The World Without Us (Alan Weisman 2007)
Posted on December 15 at 12.16, 2008 by Eric Mahleb
Alan Weisman is a poet. The World Without Us is no mere environmental investigation into the destructive power human beings hold over nature and their environment. It is a provocative thought experiment about the fate of our planet if humans completely disappeared tomorrow and it is an ode to the strength and resilience with which nature could fight back, if given that chance.
For as long as we have been on this earth, we Humans have, through our actions, tilted the balance of power in our favour. Influencing the environment around us, altering it to suit our needs is something that we have been doing for millions of years. But it is only recently, with the advent of industrialization and with the ever-increasing growth of technology experienced in the last few decades, that we have begun to fully understand the implications of what it really means to exercise such a control over Nature.
Weisman, using words and prose more reminiscent of classic literature than of journalism, picks his examples carefully and makes his points adroitly, eloquently and beautifully. He never seems to judge, yet leaves us no choice but to feel the urge to do so, and to punish human stupidity for the aberrations that it is capable of. Example after example, we are taken on a journey across the consequences of Man’s never ending thirst for progress at the expense of the world around him.
What would become of our cities? Would they slowly become the kingdom of animals, reserves for new or for endangered species that we were once in the process of exterminating? And what would happen for example to the hundreds of thousands of gallons of water under New York city which every day are barely being held back by some giant machinery that threatens to fail at any moment?
Even if we stopped producing CO2 tomorrow, would it ever disappear from our air, soils and oceans? And if it did, how long would it take and what changes would continue to occur during this period? And what about trapping this CO2 underground, a proposal being made these days to reduce global warming? What would happen to it after thousands of years?
If humans disappeared suddenly, would human evolution start again in a similar fashion as before or have we made too many changes to our ecosystem to sustain such a creation again? Would animals cross back the continents and return to their ancestral habitats (and behaviours), the ones they had occupied before man intervened and started regulating their environment?
What about the myriad of chemicals and materials – PCB, PBD, DDT, EDC, among many others - used in even our smallest and more innocuous creations? Would they all slowly be absorbed back into nature, eaten away by plastic-hungry bacteria, or would they linger forever, a testament to Man’s folly and ingenuity? What fate would await the hundreds of millions of tons of various plastics that are already littering our lands, beaches and oceans, approximately three million of which already form the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a Texas-size area in the Pacific Ocean that is totally covered with plastic bags, Q-tips, sandwich wraps and other unfortunately too-disposable human inventions?
These are some of the questions that Weisman addresses in this wonderful book, a must read for anyone interested in the health of our planet. As with all of my posts on this subject, I will add my disclaimer that I do not interpret this as a call to renounce technology. The message to save and heal our planet is clear and it must be heard. But humans will not disappear tomorrow and they will not renounce, nor should they, their quest for progress. Awareness and action must be taken to ensure that this progress is fully democratic, equitable, fair, clean and responsible. This, I believe, is the right path, rather than to hope for progress to stop or to wish for a return to the past.
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One Response to “The World Without Us”
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larry --in key largo Says:
December 15, 2008 at 15.22November 2008
the PCB problem is HUGE…. and it is not temporary…
plastic takes 500 to 800 years to bio-degrade…
so unless we find a real solution, it could be hundreds… if not thousands of years before the Oceans are pristine again…
and that’s if we stop polluting them… get the plastic out of all the Oceans… and keep it out… and stop using our Living Oceans as a garbage bin…
otherwise… the plastic will continue to “photo-degrade” into plastic snow, circulating all oceans via conveyor belt currents… absorbing PCB and DDT… that then become consumed by marine life… mistaking the plastic bits for plankton… including coral reef polyps… and moving on up the entire food chain… so… the big fish eat the little fish that ate the little plankton… and the PCBs “bio-magnify” up the entire food chain to all consumers in the food chain… including humans… and even our pets… if they eat petfood containing seafood…
most of the world’s major rivers and ocean depths are polluted with PCBs… it is heavier than saltwater.. so it sinks to the deepest parts… and now the photo-degrading plastic bits are picking it up… and the rest is history… and worse still… it’s probably the future…
already we are seeing skyrocketing numbers of children with autism and similar learning challenges… with no definite clue as to why… recent research demonstrated trace PCB exposure in lab mice “mothers”, easily passes through the breast milk to the pups… and disrupts normal neural tissue development in the newborns… PCBs are known to be neuro-toxic… and carcinogenic… please Google “PCB, plastic, autism”…
PBDEs… that are currently used in making many plastic products “flame-proof”… (see: http://StoryOfStuff.com).. now firefighters are fighting against the use of PBDE’s as they discover the plague of cancer in firefighters…
Capt Jacques-Yves Cousteau and GreenPeace were right all along…and still.. it’s like nobody wants to hear it… everyone just wants to enjoy their private lives… and have another beer… and let “mother nature” take care of it…
well i am here to say.. we are the hands and voice of mother nature… mother nature is not an imaginary life force for our misplaced responsibility for our human failings… the buck stops here… and life does in fact “begin to end” on the day we remain silent about things that really matter… (Dr M.L. King, Jr) like the health of our children and all the beautiful animals in the only living Oceans in the entire universe… unless NASA just discovered another one… and i say STOP the exploration of distant outer space until we have SOLVED the HUGE problems in our own Living Oceans!
larry –in key largo
Capt Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Rachel Carson and GreenPeace were right all along…