Alan Weisman
A treatise on the environment, looking towards what it would become if humans suddenly vanished. With all kinds of interesting material, most of it damning our society’s penchant for unforeseen destruction, but elegies where they’re due to what good we have done, followed by how things might change with us out of the equation.
Recorded history from civilization’s Fertile Crescent beginnings to the present day has taken barely more than 1/100th of the time that our ancestors lived in this one spot [northern africa], grubbing plants and heaving sharpened stones at animals. There must have been a lot of prey to feed a growing predator population with awakening technological skill. Olorgesailie is cluttered with femurs and tibia, many smashed for their marrow. The quentities of stone tools surrounding the impressive remains of an elephant, a hippo, and an entire flock of baboons, suggest that the entire hominid community teamed up to kill, dismember, and devour their quarry. 69
Varosha) is a city on the island of Cyprus, uninhabited since the mid seventies. I really want to go there. It was a big tourist town until Turkey invaded Cyprus and stirred up a whole bunch of shit. It’s to be reopened for tourism by Turkey (in the view of the UN, stil illegitimate invaders) in 2010; but where’s the fun in that. I want to jump a fence and go there now. I’d probably get shot by the Turkish military, who’ve cordoned the area and seriously restricted access. 96
In the Turkish capital of Ankara, the subway system’s central nerve core broadens into an extensive underground shipping district with mosaic walls, acoustic ceilings, electronic billboard screens, and arcades of stores – an orderly underworld compared to the cacophony of the streets above. 105
no one knows how many underground cities lie beneath Cappadocia. Eight have been discovered, and many smaller villages, but there are doubtless more. The biggest, Derinkuyu, wasn’t discovered until 1965, when a resident cleaning a back room of his cave house broke through a wall and discovered behind it a room that he’d never seen, which led to still another, and another. Eventually spelunking archaeologists found a maze of connecting chambers that descended at least 18 stories and 280 feet beneath the surface, ample enough to hold 30,000 people — and much remains to be excavated. One tunnel, wide enough to walk three abreast, connects to another underground city six miles away. 108
Nobody [knew how much plastic was in the ocean], because plastics haven’t been around long enough for us to know how long they’ll last or what happens to them. [Richard Thompson’s] team had identified nine different kinds in the sea so far, varieties of acrylic, nylon, polyester, polyethylene, polypropylene, and polyvinyl chloride. All he knew was that soon everything alive would be eating them. 116
“Think of it this way. Suppose all human activity ceased tomorrow, and suddenly there’s no one to produce plastic anymore. Just from what’s already present, given how we see it fragmenting, organisms will be dealing with this stuff indefinitely. THousands of years, possibly. Or more.” 118
So a million years from now, some organism will evolve the ability to gorge on plastic. Most of it will have settled somewhere, from tides or wind currents, so there will be large collections of the stuff. It’ll propel whatever organism to great things for a hundred or so years, until they realize that pretty soon the plastic is running out, and they start worrying and fighting each other for control of what’s left. Kind of like us with oil. Hopefully these organisms can at least break the plastic into something organic, and not leave piles of all kinds of waste shit covering the earth, swirling in the oceans, and clogging up the air.
In this age of deepening drought and rising temperatures, ski lift operators who, the Indians claim, defile sacred ground with their clanking machines and lucre, are being sued anew. Their latest desecration is making artificial snow for their ski runs from wastewater, which the Indians liken to bathing the face of God in shit. 120
In 1998, Moore returned with a trawling device, such as Sir Alistair Hardy had employed to sample krill, and found, incredibly, more plastic by weight than plankton on the ocean’s surface. In fact, it wasn’t even close: six times as much. 123
By 2005, Moore was referring to the gyrating Pacific dump as 10 million square miles – nearly the size of Africa. […] Plastic debris, Moore believed, was now the most common surface feature of the world’s oceans. How long would it last? Were there any benign, less-immortal substitutes that civilization coudl convert to, lest the world be plastic-wrapped evermore? 125
“Except for a small amount that’s been incinerated,” says Tony Andrady the oracle, “every bit of plastic manufactured in the world for the last 50 years or so still remains. It’s somewhere in the environment.” 126
(Municipal sludge, since 1990 deemed too toxic to dump into the North Sea, is instead spread as fertilizer on European farmlands—except in Holland. Since the 1990s, the Netherlands has not only offered incentives that practically equate organic farming with patriotism, bit has also struggled to convince its EU partners that everything applied to the land ends up in the sea anyway.) 156
Mount Rushmore, carved into fine-grained pre-cambrian granite, rock formed 1.5 billion years ago, is gonna be around for awhile. 7.2 million years without an asteroid hitting it or something incredibly catastrophic. 181
The DMZ, as it is called even in Kore, is 151 miles long and 2.5 miles wide, and has been a world essentially without people since September 6, 1953. 185
When the Korean war ended and the two countries split. Nobody lives there, or even goes there. An ecological dreamland.
