See What Would Happen to New York if Humans DisappearedLast Remains
The World Without Us
Alan Weisman. 2007. St. Martin's Press, New York. 324 pp., hardbound. $24.95.
A new map of the region surrounding the great Cambodian temple of Angkor Wat recently revealed that dense jungle hides traces of a human settlement that covered about 2,000 square kilometers (about 770 square miles). Between 400 and 1,200 years ago, this settlement, once full of temples, roads, canals, and rice fields, was the size of New York City and Los Angeles combined. Yet, in just a few hundred years, it and the culture that built it vanished from view, detectable today only by sophisticated analyses of radar data and aerial photography. Similarly, but on a smaller scale, the remains of the Mayan cities of the Yucatan disappeared for centuries until 20th-century archeologists hacked them out of the exuberant tropical vegetation jungle that smothered them.
People often speak of our fragile planet but, left alone, it's anything but. Natural forces have a way of wreaking havoc on our built environments, eventually reducing to faint scars our impressions on the Earth. At least in most cases, and for most of human history. But today we do not live lightly on the land. Our artifacts, edifices, and detritus seem more permanent, our effects on wildlife and wild lands more enduring than at any time in the past. But are they?
This is the question Alan Weisman asks in The World Without Us. If people disappeared now, what traces would remain of our civilization in ten million years, or even in 100 years? And how would the natural world fare?
Start with Manhattan, whose "…sheer titanic presence…resists efforts to picture it wasting away." Yet it would, and rather quickly, once, just days after we left, the city's vast subway system would flood without crews to man the 753 pumps that keep the water at bay. It would be a few centuries or so before the city's bridges tumbled into the river and Manhattan was truly an island again.
Meanwhile, indigenous plants and animals would reclaim the land from most of the alien invaders that displaced them, with wolves, bears, moose, and beavers living in marshes and mature oak forest. Wildlife on more isolated islands would face dimmer futures. Unchecked by our control programs, mongooses, rats, and other predators introduced to Hawaii, for instance, would run amok and likely finish the job of driving native bird species into extinction. Similarly, kudzu could smother parts of the U.S. South.
The Statue of Liberty, made of nearly indestructible bronze, would last indefinitely, even after it fell into the sea. Aluminum objects would probably also last as close to forever as we can think about. Plastics may too—unless some species evolved to digest them, a not-too-farfetched notion given studies that suggest virtually all sea creatures ingest large amounts of the plastic we've dumped into the oceans. In fact, the reason that the billion tons of plastic produced in the last 50 years don't dominate landfills is that most of them end up in the ocean. In the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a patch of ocean between California and Hawaii whose vortex captures refuse, millions of tons of plastic swirl over an area almost the size of Africa. Weisman wonders whether geologists millions of years from now would discover Barbie doll parts in the seabed and piece them together like we do dinosaur fossils today.
Weisman's exploration of the future without us is wide-ranging. He traces the history of human impacts on Africa and predicts the continent will revert to the "purest primeval state on Earth." He describes how the Panama Canal works and how it would disappear in a few years; like the New York subway system, its maintenance requires constant human attention. On the other hand, the visage of Teddy Roosevelt, who directed the canal's construction, would remain visible on Mount Rushmore for tens of thousands of years.
Weisman delves into the problems of nuclear waste storage and burning petrochemical plants as well as the fates of farmlands and coral reefs. He explores an ancient underground city in Turkey, some 18 stories deep, whose rooms and roads will outlast all vestiges of modern megalopolises. He even discusses embalming and burial practices meant to preserve our bodies that cheat the soil of our fertilizing nutrients!
Will any creature miss us when we're gone? Unlikely, according to Weisman, except our pet dogs, perhaps, and the lice, mites, and bacteria that live only on the human species. He also notes it's unlikely that "zookeepers from outer space" will save us from whatever catastrophe, which some predict will be a new technology gone awry, threatens to wipe us off the face of the Earth.
Eventually, all traces of us would disappear, as "anything truly intractable would end up buried, to one day be metamorphosed or subsumed into the planet's mantle." All, that is, but the sound of us, traveling ever farther into space on radio waves that don't die.
—Susan Lumpkin
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ZooGoer 36(6) 2007. Copyright 2007 Friends of the National Zoo.
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