(no subject)

[sawyl]

I've just read Alan Weismann's The World Without Us, a book which ponders what would happen to the Earth if humankind were to abruptly vanish — a notion that turns out to be a rather elegant conceit. For not only does it allow Weismann to consider the fates of our hubristic works, when left bereft of a caretaker; it also licences a blame free analysis of the current state of the environment on the grounds that this allows us to extrapolate a possible future.

The book starts its journey at home, considering how long it would take for our great metropolises to return to the swamps and marshes from which they arose. It considers the question of whether the non-African mega-fauna might have been exterminated by Homo sapiens and why similar creatures in Africa managed to escape the cull, and wonders if, with humans gone, some of these creatures might be able to stage a fight back.

Now that the fragility of homes and cities has been established — due to shoddy building practices, some holiday resorts may collapse mere years after the departure of humanity — the book examines the sorts of things that will last for ever. Unfortunately, with the exception of the underground cities of Cappadocia, most of the things bequeathed by humanity to posterity are rather unpleasant: indestructible plastic granules; petrochemical poisons; farmlands polluted by huge qualities of fertilizer. Although none of this is particularly surprising, the book drives home its points particularly well. The description of the North Pacific Gyre, a giant eddy where vast quantities of discarded plastics accumulate, is shocking, as is the assertion that, of all the polymers made by mankind since the invention of Bakerlite, all of them remain in the environment in some form because nothing has yet worked out how to metabolise them.

The petrochemical industry doesn't exactly get an easy ride — one of the contributors mentions that, if the huge alchemical metroplex outside Houston where to blow up because humans were no longer around to monitor it, it could well trigger a vast, toxic, chemical winter. But it fares better than the nuclear industry, with its tendency to sweep problems under the carpet — quite literally in some cases — the constant and on-going problem of waste, a decent amount of which is currently festering in temporary storage whilst someone tries to come up with a sensible suggestion of what to do with it. But even in the worst contaminated places on the planet, there are signs of hope. Sure, many of the creatures who've returned to Pripyat and Chernobyl have suffered mutations, but the ever dependable process of natural selection seems to be favouring the mutations that enhance the survival of the poor irradiated little things that live there.

The final part of the book suggests that, despite the current state of the environment, there are reasons to be optimistic: that our environment may be more resilient than we realise; that some of our greatest works of art (as well as some of our worst) have made it into space, either as EM signals or as physical artifacts attached to NASA's Voyager and Pioneer probes.

The whole enterprise closes with a suggestion of a way forward. Rather than follow the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, who recommend that humans stop producing children and retire themselves from existence, Weismann suggests a middle course: a one child per mother program. Whilst agreeing that this will be a hard and painful thing to do, it is, Weismann says, the only way to restore the wonders of an over-burdened world.

I rather recommend The World Without Us. It's so short and punchy that it manages to smuggle in vast numbers of facts without turning into a drone-fest. The style is generally elegant and the tone largely neutral, even when the things being described are positively monstrous, and the conclusions surprisingly optimistic. Well worth reading.