The World Without Us – Alan Weisman
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The premise of this book is both simple and seductive. What would be the fate of the planet if humanity simply ceased to exist?
It’s important to appreciate that, in order to keep the argument moving along, author Alan Weisman does not venture into the territory of how we will go. It’s really best not to think about this aspect of things too closely – whether we are raptured into heaven (or the opposite), subject to a mass alien abduction or finished by a virus that kills us all dead at a stroke but leaves the rest of Earth’s ecosystem untouched.
Choose whatever best fits your worldview. Basically, dear reader, you need to accept that you’re not really the story here.
Or, at least, in the beginning. Weisman gives us a gentle introduction to what proves to be a fairly gruelling thought experiment by discussing the fate of our buildings, our art, our cities and our agriculture in a magazine-like format. In so doing he reports on a fascinating series of conversations with experts in these disciplines. How nature would recover from the pressure of our existence, in other words.
The picture at first seems quite sunny and optimistic with nature gently and inexorably claiming back the territory we have run riot over during the last 250,000 years or so. Biodiversity returns and pollution is mitigated. This, of course, suggests that if we aren’t magically scooped up by the hand of some god who conveniently takes the problem out of our hands, we might actually be in a position to clear up the mess we’ve created.
But, to cut a very long story short, there is the theoretical and there is the actual.
As the book progresses we arrive at the areas where pessimism about humanity’s near-catastrophic impact on the planet simply cannot be played down. These sections discuss our legacy and to call it toxic does not begin to do it justice.
The stuff about the inevitable breakdown of our carefully-maintained oil infrastructure and the effects of a mass of stored hydrocarbons catching fire and being pumped into the atmosphere is pretty bad.
But the real problems have already, inexorably, been created by our producing things that cannot be destroyed and which nature has no way of breaking down.
Plastics fill the oceans, crumbling into smaller and smaller bits, and thus find their way further and futher up the food chain because they cannot be destroyed by anything that currently exists. And the lethal products of nuclear fission will likely emit toxic pollution for longer than the planet has left.
Consider the fact that we haven’t really worked out yet what to do with the waste products generated by 60 years of nuclear power. And, with no electricity or human intervention to contain them, these waste products will reach extreme temperatures and release extreme amounts of radiation into the earth, air and water in quantities that have not existed here for aeons of geological time.
One to consider next time someone raises the possibility that more nuclear power stations are the obvious answer to global warming.
When the reader comes to terms with the consequences of these two problems, the whimsical discussions of matters like how long it would take a house to fall down or a forest to colonise a field seem somewhat unimportant by comparison.
Weisman suggests that salvation in both cases could come from evolution – with the emergence of microbes able to digest the abundant foodstuffs presented by the long chains of polymers that make up plastics, and with organisms that are capable of withstanding much larger levels of radiation than the planet currently enjoys.
Evidence from the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, for instance, suggests that birds, trees and mammals can survive to breed. But they show clear mutations and it is not yet obvious how viable the irradiated members of these species are, or whether they can succeed at breeding.
But that still leaves a problem of equal size – whether humanity will ever attempt to walk through the ethical and political minefield of unrestricted reproduction, and face up to the consequences of adding to our species at the rate of one million every four days.
Weisman’s final message, saved until the book’s last pages, is that unless we start to consider what kind of world we are leaving for our children rather than just blindly ensuring they are in it, we’ve had it anyway.