A new series debuts tomorrow night on the History Channel that essentially renders all of the crying, teeth gnashing, and hair pulling over anthropogenic climate change ridiculously moot.  

The World Without US takes concepts that have been around for years in the works of people like Dougal Dixon (After Man: A Zoology of the Future and Man After Man, about future human evolutions), and illustrate how ferociously efficient the natural world will be in reclaiming the planet once human civilization disappears. 

Essentially it boils down to this:  less than 50 years after the last human vanishes, all the forests will grow back, cities will disappear under vegetation, natural streams and rivers will flow freely again, and all the damage human industry and culture wrought on the natural world will be healed, as if the last 10,000 years or so never happened at all. 

Growing up in strong Democratic households, and having Earth Day and other traditionally Democratic holidays beaten into us by heavy-handed liberal schools, we were never once shown how resilient the natural world truly is — and how throughout the fossil record species have risen and fallen as the planet’s fortunes ebbed and flowed, largely influenced primarily by the activity of the sun (since we believe it is solar flare activity, not anthropogenic industrial emissions, that causes fluctuations in global temperatures). 

Check out this new series to see just how little time it would take for the whole planet to become one giant forest again, and for all sorts of new animals to evolve to reconquer the planet without humanity around to limit their develop.  

If you like the series, check out Dougal Dixon’s works on alternate evolution.  It’s the kind of stuff guaranteed to make you the oddball in any cocktail party, since talking about the speculative future evolution of rabbits into deer-like ungulates and rats into monstrous leonine terrors is something not appreciated by anyone without a healthy imagination, and the ability and willingness to realize that humanity gives itself way too much credit:  we might be the dominant species on this planet, but in the end the planet itself will dominate us, the way it’s dominated everything else.  We’ve had about 10,000 years worth of impact.  

But just 50 years or so without us around would already wipe most of our achievements out completely.