The beginning is near
By Kurt CaswellThe World Without Us. By Alan Weisman Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin’s Press, 2007, 324 pages, cloth $24.95 ISBN-13: 978-0-321-34729-1 & ISBN-10: 0-312-34729-4; see also: www.worldwithoutus.com
Everything that ever was, is and shall be will have its end. This means that the people and animals you love; nations (newsflash: the United States is not forever); and all species will go extinct eventually. The Earth too shall perish, in fire as it turns out, some five billion years hence when the sun expands into a red giant and swallows half our solar system. And we can go farther still. The universe itself, as far as science can see, will expand out and out forever until it becomes so disparate, so drawn apart as to be not anything at all.
These cheerful thoughts may work against your brighter day, and you would be right to give up all thinking and settle for a simple animal life of hot sex, good food and occasional trips to the cinema. But before you do, consider that this dark vision may in fact bring hope, as it did for Alan Weisman, author of The World Without Us.
The literary world has imagined plenty of post-apocalyptic worlds — just recently in Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel The Road, Will Smith in the movie I Am Legend and Hayao Miyazaki’s animated film Nausicca of the Valley of the Wind. All three stories lead to re-birth, and hope for humanity. But Weisman imagined a world in which we not only don’t survive the apocalypse, but are the apocalypse. Post-us, creatures of the sea, land and air recover and again riot upon a wild, green Earth. It is a strangely compelling dream. When Weisman told friends he was working on the book, they responded: “Oh, wouldn’t that be great!”
That fantasy has taken root. The History Channel launched a television series based on The World Without Us, and a kind of Eden-styled archaeology has come into vogue, re-imaging both the pre- and post-human landscape. In his book, Weisman reports, New York City subway tunnels would flood in 36 hours and begin to corrode the infrastructure that supports the streets. Within 20 years, those same streets would cave in, and rivers would again flow across Manhattan. Within 200 years, trees would re-colonize the island, bringing back the birds.
Weisman found plenty of evidence for such speculation. He traveled to the Korean DMZ, for example, the 2.5-mile-wide, 151-mile-long demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, where people have not lived for 50 years, and found an “accidental wildlife sanctuary,” with a vibrant population of red-crowned cranes, the second-rarest species of crane in the world. Within a year of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, he tells us, nature rushed in to fill the niches people evacuated. The birds returned. Plants re-colonized the 30-kilometer Zone of Alienation around the site. “The worst happens,” writes Weisman, “and life still goes on.”
What kind of life after nuclear weapons, power plants, and waste storage facilities start to corrode and crack, leaking deadly radio-active materials into the air, water, and soil, remains an agonizingly open question. Some of these materials boast half-lives of far longer durations than the Earth is expected to exist. Also, every bit of plastic ever manufactured is still in the environment. In the Pacific “horse latitudes,” revolving air currents drive a whirling vortex of plastic refuse at least the size of Texas. To add to this troubling news, most plastic breaks up into ever smaller and smaller “nurdles” that are being ingested and killing ever tinier creatures. What will happen if plastic decimates the krill population on which the entire oceanic food chain rests?
Understanding this possible future may help balance extreme views of the state of our planet: everything from “we’re all going to die tomorrow” to “there is no global warming, and we didn’t do it.” The truth is, the Earth’s resources are limited, and so what are we going to do?
After exploring the mission statement of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement—“May we live long and die out” — Weisman decides that the passing of human beings from the Earth is not what he wants. “We have as much right to be here as any other species,” he said during a reading at Texas Tech University. The question is: How long have we got?
Weisman offers a surprising option: If tomorrow the world agreed that every capable human female would have no more than one child, 100 years from now the world population would return to what it was 100 years ago. It would decrease from the current 6.5 billion to 1.6 billion. The pressures on the Earth’s resources would be dramatically reduced, and many of the species and ecosystems severely impacted by human life would recover, and according to Weisman, “refreshed air would fill each season with birdsong.”
