Contemplating The World Without Us
A couple years ago I heard about a book that was guaranteed to catch my eye, Alan Weisman’s “The World Without Us“. How many of us think about the problems, the horrors, the wretchedness on this earth, the oil spills and nuclear waste and wars and rape and genocide, and wonder how much better this world would be…without us?
This is a book that poses the thought experiment: if, tomorrow, all humans were simply not here, what would happen on this planet?
He takes us through the breakdown of our physical structures – the bridges, the highways, the cities – and he takes us back in time to the world before us. He explores the shrinking and threatened places that are, almost entirely by accident, mostly untouched by humans. You’ll learn the horrifying realities of the oil refineries and the nuclear reactors and nuclear waste, and you’ll realize that the only monument to the human race when we’re long gone will be the eternal polymers and the nuclear waste that will outlast this very planet.
It’s sobering, but it is fascinating at the same time.
There were so many interesting (in a train-wreck-watching way) pieces of information:
- 13 million gallons of water are pumped out of the NYC subway system every day. And that’s when it is not raining. (p. 31, electronic version)
- Tucson originally was a village called Chuk Shon, “flowing water”. (p. 74)
- “Long after humans and even animals or roses go, Dieldron, an ingeniously stable, manufactured molecule, may still be around.” (p. 82)
- Cattle now account for more than half the live weight of African savanna ecosystems. (p. 90)
- 80% of mid-ocean floatsam had originally been discarded on land. (p. 126)
- It is now estimated that 1 billion birds are killed annually in the U.S. by windows. (Birds do not discriminate between clear glass and reflective glass, and they can not see glass as an obstacle.) (p. 201)
- In a year humans take 100 million sharks while sharks attack maybe 15 people. (p. 268)
- Worldwide, every four days the human population rises by 1 million. (p. 274)
The book is much more than a random collection of interesting train-wreck-style facts. He does a great job of putting together a picture of the world so you can see the connections. The past to the present to the future, as well as the connections between the roses at the shops in Europe and the destruction of an entire ecosystem in Kenya in order to grow those roses. He looks at current examples of nature’s reclamation of human development, as well as nature’s recovery from disasters like Chernobyl.
Underlying it all was a theme that I’ve seen in several books now, starting with Murray Bookchin, in Ecology of Freedom: things began falling apart when humans began holding themselves as something apart from nature.
And by “apart” of course we mean “higher, better, more important.”
It’s an odd thing to think about, the way we tell ourselves elaborate lies and construct elaborate societies to keep us separated from nature. According to Bookchin, humans separating themselves from nature was also the start of the development of hierarchies in society, which also means it was the start of prejudice and exploitation.
We see this all the time, where people, humans, get offended that we might think they are animals. Or that we might think that animals have the same right to life as humans. Or that we might think that pampered humans living in powerful rich countries are no more deserving of anything at all than those who bear the cost of our luxuries.
Yet, we are animals. We not only share this planet with every other Earthling, we are just as dependent on the water, the air, the soil, and we are just as vulnerable to the changes to the environment we live in. Perhaps, considering the precarious position we are all in due to globalization, it could be said that we’re more vulnerable than we ever have been, and are now more vulnerable to environmental changes than most species on this planet.
Which begs the question – why have we done so much to destroy it all?
Stephanie Ernst
Marji
Kelly G.
Deb
Mary Martin
My partner has a very strong opinion on this very subject. Just the other day (discussing the oil disaster in the Gulf) he said, “If there were no more spiders, this whole planet – all the animals, trees, every ecosystem – would whither & die. But if humans disappeared? The earth would wipe away all traces of us as if it were recovering from an infection. We would not be missed.”
Great post….
The actual, horrible and nasty truth however, is that we humans will be left alone on this planet with nothing else but the prosthetic world we created to keep us alive.
Forests gone, wildlife gone, oceans empty.
Nothing will remain but humans, concrete and life support systems.
One of my favorite reads!
