Ear­li­er this week I spoke on the phone with Alan Weis­man, the author of The World With­out Us. (See our ini­tial piece on his book.) Alan was gra­cious enough to take some time out of his pub­lic­i­ty sched­ule to share his thoughts on the book, the world, his writ­ing process, and more. What fol­lows is an edit­ed tran­script of our con­ver­sa­tion.

Ed: This book address­es what on the sur­face seems to be a pret­ty far-fetched hypo­thet­i­cal: that human­i­ty might sud­den­ly dis­ap­pear. What drew you to this premise in the first place?

Alan: Well, pre­cise­ly that. Most great envi­ron­men­tal writ­ing does not get read by a lot of the peo­ple who ought to be learn­ing about it because the near­er-term pos­si­bil­i­ties just seem some­times so fright­en­ing, or so depress­ing, that nobody real­ly wants to pick up a book to read it.

By struc­tur­ing the book the way that I did, I dis­arm the auto­mat­ic fear that repels a lot of peo­ple from read­ing about the envi­ron­ment. Peo­ple don’t want to read some­thing that seems too threat­en­ing. On a sub­con­scious or even a con­scious lev­el, they don’t want to be wor­ried we’re all going to die. In my book, killing us off in the first cou­ple of pages means peo­ple don’t have to wor­ry about dying because we’re already dead, and that’s a relief in a sense. The idea of glimps­ing the future is irre­sistible to all of us and I estab­lish pret­ty quick­ly that is not going to just be me spec­u­lat­ing, it’s going to be some hard sci­ence writ­ing based on a lot of report­ing, of talk­ing to experts or eye­wit­ness­es whose guess­es will be far more inter­est­ing than most peo­ples’.

The fact that it is far-fetched is real­ly use­ful because on the one hand real­ly it’s a remote pos­si­bil­i­ty that we would leave, that we would dis­ap­pear tomor­row. So peo­ple don’t go into a pan­ic over this book, and it real­ly gives peo­ple enough time to think about these things with­out pan­ick­ing about it. So that’s how this device works, and I think it’s been proven to be very effec­tive. I’m get­ting a lot more peo­ple to read it than just peo­ple who are hung up on the envi­ron­ment.

(more…)