The Passanger Pigeon, like the Chestnut tree, speaks to humanity’s tremendous power to wipe shit off the face of the earth. “It’s flocks, 300 miles long and numbering in the billions, spanned horizons fore and aft, actually darkening the sky. Hours could go by, and it was as though they hadn’t passed at all, because they kept coming. (192)”
They only lived in north america, and they were all killed by modern americans. Gone by 1914.
By studying its [the Bobolink’s] eyes and brains, bird physiologist RObery Beason has detected evolutionary traits that unfortunately turned lethal in the age of electronic communications. Bobolinks and other migrants carry built-in compasses – particles of magnetite in their heads, with which they orient to the Earth’s magnetic field. The mechanism to switch them on involves their optics. The short end of the spectrum – purples, blues, and greens, – apparently triggers their navigational cues. If only longer red waves are present, they grow disoriented. 194
Which gives us millions of birds lured towards large electrical and phone towers, marked with red lights by law to keep airplanes from flying into them, and killed. In north america and europe since 1975, the numbers of some migratory bird species have fallen by 2/3. 196 This isn’t the only way birds die. Hundreds of millions die yearly.
If everyone on earth disappeared, 441 nuclear plants, several with multiple reactors, would briefly run on autopilot until, one by one, they overheated. 213
That is unfortunate [that the nuclear meltdown wouldn’t burn straight into the core of the earth], because deep self-internment would be a blessing to whatever life remained on the surface. Instead, what briefly was an exquisitely machined technological array would have congealed into a deadly, dull, metallic blob: a tombstone to the intellect that created it – and, for thousands of years thereafter, to innocent nonhuman victims that approach too closely. 214
After Chernobyl, “an entire pine forest died within days of the blast, and couldn’t be burned because its smoke would have been lethal (215)”.
…at Dos Pilas [a Mayan city], one victim was tightly rolled and bound, and then used for a game on the ceremonial ball court until his back was broken. 226
If we all bought into the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement: “The last humans could enjoy their final sunsets peacefully, knowing they have returned the planed as close as possible to the garden of Eden (243).”
Bronze, a metal that doesn’t decay, makes a damn good statue. There are longs of ancient bronze statues for us to look back at.
Unfortunately, that happens, and tragically most of history’s bronze statues are also gone, melted down for waeapons. “nintey-five percent of all artwork ever made doesn’t exist anymore,” says Himmelstein, a knuckle stroking his gray goatee. 247
Yet the biggest elephant o all is a figurative one in the planet-sized room that is ever harder to ignore, although we keep trying. Worldwide, every four days the human population rises by 1 million. Since we can’t really grasp such numbers, they’ll wax out of control until they crash, as has happened to every other species that got too big for this box. […] The intelligent solution would require the courage and the wisdom to put our knowledge to the test. It would be poignant and distressing in ways, but not fatal. It would henceforth limit every human female on eEarth capable of bearing children to one.
If this somehow began tomorrow, our current 6.5 billion human population would drop by 1 billion by the middle of this century. (If we continue as projected, we’ll reach 9 billion.)
By 2075 we’d be half, and by 2100 we’d be down to 1.6 billion. back to levels last seen in the 19th century, just before quantum advances in energy, medicine, and food production doubled our numbers and then doubled us again. At the time, those discoveries seemed like miracles. Today, like too much of any good thing, we indulge in more only at our peril.
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Just one benchmark for how drastically the world has changed in the past 100 years:
until Marconi’s wireless and Edison’s phonograph, all the music ever heard on Earth was live. Today, a tiny fraction of 1 percent is. The rest is electronically reproduced or broadcast, along with a trillion words and images each day. 274