Alan Weisman is a journalist and non fiction writer whose focus over the past twenty five years has been on the crises that now imperil the planet.  In The World Without Us (2007), which became a New York Times and International best seller, Alan tries to engage readers by helping them to imagine a world without them.   From cities to power plants, what would happen to our environmental impact if we suddenly disappeared from the planet tomorrow?  In Count Down: Our Last Best Hope for a Future on Earth (2013),  Alan takes up the causes and possible solutions to the most important, and typically neglected, driving force behind the pressures now being placed on the planet, exponential population growth.  Finally, in his most recent book, Hope Dies Last: Visionary People Across the World Fighting to Find Us a Future (2025), Alan finds inspirational examples of people from all walks of life, across the globe, who are finding solutions to the world’s most pressing problems.  I had the opportunity to engage Alan in a wide ranging conversation about all three books with a particular focus on the themes of memory and forgetting.  

I was especially intrigued by references to Eden which appear at the start of The World Without Us and Hope Dies Last.  The first chapter of The World Without Us is entitled “A Lingering Scent of Eden.” It takes us on a journey into the Białowiea Puszcza, Europe’s last old-growth forest, located between Poland and Belarus.  From trees with trunks seven feet across, stretching 150 feet into the sky, to species of animals that have survived almost nowhere else in Europe, Alan describes the Białowiea Puszcza as a relic of a forest that once spanned the continent from Siberia to Ireland.  The Białowiea Puszcza has deep resonance for those who visit because, Alan explains, it stirs memories deep within us of a world we recognize from our past.  It is an Eden, vestiges of which continue to live on in different shapes and forms across the planet, which we still have the ability to nurture and revive.  

The Eden in Hope Dies Last is situated in the biblical heartland of the Middle East.  At the end of the Pleistocene era the region where civilization first began resembled the biblical description of Eden. Delving into the history of plate tectonics, Alan notes how the Pleistocene era was a period of refrigeration caused by the collision of the earth’s landmasses.  When the first homosapiens reached the region that became known as the Fertile Crescent, the mass of water still locked under oceans of glaciers lowered sea levels and exposed more land.  Not just the famed Tigris and Euphrates but also the Karun and Wadi al-Batin rivers created a fertile and hunting paradise for our ancestors who first developed farming, animal husbandry, and finally, the earliest civilizations. 

Gazing on the ruins of history’s most enduring civilization, pondering the fragility of empire and grandeur lost so quickly when water vanished, should humble us—but it’s too distant, too preindustrial, too impossible to imagine our own capitals reduced to dust. Alan Weisman, Hope Dies Last: Visionary People Across the World Fighting to Find Us a Future. 

The Eden whose history Alan traces in Hope Dies Last is then juxtaposed with the region ravaged by the policies of Iraqi dictator Saadam Hussein.  Diverting the Tigris and Euphrates, to deprive Shi’ite opposition of the vegetation that gave them shelter, the once fertile region, rich in biodiversity, became a barren wasteland.   Against what seemed like impossible odds, two Iraqis inspired by childhood memories of a lost paradise, rented a backhoe, punched a hole in Saadam’s earthworks, and began the long process of reviving a region that had been left for dead.  Azam Alwash, founder of the non-profit Nature Iraq, that became the driving force behind the project, went on to win the 2013 Goldman Environmental Prize, what Alan describes as the “Green Nobel Prize.”   Alwash is just one of the many inspirational stories in Hope Dies Last of ordinary people fighting and sometimes succeeding in saving our lost Edens.  

If Eden is a memory trigger Alan uses to rally readers to the cause of an imperiled planet, so is forgetting.  The entire premise of Alan’s most widely read book, The World Without Us, is to imagine what would happen to all the ways we’ve impacted the planet if humanity disappeared tomorrow.  Rather than crafting a skin-crawling horror story, Alan chose to focus on the sum total of humanity’s imprint on the planet.  While some of the remains of human ingenuity, such as nuclear waste, will last as long as the planet, most things we leave behind will eventually be swallowed up, broken down, and absorbed by the twin powers of nature and time.  After recovering from five previous mass extinction events, Alan posits that the planet will be fine without us.  By featuring the incredible resilience of the planet while showing how we can be erased and forgotten, Alan hopes to inspire readers to want to stick around and be part of the solution.  

