Atlanta was taken over by wild beasts on a television show called Life After People. Ordinarily the History Channel, which aired it, uses old footage and photographs to bring the past to life. But last year the network decided to envision, with the help of time-lapse photography and computer graphics, what would happen to the world if, from some unspecified cause, every last human being died. Over the course of two hours, highways disappeared under meadows, collapsing cities turned into verdant hillocks and automobiles crumbled into dust.
It was macabre but riveting. Life After People became the most-watched programme in the history of the History Channel. Hence this season’s 10-part follow-up, which has just begun to air. It is not the only evidence of a new fascination with human extinction. Two years ago in the US, Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us became one of the top 10 non-fiction bestsellers of the year. This spring Fox bought the rights to turn it into a major film.
Mortality is an obsession as old as our culture (“Dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return”). So is Judgment Day. Extinction, though, is a relatively recent worry. Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” still shocks us with its vision of man winding up, like other species, “blown about the desert dust, / Or seal’d within the iron hills.”
What is the appeal of Life After People? It is fun to watch things break down and blow up on television, of course. But there was a vindictive serves-you-right tone to last year’s film: “San Francisco’s stately wooden Victorians are now only useful as timber,” says a gravelly voiced narrator as a street is consumed by flames. The same voice describes the crumbling of Manhattan: “The tunnels echo with the sound of cracking steel and cement as the streets above are sucked into the underground.” Such scenes rub mankind’s nose in the fact of its impermanence. A few stone-chiselled memorials will survive, from the pyramids to Mount Rushmore, but mould spores will devour our libraries and acid will melt our films. The History Channel view is Tennyson’s, recast in a mood not of dread but of glee.
A frequent technique is to go to places that humans have abandoned and to see what has happened to them: the island of Hashima 35 years after the Japanese coal industry abandoned it, for instance, or parts of Gary, Indiana, that have been derelict for decades. The news is mixed. If you are human, these are catastrophes. If you are an ailanthus tree, you will have a different perspective.
Last year’s film took the same approach with Pripyat, the company town built to serve the Chernobyl reactor and abandoned after the nuclear disaster in 1986. Chernobyl’s environs are now something of a nature preserve. Roe deer are back and the bird-watching is magnificent. Mr Weisman, who wrote an article on post-disaster Chernobyl for Harpers magazine in 1994, is circumspect. He thinks it will take generations to see just how habitable the landscape is. But the History Channel has no time for such qualifications.
“Incredibly,” says the narrator, “the effect of the absence of humans for 20 years has outweighed the initial damage caused by the nuclear nightmare.” A scientist looking out over the ruins reflects: “It seems pretty sad when you look now and see what’s become of this beautiful city of Pripyat, and that people will never live here again … ” Then there is a silence. In the eight seconds that it lasts, there is never a moment’s doubt that the next word will be but. “ … But there’s another side to the story, a very encouraging side, one that says that life is much more resilient than what we thought possible.”
The speculative excitement of the scientists interviewed for the film is the most unnerving thing about it. One scientist standing amid the grand judiciary buildings in Manhattan’s Foley Square notes that, without people, “nature would re-establish itself, and slowly bring us back to the green heart of what it means to be on the planet Earth.” The zoologist Ray Coppinger of Hampshire College just cackles with delight: “If the city is abandoned, rats will have to go back to making an honest living,” he says. And later: “I could picture New York City with all the buildings covered with vines, you know, hawks sailing around … It’d be lovely. It’d be absolutely lovely.”
How many people feel this way, and why? Do they only want a dramatic illustration of the process by which, left alone, some kinds of environmental damage done by man can be reversed? Mr Weisman has insisted in interviews he is a journalist, not a misanthrope or a crusader. He is speculating about our absence only as a means of “looking at our impact by extraction”. From a scientific perspective, that is sensible. But most viewers seem to want something else. They want Judgment Day. “In my opinion the Earth will be better off without humans,” writes a correspondent on a YouTube message board. “Humans are the main cause for altering the way the Earth once was.”
Maybe this sort of view is the dark unconscious of the universalism that is preached in the age of globalisation. Love of one’s own kind has gone out of fashion – we are now supposed to offer that love to a refugee in Darfur as readily as to our neighbours. Kantian ethics have replaced allegiances. But what happens to dislike for the neighbour down the street, which is equally part of the human condition? Apparently that sentiment gets universalised too – to the point where people begin not just to wish ill to their neighbours but to dream about the end of mankind.
The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard. His book, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West, is published next week
