I Love Cynics!

If I could award one person with Cynic of the Year, it’d go to Alan Weisman. How often have we, as the jaded cynical people we are, considered the thought experiment “What would this place be like if every one of us disappeared?” Usually there’s the addendum “except for me.”

No, in Weisman’s book we all go. Not a one of us left. What becomes of our precious creations? Our monuments and buildings, our subways and pipelines. Our art. Does it live on without us, or decay back to the earth that spawned it all? What of the animals we’ve domesticated or the wild things we’ve kept at bay? Do they survive our sudden departure? Thrive, perhaps?

The World Without Us strives to answer these questions by getting answers from the very people who know. Weisman interviews people from all walks of life, from astrophysicists and archaeologists to the maintenance workers of the Panama Canal. The answers they give are not always what we expect.

Take the ubiquitous cockroach; the scourge of which I came to know living in military housing as a kid from places as disparate as Virginia and Alaska. They seem to be everywhere. It’s said, that if there was ever a nuclear war, they’d be the only things left. How wrong we were. According to Weisman, the nasty little crawlers are everywhere because we are everywhere. They rely on our home’s heating and our less than savory food storage habits. Without us, they die out to the tropics where they originated.

Nor will most of current architecture last long. While we may look upon structures that are built to withstand the elements and wonder what could bring them down, without regular maintenance, they quickly succumb to the very things they were built to withstand. A little water gets in and freezes, a small crack becomes a larger one. Without the people to fix these things, it’s amazing how fast they deteriorate.

In general, the book presents a hopeful picture. A possible return of the megafauna that once roamed the world, forests regrown and diversified, restoration of wetlands and marine habitats.

But don’t let that fool you. Lurking around the world are various hot spots of potential death and destruction of cataclysmic proportions. Even when we’re gone, our ability to kill will remain. Be it from nuclear wastes we’ve left buried underground or in vulnerable “temporary” storage, or from huge containers of petrochemicals, with no one around to maintain the storage systems, they will eventually degrade. The question then is does it happen quickly, or slowly over time.

Weisman uses many current day examples to look at how things might progress. Animals (and people!) returned to Chernobyl despite contamination from radiation, the DMZ in Korea is no longer rice paddies, but forests and wetlands harboring nearly extinct red crowned cranes. These are hopeful signs. Even in only 50 years, nature can take back a war zone.

But what will be our legacy? Should something intelligent evolve in our absence, or some curious alien takes a close look, what will remain of our once great civilization? Few great (and less than great) works of art will survive. Without the well controlled environments of museums and archives, sheet music, manuscripts and paintings decay. Our architecture crumbles. Interestingly, Weisman notes, it’ll often be the oldest things that last longest. Bronze statues, old stone buildings, ceramics; these are the things that last.

Oh, and plastics. Lots and lots of plastic. While it can decay it generally “biodegrades” into… smaller chunks of plastic. Weisman spends a great deal of time detailing the amount of plastic in the world, or more specifically, in the ocean. It’s a pretty depressing thought. Near the end of the book is a section on a coral reef where life is seen to be thriving. Divers census fish, sharks and corals in abundance. Then they move to the other side of the reef, the side facing prevailing currents. That side is dead and strewn with the remnants of society dependent on petrochemicals and plastic. A vast island of plastic floats in the ocean killing life.

From plastics to dioxins, nuclear wastes to petrochemicals, some of the changes we’ve made to the planet will require geological time scales to erase.

The World Without Us is both a hopeful and depressing read. It’s a thought experiment not likely to happen, but it serves as a warning of how our activity affects the very planet we depend on for life.