The dangers of forgetting is once again prominently featured in Count Down.  Perhaps the most important driving force behind the many ways we endanger the planet is population growth.  While we may normalize the world we live in because we have no memory of another time, Alan emphasizes how our time is anything but normal.  Never before have there been as many people on the planet.  “Every four and a half days,” Alan notes, “there are a million more people on the plant.”  From one billion people in 1800, we’ve now moved beyond 8 billion and could reach 10 billion by the end of the century.  The energy and food demands created by the exponential growth of humanity is one the root causes of everything from global warming to species extinction.  Like any species that exceeds its resources, Alan reminds us, nature will eventually offer its own correction. 

Count Down traces the roots of the population explosion through the history of scientific advances from vaccines to pasteurization.  As human ingenuity succeeded in stemming the historical leveling effects of diseases and epidemics, our numbers soared.  The development of fertilizers in the early twentieth century and their widespread use in the post-World War II decades, were especially important in fueling population growth by allowing us to produce more food than nature ever intended.  Alan refers to the Haber-Bosch Process, developed by German chemists Friz Haber and Carl Bosch in the early twentieth, as the greatest scientific revolution in the history of humanity because of how it dramatically increased agricultural yields.

But too much of a good thing, Alan reminds us, can something be a bad thing.  Despite the death toll of two world wars, by the 1960s unbridled population growth risked outstripping food supplies and raised the specter of mass starvation.  If Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book, Population Bomb, which forecast mass famine and starvation by the 1970s, didn’t materialize, it wasn’t because Ehrlich was wrong.  It was the timely intervention of the Green Revolution which gave humanity a temporary reprieve.  Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution, rightfully won the 1970 Nobel Peace Price, Alan remarks, because he helped save more lives than anyone in human history.  What is forgotten, Alan stresses, is Borlaug’s own warning that if scientific advancements weren’t coupled with population control measures, humanity would inevitably grow beyond the food supply.  

Family planning, Alan argues, is paramount to reigning in the dangers of unbridled population growth.  Highlighting dark histories such as the mass sterilization program in Puerto Rico and the eugenics convictions of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, Alan notes how family planning is understandably a highly sensitive topic.  Yet the appeal of birth control pills and tubal ligation surgeries was driven in no small part by the desire of women to escape the life-threatening risks of repeated child births.  In some cases government authorities recognized the potentially destabilizing threats of large numbers of unemployed young men in countries with strong population growth.  After calling on the nation’s women to build a “Twenty Million Man Army” during the Iran-Iraq war, government authorities in Iran dramatically reversed course and implemented largely voluntary family planning policies that proved more effective than China’s coercive “one child policy.”  Sadly, one of the most important international resources in the fight for family planning, USAID, has recently been dismantled by the Trump administration.  

Rather than lamenting the current configuration of political power, Alan finds hope in the ingenuity and innovation taking place around the globe.   As rising sea levels threaten coastal cities everywhere, the Netherlands, with centuries of experience in water management, now has technology transfer contracts with scores of countries. The Dutch have been so successful in keeping their lowlands dry that they built the Watersnoodmuseum to remind younger generations of the last deadly floods that killed thousands in 1953.  From agricultural technologies that don’t rely on the harmful effects of nitrogen to limitless sources of clean energy that we can harness from our own homes, Hope Dies Last spotlights all the promising technologies now being developed.  Technology may not be the answer to the problems caused by technology but Alan believes that we have to try everything.  He finds hope and solace in the myriad ways that people are rising to the challenge of the existential crises that now threaten the planet.