Homelands co-founder Alan Weisman takes writer Raffi Khatchadourian for a virtual walk in the woods near his home in western Massachusetts for a “Talk of the Town” piece in the June 1 issue of The New Yorker.
In “After COVID-19, Will Nature Take Over?”, Alan contemplates the meaning of the great slowdown in economic (and polluting) activity brought by the pandemic. His bestselling 2007 book, The World Without Us, describes the ways in which nature would recover if human beings suddenly disappeared from the planet. Readers have been returning to the book looking for lessons.
“I don’t think nature is avenging itself,” Alan tells Khatchadourian. “We are having an impact in ways that we can’t predict, because there are so many variables in the ecosystem, but until something happens we just keep forging ahead in a bubble of denial.”