@tvv – I’ve heard that said about worms, but not about spiders! (I’ll have to read up more on spiders!) It’s a great point – there are species, such as worms and spiders and bees, who are so integral to the ecosystems ability to function that ecosystems and thus life would collapse without them. Humans are definitely not one of those species. Paul Watson loves to say that worms are more important than humans for this very reason – reporters love to quote him on that, thinking they make him sound like a fool. When he’s been asked that while being interviewed, it gives him the perfect chance to explain the reality to people. Most probably think he just hates humans or is trying to sound radical or something, but it’s just a biological fact. It’s just tough for most people, stuck in a human-centric view, to accept!
@phillip – the good news (or bad, depending on your perspective) is that we won’t be left alone, because without the bees to pollinate crops and the worms to create new soil, etc, there’s no way the human species can survive. So when we kill them off, we’re killing ourselves off. That’s the insane part of our actions! It’s like we’re part of this suicidal species, bent on our own destruction. The bee panic is really picking up steam because even mainstream sources are finally starting to understand that our entire crop farming system will fail without the bees…and another 1/3 of them didn’t survive the winter. Bee-death causing catastrophic famine is a very real worry these days.
@chris – glad to see there are other fans! I was recommended Diane Dumanoski’s “The End of the Long Summer” by a commenter here. I’m about halfway through it and it’s another really good one. I started it immediately after finishing The World Without Us, and in some ways it’s the perfect follow-up book, even though her focus is quite different. I highly recommend it even though I haven’t finished it yet!
Good post, Deb, and welcome back. I just got some chuckles reading some of the one star reviews of this book at Amazon. I do remember thinking too much of the book seemed off topic though. If you like visual aids, there is this dvd: National Geographic: Aftermath – Population Zero and apparently also a History Channel series which I never saw.
The future Philip mentioned is the common science fiction version–lots of technology controlling everything, producing fake food. I think we prove regularly that our technology isn’t foolproof enough to maintain that; at least I hope not–I’d much rather we were gone than living that way having eliminated all other life.
Hi VV!
This is a book that’s been on my “to read” list for some time, so I appreciated this post.
And I enjoyed the comments about the spiders and worms being critical to the healthy functioning of the Earth’s ecosystems (while our species is anything but), because just last night I watched an interview with Edward O. Wilson on PBS’s Charlie Rose. In discussing his new novel, Anthill, Wilson said, “If we took away all the ants from the ecosystems of the world, a large part of the rest of life on earth would collapse; if we took away ourselves the rest of the life on earth would flourish.”
As for the question this post begs, I don’t know why our species insists on fouling, overcrowding and destroying our home, annihilating our fellow beings by the billions, and basically committing mass murder/suicide. It seems to be for such shallow, selfish, contrived and fleeting reasons as profit and convenience. Maybe Voltaire was right… “Earth is an insane asylum to which the other planets deport their lunatics.”
I bought this book on CD when it first came out. I couldn’t finish listening because I got too depressed by it. I, stupidly, thought that our absence would allow the planet to recover from our catastrophic presence. Not so, once the abandoned nuclear power plants start leaking their radioactive materials. I had to stop listening, but have been tempted from time to time to try again.
Thanks for sharing, though. Maybe your post will give me the motivation I need to put the discs in the CD player.
@greentangle – I didn’t notice the book being off-topic, but I found it so interesting I don’t think I’d have noticed if it wasn’t on topic the whole time. Thanks for the DVD recommendation. I’ll have to take a look! Thanks for recommending “The End of the Long Summer” to me those months ago – I am in the middle of it, and really enjoying it.
@Laloofah – that’s a great Voltaire quote! I don’t think I’ve heard that one before…or maybe it didn’t stick in my mind because it wasn’t so perfectly relevant.
@Connie – I can see how it would be too depressing to want to continue reading, because we really have screwed things up. Did you get to the point where he talked about Chernobyl? Nature has rebounded from that nuclear mess far better than anyone could have predicted…and frankly better than humans can. One thought is that most animals’ lives are so much shorter, the impact of the radiation isn’t as severe for them. There was also a quote from NY Botanical Gardens’ Chuck Peters, “…maintaining biodiversity is less important than maintaining a functioning ecosystem…” that kind of perspective is helpful for me, on several levels. There is actually more hope in the book than it sounds like there would be. Not that I don’t freak out when I think about the impact of the oil refineries (even if they are properly shut down) and all the nuclear waste (not to mention the fact that we’re still creating more and more and more) but … it wasn’t all as bad as that!
