 Alan Weisman's The World Without Us is a book-long exercise in "what if..." Specifically, it asks, and answers, what if the human species immediately and completely vanished from the Earth, today.
The
answer he provides is neither tedious nor depressing, in part because
Weisman infuses the book with a ton of interesting, even astonishing
information, and in part because he keeps changing the setting of the
future scenario to show that the answer is not at all simple. Some
critics have complained that the whole book is a seductive set-up for
the conclusion in the book's Coda: That the only alternative to
dreadful annihilation and the horrific mess we will leave behind when
we wipe ourselves out, is an urgent Stop At One program for every
female on the planet for the next 150 years, returning our numbers to a
sustainable 1.6 billion and preventing the Sixth Great Extinction just
in time.
I didn't find the book as entertaining or as stimulating as Ronald Wright's novel (A Scientific Romance)
with a similar theme (the sudden extinction of humanity, leaving other
species more or less intact). And I will confess that while I agree
with the prescription in the book's Coda I don't think it fits well
with, or follows from, the rest of the book. But my copy is already
full of underlined passages of intriguing arguments, facts and figures.
A sampling:
- Thomas Jefferson said "such is the economy of
nature that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one
race of her animals to become extinct". This was before Darwin, of
course.
- The Americas were once home to most of the world's
largest and most exotic mammals, almost all of which were hunted to
extinction long before the Europeans arrived to begin their murderous
reign.
- The existence of much of the Great Plains is likewise
due to fires set by early human inhabitants to concentrate game and
create grazing land; it is not the 'natural vegetation' of these areas.
Except in New England, pre-European invasion America was already
extensively cleared and planted, dependent on maize.
- Species
extinction is the result of humans' (and quite probably other
large-brained apes') "acquisitive instincts that can't tell us when to
stop, until something we never intended to harm is fatally deprived of
something it needs. We don't actually have to shoot songbirds to remove
them from the sky. Take away enough of their home or sustenance, and
they fall dead on their own." Isn't that a marvelous way of summing up
the paradox of being a conservationist?
- The reason wild animals
have done comparatively well in Africa is that they co-evolved with
humans, so they learned the danger we posed, whereas elsewhere we
arrived abruptly and wiped them out before they could learn.
- Only 6000 years ago the Sahara was green savanna.
- If
humans suddenly vanished tomorrow, it is quite conceivable that baboons
would quickly evolve to fill the niche created by our absence.
- The
vast majority of plastic sent to landfills ultimately ends up, instead,
in the ocean, over a billion tons of it, all the plastic ever created
(since its invention about 60 years ago)
- Close to a trillion non-biodegradable tires have been produced since the automobile was invented scarcely a century ago.
- Left
unattended, petrochemical 'alleys' would eventually explode in a
runaway chain reaction creating a toxic band of poison that would
circle the Earth, creating a chemical 'nuclear winter' producing
massive die-off and mutations. A large gas well that caught fire and
was left uncapped could likewise burn for millennia, making the CO2
created by Saddam's oil well arson look like child's play.
- Likewise,
left unattended, nuclear warhead depots would leak waste products that
would take a quarter million years to neutralize, CFC depots would leak
enough mothballed toxins to wipe out the ozone layer, and stored
depleted uranium from thousands of nuclear power plants would...well
you get the idea. Half the nukes would ultimately burn down, and the
other half would melt, adding to the mess.
- The soils in much of
North America were already severely depleted and poisoned with man-made
toxins a century ago. As early as the 1800s, every conceivable form of
fertilizer from everywhere on the planet was harvested to try to
renourish Europe's depleted soils. The buildup of lead in our soils
will take 35,000 years -- several ice ages -- to disappear naturally.
- The
algae blooms that are consuming more and more freshwater lakes due to
runoff of artificial phosphate and nitrate fertilizer, weigh tons and
choke so much oxygen out of the water that everything living in it
quickly suffocates.
- Songbirds are dying in massive numbers --
billions of birds in North America per year alone, and perhaps 2/3 of
all songbirds in the past generation alone -- due to a combination of
attractive red lights on transmission towers, high-voltage lines, cats,
and chemicals (notably dioxins, which are even more toxic and
long-lasting than DDT -- which is making a resurgence in many countries
as mosquitos build up resistance to newer chemicals).
If this
book makes you want to learn more about how we got into this mess,
you're ready for the grim but liberating truths of John Gray's Straw Dogs or Ronald Wright's A Short History of Progress. Happy reading!
Artwork from Salon.com's review of the book.
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