Big box stores, middle schools, movie metroplexes, trailer parks, freeway overpasses, minivans, megamalls, and so much more: the Stuff of Humankind. These constructs all figure prominently in our very own Artificial World, created by us and for us, in order to facilitate living to our own satisfaction—often at the expense of most other living things on our planet.
Most times, our “artificial world” reassures us with its apparent solidity and timelessness. But sometimes the very existence of our constructs, the so many bad things humans have done, built, or inflicted on the planet, depresses the hell out of me.
Continually I affirm with silent anguish, “If only! If *only the Earth could ‘catch up’ somehow and deal with the defilement inflicted upon it without a let-up. If *only the Earth could stop and breathe for a moment and start regenerating itself, without humankind continuing to sully things. If only we humans weren’t around, the Earth could heal and return to the Eden it once was… before the human beings exploded like a cancer over the land.”
Two books—one of them new nonfiction, “The World Without Us”; the other a fiction classic from the late 50s, “Earth Abides” stunningly showcase what might happen to Planet Earth if humans suddenly vanished from the scene.
“The World Without U”s by Alan Weisman, associate professor of journalism at the University of Arizona and noted science writer, takes the reader on a wild yet sobering ride into an astonishing, unknown world: one without any people. The author invites us to “picture a world from which we all suddenly vanish,” whether due to a mutant killer virus, alien beings or the Final Rapture.
How soon would, or could, the climate return to where it was before we fired up all of our engines? How soon would Nature rebound and in what ways? How long would human artifacts remain in any recognizable form? We are called to imagine what might happen to Planet Earth, to its terrestrial wildlife, landscapes with both natural and artificial constructs, atmosphere, marine life, bridges, skyscrapers, and all the toxic wastes we’ve accumulated if the human race were suddenly to disappear.
Weisman guides us through this often-wondrous/often-scary “Brave New World Without Us,” as he attempts to answer his own question, “How would the rest of Nature respond if it were suddenly relieved of the relentless pressures we heap on it and our fellow organisms?”
According to Weisman, the deterioration process would begin immediately. But how, exactly? And why so quickly? Weisman’s answer: “It all begins and ends with maintenance.”
Our civilization is far more precarious, Weisman cautions, than we assume it to be. Large parts of our infrastructure would begin to crumble almost immediately, city streets and freeways would crack and buckle in a matter of months. Houses and office buildings would collapse in a few short years. Only a few, select artifacts—stainless-steel pots, certain common plastics, ceramic items—will survive intact. “Ceramics are very hardy substances; they’ll outlast almost everything else that humans have made,” Weisman says.
Consider the New York City subway system. We know it to be monumental, tried and true, humming day and night. But without people to constantly maintain it, the subterranean passageways would start filling with water within 48 hours (yes, *hours.) Manhattan Island of the 1600s was a very hilly place, lush with some 40 different streams and many underground springs. All of this water has now been imprisoned under skyscrapers and cement. Some of it runs through the sewage system, but there’s still a lot of groundwater rushing about underneath, trying to get up and out. Even on a clear, sunny day, the folks who keep the subway on track have to pump out 13 million gallons of water, every *day. Otherwise the tunnels would flood.
If human beings disappeared tomorrow, one of the first things that would happen is that the power would go off. Much of our power now comes from nuclear or coal-fired plants that have automatic fail-safe switches to make sure that they don’t go out of control if humans aren’t around to monitor their systems. Once the power goes off, the pumps stop working. Once the pumps stop working, the subways start filling with water. Within 48 hours, there will be a lot of water in New York City, some of it above the surface. It would overwhelmingly flood in just a few days if its army of transit employees were not working constantly to keep water and sewage out. The sewers would also overflow. Below, the steel columns would start corroding, and eventually collapse. After awhile, the streets would start caving in, and some of the streets would revert to the surface rivers they used to be. Seeds from plants would blow into cracks in the pavement and into the leaf litter. The return to a forest would happen pretty quickly.
Residential homes would go pretty fast, too, what with water getting in and mold appearing with the moisture. The mortar turns to dust, the chimney topples, pipes burst, woodpeckers attack. In a few decades, the roof collapses.
While we are alive, we are constantly maintaining. As Weisman puts it, “If you stop, when something gets wet, more wetness will follow. Wet follows wet. The subtext is maintenance and the maintenance people. Civilization would crumble without these folks.”
In several places on earth, humans are *already removed from the scene and have been for many years. The changes there are astonishing and surprisingly heartening. Says Weisman, “To see how the world would look if humans were gone, I began going to abandoned places, places that people had left for different reasons.”
• Bialowieza Puszcza, now a half-million-acre national park on the border between Poland and Belarus. It’s the last remaining fragment of old-growth, lowland wilderness in Europe. All of Europe once looked like the Puszcza with ash, oaks and linden trees 150 feet tall and 10 feet in diameter “with bark furrows so deep that woodpeckers stuff pinecones in them….It’s like what you see in your mind’s eye when you’re a kid and someone is reading Grimm’s fairy tales to you: a dark brooding forest with…tons of moss hanging off the trees. And there is such a place,” according to Weisman. Even wisent (European bison) still are found there, as well as more varieties of wild flora and fauna than anywhere else in Europe.
