The World Without Us

By Alan Weisman (Picador, $15)

In "The World Without Us," journalist Alan Weisman set out to talk about the global environment in a way that would, he hoped, reach a wide audience. The subject usually "overwhelms or scares the hell out of people," he says.

The writer traveled from the still-primeval forests of Bialowwieza Puszcza to the underground world of gas pipelines that tie Houston to New Jersey and to Kingman Reef in the north Pacific Ocean, one of the hardest places on Earth to reach. He wanted to examine what would happen to the world if, all of a sudden, humans were to disappear from it. He wanted to ask a deeper question: Is it possible for us to remain here after all?

Q: The book was published in 2007, is now out in paperback and has been translated into 31 languages. What is it that tapped a universal vein?

A: Everyone, no matter how old they are, can remember a place that they used to be able to go, where they could get away to, could get away to, could go out and walk, hike, watch birds, shoot birds if they want to. Everybody regrets at some deep genetic level the way we've colonized the Earth.

Q: I sense a deeply spiritual strand in the book. I mean, after all, you open with an image of a landscape that is paradisiacal, no?

A: It does start in Paradise, in Polish Eden, and then we descend and come back up, and it's very Old Testament in that way. I think what I'm writing about does kind of touch on these themes that, if there's any place for humans on this planet, it's going to be with the best of our understanding of biology and ecology and an acknowledgment of our inclination to spirit.

Q: And what has been the response from atheists?

A: Contemplating the spiritual is just one of the things that human beings do. Spirit is one of the things that utterly fascinates me; it's very seductive. The physical world itself is deeply spiritual because there's no difference, say, between the human race and nature.

Q: One of the issues you touch on at the end of the book is profoundly material. You deal with the problem of population. How does this sort of discussion go over with Catholics, Evangelicals and even Mormons?

A: Population is a potentially volitile issue. I was at Weber State last fall in fact, I'm wearing a green Weber State sweatshirt that someone gave me right now and when I got to the moment in my talk when I realized I was going to talk about how do we manage the numbers, I realized I was talking to a Mormon audience.

Instead of preaching or attacking a belief system, I had done some research about how the early Mormons had gotten themselves into a bind. When Brigham Young brought everybody to Utah, the idea very much like in the Bible: Let's multiply and fill the Earth and threby gain possession of it. Then . . . a lot of women were dying in childbirth or pregnancy, and doctors started advising women that they had to space their births.

Frankly, I've found Latter-day Saints to be in a much more flexible and modern position to be able to do this thing - save Mother Nature. In the audience that day, people were nodding.

Q: What are some of the questions we should be asking of the current presidential candidates when it comes to the world with us or without us?

A: I don't belong to a poitical party. But there's a fairly clear choice if you want to take it on. I lived in John McCain's state for many years. He used to not be bad on climate and now he's ditched it completely. He was even against drilling in Alaska and now he's picked a vice presidential candidate who's for it. Obama has got a stiff learning curve in front of him on the environment, but he's surrounding himself by people who know stuff, whereas McCain is portraying himself as someone who has the answers. It's as if he's saying, "If I can get through five years in a box in Vietnam, I can get us through anything." Both are talking about investing in green technology, but Obama's aims and figures are just more ambitious.

Q: What else is it that you think we need to be thinking about, not just as a nation, but as a global community?

A: I've been to China and spoken at universities there, and students ask me this constantly: "What should I be studying and what should I be doing?" I say: Go into engineering, go into the hard sciences. The best and the brightest of this past generation all went and got MBAs. There's an enormous market for stuff that we can do with the sun, with wind, with metal alloys. This is going to be the growth industry of the future.

Q: That's a pretty practical solution to a lot of the issues you raise in the book.

A: My book gives the sense that maybe we can do it. In it, I've tried to talk about the environment in a way that people feel hope instead of disaster and despair.

- Interview conducted, condensed and edited by Julie Checkoway, who can be reached at jcheckoway@sltrib.com

Hear it from the author himself

Alan Weisman will speak Sept. 30 at 7 p.m. at the University of Utah Libby Gardner Hall, 1375 E. Presidents Circle, Salt Lake City. His talk is sponsored by the University's Wallace Stegner Center.

Tickets, $10, are available at 801-581-7100 or www.kingsburyhall.org.