This is a strong candidate for the best book non-fiction book I will read this year. I don’t know that for certain, because I might read some great books over the next nine months, but it will be on the shortlist for sure.
When I was a teenager, lonely, shy and put-upon, I often daydreamed and fantasized about what the world would be like if everyone else just disappeared. In my mind, it would be something like what happens in the movie Night of the Comet. In the movie, a one in a million years comet passes near the ear leaving behind radiation that turns everyone not protected by a steel enclosure into red dust. Those partially protected slowly die but turn into cannibalistic zombies before death, terrorizing the remaining healthy people. I’ve had a love-love relationship with post-apocalyptic stories since my teen years.
The World Without Us is a non-fiction version of my fantasy. It looks at the environment through the lens of one question: what if the human species keeled off in short order? What would happen to the various things we’ve created or affected through our existence? How permanent are we?
The short answer of course is that it depends on what we are looking at. Movies set in the far future like to portray a New York abandoned but still standing. But the reality is that little of our structures will remain of us. Water tears down all, helped along by opportunistic plants and animals. Much will disappear without us around to maintain it, and what remains will be evidence that it was created intelligently but will lack the context to tell our progeny (or aliens) what it was created for. We have numerous examples of abandoned cities to show this actually. Not just ancient cities built with less modern technology, but places from our own childhoods. Chernobyl, Ukraine, and Varosha, Cyprus are two examples. In less than 30 years these places have fallen apart. The good
news is that nature filled in the gaps and is recovering from our depredations. Not necessarily in the same form as before we arrived, but it is unlikely that we will leave the world a lifeless wasteland. Life in some form will continue.
That’s the hopeful thesis of Alan Weisman’s book. It’s a survey of the question, not an in depth study. Thankfully enough science is included to make it interesting, but the deep explanations aren’t to be found here. The book isn’t even systematic. Weisman jumps around from topic to topic with loose themes uniting his chapters and sections. I might have preferred a systematic approach (such as a timeline), but the journalistic style still works.
It’s not just a look at what will happen to our cities and structures. One the things Weisman looks at include what happens to the billions of pounds of plastics created over the last 50 years. A bit has been incinerated, the rest still exists in some form somewhere. He looks at the nuclear waste created and how it will persist. It will be here a long time. Again, radiation isn’t a death sentence for nature. Flora and fauna thrive in contaminated zones. I gather from reading the book that the problem we present to nature is that humans adapt faster than anything else. It’s not really our numbers that tip the balance, it’s that we impose new conditions to which they cannot adapt. And when things that do adapt to the world created by us, we come up with something new to change that environment. Without us to maintain it, they can catch up.
The few things that will be reasonably permanent are some we’ve modified from nature: Bronze sculptures (including the Statue of Liberty), Mount Rushmore, the Chunnel, and some underground cities carved from tuff in Turkey, among others. But probably the most permanent evidence of human existence will be the radio waves we’ve sent off. Though attenuated, I Love Lucy will probably exist until the end of the universe.
Title: The world without us
Author: Alan Weisman
Imprint / publisher: Thomas Dunne Books / St. Martin’s / Macmillan
Format: Hardcover
Length: 324 p. (includes lengthy acknowledgments, bibliography, and index)
Publication date: July 2007
ISBN-10: 0-312-34729-4
ISBN-13: 978-0-312-34729-1
Subject: Nature — Effect of human beings on
Subject: Material culture
Subject: Human-plant relationships
Subject: Human-animal relationships
LC classification: GF75.W4S5 2007
