Conventional wisdom is often a poor guide. For one thing it suggests that human damage to the world’s species, habitats and ecosystems is terminal: that when things are lost, they are lost for ever. But oil spills of the sort that now threaten the Timor Sea, forest fires like those that recently afflicted Greece, and other man-made and man-assisted threats to wildlife are transient. Except in those cases in which a species is driven to extinction, the Earth’s ability to shrug such things off is often underestimated. Alan Weisman shows this in his book, ‘The World Without Us, which illustrates nature’s great capacity to recover. Have mankind abducted by aliens or wiped out by some Homo sapiens-specific virus, and nature, Mr Weisman reckons, would reclaim its territory with surprising speed, as weeds colonised pavements, rivers flooded subway tunnels and buildings burst as they were played like concertinas by a cycle of freezing and thawing. By Mr Weisman’s reckoning, residential neighbourhoods would return to forest in 500 years and only the most stubborn of human inventions, such as certain plastics, would prove permanent. AFP Mr Weisman’s conclusion was backed up earlier this year by a study published in the […]