Post-disaster Rewilding

Post-disaster rewilding is the gradual, uneven reoccupation of human-shaped environments by wild growth and animal life after the Great Disaster. It unfolds alongside the survival of small human communities, not after humanity has simply vanished: roads and bridges remain for a time, cattle crowd the countryside, and the return of grass can determine whether people believe the land is still capable of renewal. The changing landscape makes clear that nature does not merely restore the world as it was. Some species flourish, some cultivated plants disappear, and the structures of the old world decay at different rates.

Definition and Early Shifts

The Great Disaster initially killed a large part of the population, but it did not instantly erase human organization or its environmental effects. Reports described cities where doctors and nurses remained at their posts, food was still handled on an emergency basis, and telephone, water, light, and power continued to function in many places despite immense losses. This early interval matters: the landscape’s later changes follow a period in which people were still attempting to sustain institutions and services, even as the population that maintained them had been sharply reduced.

As communities survived and took stock of their surroundings, they encountered animal populations that did not follow a simple pattern of decline. The people of The Tribe remembered earlier plagues of ants and rats, while cattle became increasingly numerous in their district. In the Year 5, cattle reached a local peak: horses were rarely seen and sheep not at all, but cattle thrived in the country. Their abundance supplied as much tough steak as people wanted, while also making ordinary travel hazardous when a bull charged. The community learned to get out of the way and turned the practice into a game called bull-dodging. The episode presents rewilding as a practical change in human-animal relations: animals that had been domesticated remained a source of food, but their numbers and behavior were no longer managed for human convenience.

Drought, Insects, and Recovery

Abundance did not mean stability. In the following year, drought left little grass, and the cattle grew thin as they wandered in search of food. One night, a herd broke through the sturdy fence around The Tribe’s vegetable plot. The men fired their rifles, but the milling animals trampled the garden before they could be driven away. The irony was immediate and material: the cattle destroyed the food plot without eating what grew there.

Grasshoppers then consumed what the cattle had not reached. They stripped leaves from trees and ate the flesh of ripening peaches, leaving bare seeds on the branches; after the insects died, the damage was followed by their widespread stench. These linked events show how ecological pressure could compound: drought altered animal behavior, and an insect outbreak further depleted plants that people and animals depended upon. The older children accepted the dying cattle as part of their surroundings, while nursing babies and their distressed mothers were caught in a different, human cycle of anxiety. The landscape’s disturbance was therefore not an abstract background to the community’s life; it affected food, confidence, and the daily experience of survival.

Recovery arrived, but not as a return to the previous order. Two weeks after the first rain, the hills showed a faint green of sprouting grass. Molly and Maurine wept with relief, and Ish’s confidence in the earth’s capacity to recover was restored after the others’ despair had begun to unsettle it. He had wondered whether any seed remained. The rain and new growth offered an answer, but only after drought, cattle, and grasshoppers had made the possibility of recovery uncertain. Rewilding here proceeds through disturbance and response, not through a smooth or guaranteed succession.

Infrastructure and the Reclaimed Landscape

The old built environment also changes unevenly. A description of a large bridge records years of exposure: its steel towers and cables have lost their bright sheen beneath a red-brown coat of rust, while gulls, pelicans, and cormorants perch on the structures. Rats live and breed on the piers, feeding at low tide on mussels and crabs. Yet the broad roadway has changed relatively little at first. It has roughened and cracked, with grass and hardy weeds taking root in places where dust has settled. The bridge’s deeper structure remains largely intact, though corrosion has advanced more seriously where salt water reaches the eastern supports. The contrast between surface rust, new animal use, and continuing structural strength shows that abandonment is not the same as immediate ruin.

Elsewhere, decay and vegetation have a more direct effect on movement. Robert and Richard reported that, as they crossed the wetter country, roads were increasingly blocked by fast-growing vegetation, heavy rains, and hard winter frosts. Highways split into chunks where frost worked beneath cracked surfaces; grass, weeds, bushes, and young trees grew through the breaks. Floods, windstorms, and frost turned formerly smooth routes into rough stretches of concrete and gravel, crossed by fallen tree trunks. At times the jeep could push through brush or go around the trunks, but the travelers often had to clear a way with an axe or shovel. The landscape did not simply erase the roads: it converted them into difficult passages that demanded labor from anyone still trying to use them.

The contrast was especially stark at Chicago. Robert and Richard found empty streets in a city that Ish considered inhospitable once winter winds came from Lake Michigan. People had drifted away, leaving the formerly great city deserted while, beyond it, the roads and bridges were also being remade by weather and growth. The journey makes rewilding visible at two scales: a city can lose its human population while its infrastructure still marks its former importance, and a highway can remain a route while becoming progressively harder to cross.

Cultivated Plants and the Limits of Return

The decline of agriculture reveals a different limit of rewilding. Wheat and maize had traveled with people and become dependent on their care. After plowed fields disappeared, volunteer wheat initially sprang up across thousands of acres, but its abundance diminished year by year as native grasses returned. These grasses formed tough sod and grew repeatedly from established roots, gaining ground in the absence of cultivation. Wheat persisted in scattered dry regions of Asia and Africa, but the account distinguishes those remnants from the fields that human agriculture had once sustained.

Maize proved still more vulnerable. Its tough husk held its seeds so securely that the plant could not readily shed them by itself; it disappeared even sooner than wheat from the abandoned cultivated landscape. Wild teosinte nevertheless grew in thick clumps on the Mexican Highlands. The contrast is central to the book’s account of ecological change: the survival of a wild relative does not mean that a domesticated crop can reproduce the conditions of its former abundance. Human beings depend on wheat and corn, but these crops, in turn, depend on human cultivation.

Rewilding therefore does not amount to nature simply reclaiming a stable, self-sufficient world. Cattle can multiply until they become a nuisance, then suffer when grass fails; insects can strip trees and crops, while rain allows grass to return; bridges may remain structurally sound as rust and wildlife mark their abandonment; and wild grasses can displace crops that once seemed fundamental to human life. The surviving community experiences these changes as food shortages, hazards, and grounds for hope. Its dependence on cultivated plants also complicates the idea of a clean division between humanity and nature: neither people nor the crops they have shaped can flourish independently of the relationship between them.