Finished on 7.1.25

This was a really interesting read, and mostly a bummer, as I expected. The author explores the concept of what a world without humans would look like from a lot of different angles, and I learned a lot of things that I hadn’t known before. Here are a few examples:

I did not realize that the Iron Curtain was partially a physical barrier—I thought it was just a political concept / border.

I did not know that there were once ground sloths bigger than mammoths.

I did not realize the vast, huge amount of birds that die by flying into buildings, etc., every year. It literally made me cry and it made me feel like we should be demolishing every tall building. More than anything else in this book, this little bit of info has changed the way I think in the past few months. Truly almost everything humans do has a huge, unseen effect on some part of nature, living or not. It’s really disheartening to think about it too much.

I had never heard of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. It’s a really, really interesting concept—it calls for people to abstain from procreation and let the human race die out naturally. Obviously this would never happen, but it’s a really interesting thought experiment and I liked the idea that “the last humans could enjoy their final sunsets peacefully, knowing they have returned the planet as close as possible to the Garden of Eden.”

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My favorite quotes:

“In New York, the European starling—now a ubiquitous avian pest from Alaska to Mexico—was introduced because someone thought the city would be more cultured if Central Park were home to each bird mentioned in Shakespeare. Next came a Central Park garden with every plant in the Bard’s plays, sown with the lyrical likes of primrose, wormwood, lark’s heel, eglantine, and cowslip—everything short of Macbeth’s Birnam Wood.”

“Olduvai Gorge and the other fossil hominid sites … have confirmed beyond much doubt that we are all Africans. The dust we breathe here, blown by zephyrs that leave a coating of gray tuff powder on Olduvai’s sisals and acacias, contains calcified specks of the very DNA that we carry. From this place, humans radiated across continents and around a planet. Eventually, coming full circle, we returned, so estranged from our origins that we enslaved blood cousins who stayed behind to maintain our birthright.”

“The museum’s centerpiece is the faithfully reproduced 2,500-square-foot trophy room of McElroy’s Tucson mansion, which bears the taxidermied spoils of a lifelong obsession with killing large mammals. Locally often derided as the ‘dead animal museum,’ for Martin on this night, it’s perfect.” -about the International Wildlife Museum, talking about late millionaire big-game hunter C.J. McElroy

“A flower, like a human, is two-thirds water.”

“Thompson’s team realized that slow mechanical action—waves and tides that grind against shorelines, turning rocks into beaches—were now doing the same to plastics. The largest, most conspicuous items bobbing in the surf were slowly getting smaller. At the same time, there was no sign that any of the plastic was biodegrading, even when reduced to tiny fragments. 

‘We imagined it was being ground down smaller and smaller, into a kind of powder. And we realized that smaller and smaller could lead to bigger and bigger problems.’”

“‘They spent decades of frustration trying to get white pine to succeed itself. They didn’t get that when you cut down the forest, you expose a new forest that rooted in its shade. They never read Thoreau.’”

“For years, thousands of drums of cutting oil saturated with plutonium and uranium were leaking, stacked outside on bare ground. When someone finally noticed they were leaking, asphalt was poured over the evidence.”

“To watch barn swallows zip naked around the carcass of the hot reactor is discombobulating, especially when you are swaddled in layers of wool and hooded canvas coveralls to block alpha particles, with a surgical cap and mask to keep plutonium dust from your hair and lungs. You want them to fly away, fast and far. At the same time, it’s mesmerizing that they’re here. It seems so normal, as if apocalypse has turned out to be not so bad after all. The worst happens, and life still goes on.
Life goes on, but the baseline has changed.”

“The last humans could enjoy their final sunsets peacefully, knowing they have returned the planet as close as possible to the Garden of Eden.”

“In Christianity, the Earth melts, but a new one is born. Since it needs no sun—the eternal light of God and the Lamb having eliminated night—it’s clearly a different planet than this one.”