Yeah, the Chernobyl part was heartening. I couldn’t believe there was any living thing in that area. Of course, it’s probably due to the fact that people have avoided it. It’s like the demilitarized zone between North & South Korea. There are landmines everywhere, so people stay out and it’s become an undisturbed thriving ecosystem for wildlife.
There are no coincidences: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/05/for-these-5-animals-war-is-actually-a-good-thing.php
The DMZ is mentioned in this piece.
I did not read The World Without Us, so I do not know if the author covered global warming. This is just my opinion, but the only relevant future scenario of real importance right now is an Earth affected by climate change. Positive feedback is already happening with methane bubbling up from the sea as well as the land. It is inevitable that many more examples of positive feedback will become realities, and at that point trying to control gases pumped into the atmosphere will be totally out of human hands – nature will be emitting massive amounts of gases regardless of whether we stop all human emissions or not. With the way things stand today, (our politicians doing nothing, and the majority of the rest of the world being in denial or simply not caring) I have no reason to believe that things won’t become catastrophically worse. There are some people who take comfort in the idea that life is resilient and will live on after humans have left the Earth. But many of the effects of climate change won’t be reversed for centuries, if not millenniums. Call me nostalgic for nature as it is today, because tomorrow most of it will probably not survive (nor is it likely that it will have some magnificent comeback soon thereafter). And the worst case scenario (though further from impossible than you’d think) is that eventually almost all aerobic life will die off and be replaced by anaerobic organisms that thrive and feed off the CO2 (coming full circle in Earth’s history). Call me picky, but that’s really not all that comforting to me. Yes, life will live on, but not even remotely like what it is today (or what it was yesterday). And all the beautiful amazing animals and plants that will suffer and then disappear never to be seen again (even if to be replaced by others many, many years from now) – it deeply saddens me. Just the thought of it has been affecting me lately almost as if I have lost (or am losing) a loved one.
@Connie – the DMZ part was absolutely fascinating, I should have mentioned it in my list! Who would have thought there could be anything positive from a war? And that article you linked in…very interesting!
@Jeannie – it wasn’t that kind of book, it was exploring a different question and taking a much larger time-frame as its scope. So while climate change is a factor in terms of what will happen to the world in the future, it wasn’t examining climate change specifically. And, let’s face it, the climate will change regardless of whether we’re here to speed it along and put pressure on the global system that it has never felt before. A book you might be interested in, which talks about climate change in relation to humans (but not solely looking at climate change) is “The End of the Long Summer”. I’m about halfway through, and it’s fascinating. Not the least because she hammers home the point that we look at the earth from a perspective of an unusually stable climactic period. If you’re interested in understanding the global climate and the various theories as to what drives it, and what has been happening, and how things like the wind storms in the desert of Chad feed the Americas soil fertility, I’d recommend a book called “With Speed and Violence” by Fred Pearce.
Yes, I know Earth’s climate changes regularly over time. Climate “deniers” also enjoy playing up the fact that climate is always changing – to me, that is sort of a “duh factor.” I’ve read quite a bit of literature on the climate (from various perspectives), and I can see the angle you’re coming from. I understand the need to seek out a mental balm to soothe the pain.
@Jeanie – you lost me with the mention of a mental balm. I certainly don’t have any to offer! Unless you’re talking about the people who think that the climate will never change?
We are human animals that are part of nature. Our natural diet is omnivorous. We used to hunt other animals for their meat. Today, we don’t have to hunt but can just go to the market.
Sue the point is that we are animals who have removed themselves from nature. There is also plenty of evidence that humans natural diet is herbivorous. Certainly our healthiest diet is, but even that misses the point – as humans we have the ability to reason and make decisions based on ethics. You do not have to eat animal products to survive, so every death you cause with your choices is unnecessary.
You’re kidding yourself if you think human’s natural diet is herbivorous and is the healthiest. You can’t get anything more nutrient dense than meat. Even if we don’t live in nature we are still part of nature.
Sorry, Sue, I’m going to go with the medical opinion on this one – whole foods plants based diets are the healthiest.
But did you know that this post was about a book called “The World Without Us”? I’m guessing you missed that.