Apocalypse New

(2 of 2)
After the beast is through with us, what then? The postapocalypse comes in two varieties: the sterile kind, which leaves behind a dead desert, and the fertile kind, in which destruction makes room for new life and nature gloriously reclaims a human-free earth. In The Road, McCarthy—following Eliot and Mad Max—imagines an earth from which every cell of nonhuman life has been burned. It's a vivid fantasy, but it's not the most plausible scenario. Alan Weisman's The World Without Us, a sleeper hit last year, is a carefully researched look at what a depopulated earth would really be like. It turns out to be not all bad.

Plants would crack and pulverize cities and highways. Moose and wolves would return, and the forest would become dense again. Reading The World Without Us, you want to cheer at the springy resilience with which the earth bounces back from the damage humans inflicted on it. Global warming is our newest and most cherished apocalypse, but even the atmosphere will eventually rebalance itself, more or less. "I wanted to write a book that was intentionally not apocalyptic," says Weisman, who teaches journalism at the University of Arizona. "Apocalypse means destruction, and the whole world ends. In my book, I show how beautiful things could get—and how quickly—if we weren't around. How things revert to wilderness, almost like the Garden of Eden." (The History Channel's Life After People, which airs Jan. 21, has essentially the same premise.)

Weisman's book gets at the paradox of the apocalypse, which is that it's weirdly seductive. Watching Smith in I Am Legend as he romps through a Manhattan blessedly free of people, you try to remember that he's supposed to be mourning the death of humanity, but it's damned hard. He's playing golf and driving a sports car. He's picking corn and hunting deer—he's eating locally! The apocalypse is an epic tragedy, but it's also a fantasy of cleansing and regeneration wherein everything inessential and inauthentic is swept away so that we can build afresh among the ruins. It's a convenient untruth. "I've been struck by the number of New Yorkers who have actually said to me, 'God, it was so much fun watching the city fall apart like that,'" says Weisman. "There is on some level a secret longing that people have, saying 'Let's just give it up. What a mess we've made just by being alive.' We all have this footprint now. We've redefined original sin."

We won't reveal what kind of apocalypse the beast in Cloverfield brings, whether it leaves behind a charred, crispy earth or a moist green one or whether it just—no fair!—succumbs to old-fashioned human military might. But there's a part of each of us that is rooting for the monster and that would be glad to see us go. Because we know there's a little beast in us too.