"A Trippy '80s Book on Life After Humans Is Now More " Topic

….Relevant Than Ever

"Fifty million years after humanity's extinction, the world has once more grown wild. In the forests of North America, the deer-like descendants of rabbits flee attacks by large predatory rats. Giant antelope and striding baboons more reminiscent of dinosaurs roam Africa's savannas.

This is the tangled new jungle of life Dougal Dixon's book After Man presents to readers. Originally published in 1981 and re-released in a lightly-revised edition in May, After Man is the foundational entry in the field of "speculative zoology," where writers and artists play with ideas about what kind of world evolution might produce if humanity were to disappear. The book is a fully illustrated bestiary of future animals, complete with field sketches, detailed paintings and thorough explorations of their ecology. In the pollution-ridden 1980s, it offered both an arresting vision of the future and a glimmer of hope.

In the years since then, concerns over climate change and ecological collapse have grown, forcing people to imagine a world that isn't just polluted, but where things like sea level rise and extreme weather are reshaping entire landscapes. Even more so today than in the 1980s, humanity's impact on the Earth raises the question of what sorts of animals are going to be able to survive—or even thrive—in the future…."

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