Justin Beal

On an incandescent September afternoon last year, my nine year-old daughter and I sat on a bench eating ice cream in the empty plaza of the Manhattan West development that links the Moynihan Train Hall to Hudson Yards. We had just walked the new spur of the High Line and were resting in the shade of a construction barrier, watching a janitor with a backpack vacuum suck up spotted lanternflies off the pavement at the base of an office tower. No one knows exactly why Lycorma delicatula are so attracted to tall buildings, but one popular theory is that they are lousy fliers – they can generate thrust but not much lift – so they are genetically programmed to find the tallest tree around and launch themselves into the wind. Incapable of distinguishing structure from flora, they climb buildings. They also seem to be particularly attracted to glass for reasons that may have to do with surface texture or temperature. Either way, they flock in hordes to one of the most unnatural structures we have ever created – the glass skyscraper. There were hundreds of lanternflies that afternoon, maybe thousands, rolling about on the pavement or climbing sluggishly skyward in search of a breeze on that windless day. A crowd of hapless newcomers wearing exquisite scarlet gowns beneath their blush polka-dot trench coats. They were delivered here by the movements of global capital only to be received with that most malignant vitriol reserved for unwelcome immigrants. Each one disappeared up the vacuum tube. thwup. thwup. thwup.

“It feels unfair,” my daughter offered, licking melting ice cream off her fingers. “Aren’t we an invasive species too?”

* * *

The HBO series The Last of Us begins with a cold open of two epidemiologists being interviewed in 1968 by a talk show host. The subject is pandemics. When the host asks one of the doctors what his greatest pandemic fear is, he replies, stone-faced, that it is not a viral or bacterial pandemic but a mind-controlling fungal infection that poses the greatest existential threat to mankind. In the ensuing monologue, the doctor describes a strain of pathogenic Cordyceps capable of infecting humans and controlling their minds and bodies “like a puppeteer with a marionette.” The science is based on the Cordyceps fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, which can enter the body of a carpenter ant, feed on its host from within, and multiply its own cells until it makes up nearly half of its host’s body mass.

Once established, the fungal cells push needlelike mycelia into the ant’s muscles and send chemical signals to its brain, directing it to climb a tree and clamp its mandibles onto a vein on the underside of a leaf. The fungus emits sticky threads that lash the ant to the leaf, and then a stalk violently erupts from the host’s head, showering spores onto the unsuspecting ants working on the forest floor below.

When his colleague challenges the notion that Cordyceps could survive in animals as warm-blooded as humans, the epidemiologist concedes that while that may be true for now, a small shift in global temperature might be enough for Cordyceps to adapt to higher temperatures. “One gene mutates,” he speculates, and mankind could be reduced to a profusion of “puppets with poisoned minds permanently fixed on one unifying goal, to spread the infection to every last human alive.”

The Last of Us is based on the hugely popular video game of the same name, created by Neil Druckmann’s company Naughty Dog for Sony PlayStation in 2013. The HBO series was cowritten and codirected by Druckmann and Craig Mazin (best known for the 2019 ecocatastrophe drama Chernobyl) and is widely considered the best screen adaptation of a video game to date. Like the game, the series follows Joel (Pedro Pascal) as he escorts the teenage Ellie (Bella Ramsey), who, in a familiar trope of the zombie genre, is immune to the infection and may be humanity’s last hope for salvation, across an America ravaged by a pathogenic Cordyceps fungus. Pascal and Ramsey are excellent in the leading roles, but the astonishing intricacies of the series’ overgrown, moldering cities are the show’s greatest asset. Production designer John Paino, armed with a per-episode budget rumored to have exceeded that of most Game of Thrones installments, and relying far less on computer-generated imagery than one might expect, erected entire cities on location in Alberta, rendering the imagery of Druckmann’s digital game world with meticulous, uncanny verisimilitude.

This is not a boilerplate dystopic wasteland, not the Malthusian grisaille of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). Instead, it is a landscape of infrastructure repossessed – verdant urban canyons with buildings toppling like the trunks of ancient trees and nature repossessing abandoned architecture like coral making a reef in the carcass of a sunken ship. The world of The Last of Us is beautiful, teeming with wildlife and tangled foliage and, by any estimation, thriving. I was reminded at times of the moments of urban rewilding in Richard Matheson’s I am Legend (1954), but the closest literary precedent might be Alan Weisman’s 2007 bestseller The World Without Us. Weisman’s meticulous work of speculative science-nonfiction opens with a simple question: If the human race vanished from the planet tomorrow, what would remain in a day, a year, a century? “How would nature respond,” Weisman asks, “if it were suddenly relieved of the relentless pressures we heap on it?” The World Without Us is a methodical study of life after the Anthropocene. It was also a key reference for Druckmann, and the texture of his game world is clearly indebted to Weisman’s vivid descriptions of life after Us. Like all postapocalyptic stories, The Last of Us and The World Without Us play on how difficult it is for humans to imagine a world where we are not the dominant species. They both suggest that what we have truly endangered is not the planet but our ability to thrive on it. Even our most conscientious anxieties about “destroying the planet” are inherently self-centered because we tend to conflate the idea of an Earth uninhabitable by humans with an Earth incapable of sustaining life. We are damaging the ecosystem we inhabit, to be sure, but to say that we are destroying the planet is to grossly underestimate the planet’s resiliency. The constant refrain that runs throughout The World Without Us is that in the face of an uncertain future, “the only real prediction you can make is that life will go on.”

Some of the best television shows use genre as misdirection, and while The Last of Us leans on the conventions of the zombie apocalypse film, it is, at its emotional core, the story of an evolving relationship between a surrogate father and daughter, set within a parable of a ravaged ecosystem that is fighting back against a species that took it for granted. The entrancingly grotesque, often beautiful, saprophytic monsters in The Last of Us are not undead, they are not humans possessed by black magic or mad with infection, but rather mycelium in human form. Under the control of the Cordyceps, the mycologist Merlin Sheldrake observes in his 2020 book Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures, the carpenter ant loses any agency it might have had. “In physiological, behavioral, and evolutionary terms, the ant becomes a fungus.” These are not zombies, this is nature exacting revenge, with an extraordinary, networked mycelial intelligence.

It is a fundamental tenet of the Anthropocene that our sense of superiority over nature is predicated on the illusion of our unparalleled intelligence. The horror of The Last of Us resides in the question of what it means, to borrow a phrase from urban historian Mike Davis’s 1998 book Ecology of Fear, for us to “confront, for the first time, what it might be like to be on the receiving end of imperial conquest.” And it is hard to imagine an adversary better suited to undo the damage we have left behind. There are fungi that can digest plastics and fungi that can break down oil. In her extraordinary 2015 study of matsutake foragers, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing notes that after Hiroshima was devastated by an atomic bomb, “the first living thing to emerge from the blasted landscape was a matsutake mushroom.”...