• Korea’s demilitarized zone (DMZ), where North and South Korean troops face off over a little stretch of land, about 150 miles long and 2.5 miles wide. Between these two armies is an inadvertent wildlife preserve, home to species that might otherwise have vanished. Rare red-crowned cranes, Asiatic black bears, Eurasian lynx, musk deer, yellow-throated martens, the endangered mountain goat known as the goral, and the nearly vanished Amur leopard have all made themselves at home in the DMZ.
• Kingman Reef, a sunken atoll that was briefly a U.S. Navy base during WWII and largely unvisited since then; places like the ancient underground cities of Derinkuyu (near Cappadocia in Turkey) that go down 18 stories with enough room to hold 30,000 people; places like Varosha on the island of Cyprus, once a city of 20,000, deserted by Turks and Cypriots alike since 1974 after fierce fighting, now growing back thickly with foliage, reptiles, amphibians, and birds.
What about all that bad stuff out there, stuff we humans have created like plastics, heavy metals from discarded computers, and PCBs? Already, 95 percent of retrieved dead North Sea seabirds are found to have plastic pieces on their stomachs, with an average of 44 pieces per bird; even krill, jellyfish and plankton are consuming tiny bits of indigestible plastic invisible to our naked eye.
Some of these “crumbs from the human table” will persist for millennia, even longer. Without human beings around, all of our enriched plutonium is going to escape into the environment… sometime, somewhere, somehow where it will endanger life as we know it for another 250,000 years. Heavy metals, some of them toxic, hang around for a long time in the soil: zinc 3700 years; cadmium 7500 years; lead 35,000 years, chromium 70,000 years. Uranium-235 has a half-life of 704 million years, but Uranium-238 (the so-called “depleted uranium”) will be part of the earth for 4.5 billion years (and we have at least more than 500,000 tons of it lying around, particularly in armor-piercing weapons used in the Iraq War).
And what about our billions of plastic bags, old bleach bottles, and other flotsam? Out in the ocean, between California and Hawaii, there’s an immense area (officially termed the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, but unofficially known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch) where a Texas-sized rotating ‘galaxy’ of trash floats, consisting of 90 percent plastic. In the mid-1990s on the island of Cozumel, thousands of miles from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, I was horrified to see an endless beach of plastic bottles and bags along the east side of the island. Plastic flotsam—it’s literally everywhere. Ocean-going vessels dump an estimated eight million pounds of plastic annually.
“I’m comforted by the fact that life is so resilient,” Weisman has been quoted as saying. “I didn’t write the book because I want people to go away. We’ve created so much beauty. My hope is that if people imagine the planet without us, then our longing would be to stick around and be a part of this and to find a better balance.”
Novelist Louise Erdich is calling this book “the most harrowing and, oddly, comforting book on the environment that I’ve read in many years.” To me, “The World Without Us” isn’t terrifying at all—it’s comforting, even inspiring. Because, even without us, the world won’t end. It has amazing, heartening powers of resiliency to heal itself if only allowed to do so. Weisman’s book guides us back to a sense of wonder about the Earth, as well as a clearer understanding of the human race whose amazing deeds have transformed it, and whose equally monstrous follies now threaten it.
Wouldn’t it be sad if we humans were no longer part of the scene? The George R. Stewart fiction classic “Earth Abides,” relates the tale of life in the aftermath of a worldwide pandemic. Only a very few, widely scattered individuals, like tiny atoms in the vastness of space, remain on earth. The book spans about 80 years, offering compelling descriptions of the changes in habitat, population fluctuations in plant and animal species, and a superb storyline about the resiliency of the human spirit and of the Earth itself. Definitely, it’s a book to cherish, and to read again and again. Copies of “Earth Abides” are still available on a variety of Internet and other outlets.
“The World Without Us” is a fascinating, comforting and ultimately reassuring read. It serves to remind us that Earth can survive without us, and not only survive, but flourish.
A brief Chinese poem begins “The World Without Us”. It also aptly sums it up its premise:
The firmament is blue forever,
and the Earth
Will long stand firm and
bloom in spring.
But, man, how long will you live?
—Li-Tai Po/Hans Bethge/Gustav Mahler, “The Chinese Flute: Drinking Song of the Sorrow of the Earth”
Veteran journalist and freelance writer Alan Weisman is the author of five books, including “The World Without Us”. His work has appeared in *Harpers, the *New York Times Magazine, the *Los Angeles Times Magazine, *Discover, the *Atlantic Monthly, *Conde Nast Traveler, *Orion and *Mother Jones. Weisman has been heard on National Public Radio and Public Radio International, and is a senior producer at Homelands Productions, a journalism collective that produces independent public radio documentary series. He teaches international journalism at the University of Arizona.
—Jane Susan MacCarter