THE HUDSON VALLEY WITHOUT US by Owen Lipstein

From InsideOuthv.com

Imagine there are no people.
Imagine that we’ve all disappeared. Without the messy footprints of an over-the-top nuclear exchange, or the kind of monster asteroid that rained on the dinosaurs’ parade.
Instead, imagine, if you can, just this: That in one single day our “cloud-capped towers, our gorgeous palaces, our solemn temples” are suddenly, and completely, bereft of people. That the we of the planet have virtually disappeared, leaving not a rack behind. Everything else in the world is … just as it was.
That, in short, is the darkly interesting premise of Alan Weisman’s New York Times bestseller, “The World Without Us.” Alan spent a morning speaking with us. We found this discussion about extinction somehow very energizing …
What happens in our valley if we’re not around to live in it? What happens to some of the people, places, and things we chronicle in this magazine?
For those of us who live in wood structures: Those buildings should not expect a long future life without their mortgage holders. Ephemeral would be the apt word for the formal barn described in our Home section by Erika Tsoukanlis. Weisman, we surmise, might say that without an owner to fix the inevitable roof leak, the barn would stay vertical for only 15 to 20 years. We love that place.
On the other hand, if you, like our brick-celebrating columnist Philip Alvare, are forward-looking enough to live in a brick building, your neighborhood birds and animals may be living there comfortably … for at least 150 years … before things start to get a little tipsy. Because inevitably, with no one there to repoint the corners, the mortar will start to wash away …
Brigit Binns, columnist of The Raw and the Cooked, discusses with a certain enthusiasm the prospect of eating very local venison. Good news here for future venison eaters (if only there were someone to eat it): Weisman shows convincingly that without human beings, animals tend to get larger (big animals eat small ones in a world without humans — with humans, there are a lot fewer lions and elephants). Assume the Hudson Valley without us would showcase an order-of-magnitude larger, beefier horned creatures.
John Cronin, in his Earth Diary, laments the gradual extinction of ancient sturgeon. Guess who will be sure to make a vigorous comeback if we’re not around?
Dr. Scharf, in this issue, warns us not to declaw our cats. It’s more painful for the cats than we might realize. For his part, Weisman is downright down on cats — they destroy more birds than we can fathom. But in a world without us, to his evident delight, the domestic cat would suddenly lose its biggest ally and chief shill. In a world without us, the housecat would have to fend for itself. It would not be fruitful … and it would tend … not to multiply. (Cockroaches also have a less-than-rosy future.)
But it is in the future of Paula Forman‘s garden, for one example, that we see most clearly what we have to look forward to. Weisman figures it would take just five centuries for her soil, now rife with “Ugly Bettys” (red salvia), to squire giant oaks, 200-foot walnuts, colossal chestnuts — stuff that would make her garden look, for all the world, like the primeval forest that Adam knew.
Call it a dubious distinction. But in a world without us, the Hudson Valley as we know it now (even with a rich imagination) wouldn’t look or be that different. And not just because we wouldn’t be underwater in two weeks as Manhattan would, or transformed into a gaseous holocaust, as the Houston-Austin corridor would.
It’s because the Hudson Valley was drafted, long ago, with the ultimate foresight — to make the mountains and rivers and streams the dominant architecture of the land — and Homo sapiens are still, after all, just another animal (though one with a troublesome history and an emerging worrisome future).
That is yet another reason we’re crazy about the Hudson Valley.