Concord without us

Some time ago I read The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, in which he imagines what would become of our roads and dams and cities if people were to disappear one day. (Tim Butcher’s book Blood River, about traveling through the Congo, reminded me of it.)

I was startled, though, to find that Thoreau tried a similar thought experiment in his Journal.

Here is the complete passage, from November 23, 1860. It follows a discussion of native and imported fruits, and may have been prompted by wondering what would become of the cultivated apple and peach trees of Concord if there were no one to look after them.

At first, perchance, there would be an abundant crop of rank garden weeds and grasses in the cultivated land, — and rankest of all in the cellar-holes, — and of pinweed, hardhack, sumach, blackberry, thimble-berry, raspberry, etc. in the fields and pastures. Elm, ash, maples, etc. would grow vigorously along old garden limits and main streets. Garden weeds and grasses would soon disappear. Huckleberry and blueberry bushes, lambkill, hazel, sweet-fern, barberry, elder, also shad-bush, choke-berry, andromeda, and thorns, etc., would rapidly prevail in the deserted pastures. At the same time the wild cherries, birch, poplar, willows, checkerberry would reëstablish themselves. Finally the pines, hemlock, spruce, larch, shrub oak, oaks, chestnut, beech, and walnuts would occupy the site of Concord once more. The apple and perhaps all exotic trees and shrubs and a great part of the indigenous ones named above would have disappeared, and the laurel and yew would to some extent be an underwood here, and perchance the red man once more thread his way through the mossy, swamp-like, primitive wood.