A bunch of years ago, before I met Kelly and my life was filled with rainbows and unicorns and puppies with angel wings, I had a particularly rough week.  I went for a walk near my apartment, to the park in front of the Minneapolis Institue of Arts.

One of the faces of the MIA has a classical museum entrance, all white with the columns and the lions and everything.  From the steps of that entrance, one can see over the park to the sparkling skyline of Minneapolis.  It’s a very pretty view, and on that night I was particularly moved by it.  What an amazing species humanity is, I thought, that we can create such beauty on such a scale.  It was probably comforting to feel like the problems I was dealing with were relatively insignificant, because look at that.  I started to feel the swell of awe, but then I caught myself.

Yeah, it’s remarkable that we have shaped our environment on a level unprecedented in history.  But the big thing that hit me that night is that none of that beauty exists for the public good.  All those shiny skyscrapers with their dramatic lighting and sweeping buttresses are built at the behest of the privileged to serve their own purposes.  My favorite Minneapolis skyscraper is the vaguely art-deco Wells Fargo Center, designed by Cesar Pelli, but despite my enthusiasm for its pleasing esthetics, it doesn’t exist for me.

Similarly, when I lived in Chicago I loved — absolutely adored — the nighttime skyline, especially the view heading south down Lake Shore Drive.  I had a similar sense of pride then, not just that I was part of the species that could produce that, but that in an abstract sense that skyline was mine.  The skyline signified Chicago, and that was my city.

But if I looked closer at those buildings, I would realize that those lights were offices where I wasn’t welcome and where Important People made decisions that poisoned the air and water, or forced struggling families from their homes.  What they represent, more than a bunch of pretty lights and civic boosterism, is power and influence and who has it and who doesn’t.

Now, I still find pretty buildings pretty and I’m still a little thrilled by a dramatic cityscape.  But it’s always there at the back of my mind that the world would probably be better off without those things.  In fact, the world would probably be better off without us.

When I was in high school, I managed to catch one of George Carlin’s many comedy specials on HBO, on one of those weekends where they unscrambled the channel to taunt us with unedited movies with swear words and the possibility of nudity.  Near the end of the show, Carlin did a great bit about how, despite all the awful things we do to it, the planet is fine.  (Now, his performance persona is outlandishly misanthropic for comedy’s sake, but underneath it is a genuine frustration with human arrogance and a respect for natural cycles of life and death, birth and rebirth.)

I thought about that bit recently when I saw Alan Weisman on the Daily Show, talking about his new book, The World Without Us.  The non-fiction book posits that all human life has been wiped out by some calamity — what traces of our existence will remain after twenty, or a hundred, or a thousand years?  It may sound morbid, but it’s not at all about what “happens” to humanity.  It’s more like, what would New York look like to a time traveler or alien visitor after fifty years?

In the Carlin routine, he insists that the planet will be fine without us, and Weisman would agree.  Earth will just become something different than it was before we changed the environment so drastically.  In Carlin’s words, it will incorporate all of our detritus into “a new paradigm:  the earth plus plastic.”

I like this.  It’s comforting to realize that we’re really screwing ourselves with the air pollution and the plastic bags and the melting ice caps.  Of course, there are also all the non-human animals which suffer right along with us, and they never had the chance to decide if that’s the world they want to contribute to.

By and large, I don’t think we’re a good influence.  What does humanity contribute to the world, except the things that prolong or enhance our own unsustainable existence?  We’re certainly not good for other species, nor for the planet itself.  In my more idealistic moments, it bothers me that I can’t be 100% vegan, 100% eco-friendly.  (In actual practice, I’ve made my peace with that and accept that those standards are impossible.)  The mere fact of my existence contributes to the degradation of the environment and the deaths of other living things.

Maybe this is why I enjoy apocalyptic fiction.  It seems like in the end we’ll get what we deserve.