Environment & Energy

The World Without Us is a 2007 non-fiction book about what would happen to the natural and built environment if humans suddenly disappeared, written by American journalist Alan Weisman and published by St. Martin's Thomas Dunne Books.[1] It is a book-length expansion of Weisman's own February 2005 Discover article "Earth Without People".[2] Written largely as a thought experiment, it outlines, for example, how cities and houses would deteriorate, how long man-made artifacts would last, and how remaining lifeforms would evolve. Weisman concludes that residential neighborhoods would become forests within 500 years, and that radioactive waste, bronze statues, plastics and Mount Rushmore would be among the longest-lasting evidence of human presence on Earth.

The Unbearable Anthropocentrism of Our World in Data
How billionaire elites help fund an Oxford statistics lab that makes the destruction of Earth look just great.

Roughly a decade ago, a 30-year-old economic statistician at Oxford University named Max Roser set out to transform the way we see the world using datasets.

One can learn, for example, that the share of people living in extreme poverty, has plummeted since the 1970s; that GDP per capita after 1945 skyrocketed in the U.S. and Western Europe, and has been rising – far more slowly, and only recently – in the rest of the world; that child mortality is way down; that the share of world population that’s undernourished is declining; that the literacy rate is way up; and that 90.44 percent of people on Earth now have access to enough electricity at least to charge a phone or power a radio four hours a day.
“It’s hard to imagine,” Roser writes in one of his many essays that celebrate the good news, “but child mortality in the very worst-off places today is much better than anywhere in the past.”

For obvious reasons, Roser’s cheerful view of capitalist business-as-usual – and the data that would seem to support it – has made him a darling of libertarian market fundamentalists, who have lavished praise on his work. His admirers include some of the most extreme right wing think tanks in the U.S. and U.K. Among these are the Cato Institute, spawn of the noxious fossil fuel magnates Charles and David Koch; the American Enterprise Institute, best known for its spreading of lies to foment the US-Iraq War in 2003; the Foundation for Economic Education, the oldest libertarian think tank in the U.S., founded by business interests to peddle pro-market, antigovernment ideology; and the Institute of Economic Affairs, a U.K.-based organization that has promoted climate-change denial.

Roser’s most important supporter, providing hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding, is the world’s fifth richest man, Bill Gates. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been the single largest donor in recent years, funding “general operations and data infrastructure development” along with “core project activities.” Gates and Roser know each other personally. Gates has referred to OWID as his “favorite website.”

Other notable allies are the philosophers and social theorists who make up what’s called “effective altruism.” EA is a boutique ideology of wealthy elites who wish to do the “most good” in the world through charitable giving. Silicon Valley tech bros have been prominent devotees, including Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and Estonian billionaire Jaan Taallin, developer of Skype.

There Are Many Threats to Humanity. A Low Birth Rate Isn’t One of Them.

Commentators across the political spectrum claim that humanity faces imminent collapse due to a “fertility crisis.” Is this mass delusion or cynical propaganda?

Far-right authoritarian pundits and political actors, from Matt Walsh to Elon Musk, all seem to have gotten the same memo instructing them to fixate on “low” fertility and birth rates. Musk has claimed that “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming” and that it will lead to “mass extinction.” Some liberals are flirting with this narrative, too. In a February New Yorker essay, Gideon Lewis-Kraus deploys dystopian imagery to describe the “low” birth-rate in South Korea, twice comparing the country to the collapsing, childless society in the 2006 film Children of Men.1 Visiting a school that’s populated by a student body smaller than its intended capacity, Lewis-Kraus describes the scene looking “as if everyone had evaporated overnight.” He laments that in South Korea, “In 2023, the number of births was just two hundred and thirty thousand.” It’s not just liberals and authoritarians engaging in this birth-rate crisis panic. Self-described leftist Elizabeth Bruenig recently equated falling fertility with humanity’s inability “to persist on this Earth.” Running through her pronatalist Atlantic opinion piece is an entirely uninterrogated presumption that fertility rates collected today are able to predict the total disappearance of the species Homo sapiens at some future time.