The great abandonment: what happens to the natural world when people disappear?

The somber truth is that the vast bulk of nature’s staggering abundance has already disappeared. We live in a world characterized primarily by the relative silence and emptiness of its natural spaces.

know the world will survive us—and in some ways it will be more alive. More birdsong. More creatures roaming around. More plants cracking through our pavement, rewilding the planet we terraformed. I imagine coyotes sleeping in the ruins of the homes we built. I imagine our plastic still washing up on beaches hundreds of years after the last of us i

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The scene might call to mind a time gone by, the passage of time, and our eventual decay. But what if you shifted your focus from the barn to the background—the field, the hills beyond. What might you see? What might you learn?

Perhaps you’d notice how the native vegetation took over the fallow field in the first ten years, and the new species of tr

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Other elements had the ability to unsettle, however. Long ago, towns had existed here, and we encountered eerie signs of human habitation: rotting cabins with sunken, red-tinged roofs, rusted wagon-wheel spokes half-buried in the dirt, and the barely seen outlines of what used to be enclosures for livestock, now mere ornament for layers of pine-nee

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