If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it...
THE WORLD WITHOUT US
By Alan Weisman
Picador Books, 353 pages
You’d think it would be a bummer, contemplating the planet without any people on it. Not for Alan Weisman, whose book, The World Without Us, is an almost gleeful thought experiment on how nature would thrive without our “help.”
Weisman is like one of those kids who grew up building tiny housing tracts and dirt roads in the backyard with his Tonka trucks, only to wipe out the whole toy town with a garden hose or a mound of fresh dirt. That’s pretty much how he forces us to look at earth and all of its human inhabitants in The World Without Us. He seems almost joyous, bolstering his book with concrete examples of places in the world where nature has held its ground — places like the Bialowieza Puszcza forest on the border between Poland and Belarus, a half-million acre woodland where trees routinely grow to 150 feet, abundant species flourish and humans very rarely set foot. It looks like something out of a fairy tale, and amazingly, says Weisman, “all Europe once looked like this.”
He takes the reader to Chernobyl, that ground zero of human error where in 1986 a nuclear reactor unleashed a cloud of radioactive waste above Kiev. Everything within 30 kilometers was renamed “The Zone of Alienation,” fit only as a toxic waste dump. Well, the birds were pretty quiet around Chernobyl right after the cloud appeared. But, as Weisman reports, a year later they took up residence again near the abandoned reactor, chirping merrily. Pine trees began growing again, albeit with mutated needles much longer and more irregular than normal. Moose, bears and lynx returned. Some birds still mutate, are eaten by predators and die off; others learn to breed earlier in life, effectively speeding up natural selection, and survive. Life and nature, apparently, carry on despite man’s boo-boo.
This is the type of anecdote, by the way, that offers ammo to conservatives (like Sarah Palin) who think oil drilling and strip mining and carbon emissions are perfectly okay, and that nature can take care of itself just fine and dandy, thank you. But Weisman has a more far-reaching argument to make.
Weisman’s point is that people are not essential to the equation on this planet. Anyone who’s ever visited an African jungle or savannah, and seen the interplay between climate, nature and man must wonder: Are we really just passing through? In nature, water, soil and sunlight are vital to promoting plant life; plants are necessary food for animals; all the creatures on top of the food chain in turn provide nourishment for the soil when they decompose. The only unnecessary ingredient in this equation is man. Nature gets along perfectly fine without us, though we can’t get along without it.
The World Without Us makes its most compelling arguments about life in heavily urbanized places, such as Manhattan. Weisman becomes rhapsodic when describing what will inevitably happen to what’s left of NYC when humans are no more:
Rising water, tides and salt corrosion have replaced the engineered shoreline, circling New York’s five boroughs with estuaries and small beaches. With no dredging, Central Park’s ponds and reservoir have been reincarnated as marshes… The grass is gone, a maturing forest in its place, radiating down former streets and invading empty foundations…
Long before, the wild predators finished off the last descendants of pet dogs, but a wily population of feral house cats persists, feeding on starlings. With bridges finally down, tunnels flooded, and Manhattan truly an island again, moose and bears swim a widened Harlem river to feast on the berries that the Lenape once picked.
Amid the rubble of Manhattan financial institutions that literally collapsed for good, a few bank vaults stand; the money within, however worthless, is mildewed but safe…
It’s a bit perverse, this Weisman guy offering Manhattanites a glimpse of the apocalypse during their morning commute — but this isn’t necessarily the Armageddon of nuclear or terrorist attack he’s talking about. It’s simply nature, patiently waiting its turn to take over once again, after ice caps have descended and scoured New York as clean as a baby’s butt, only to retreat and, after thawing, make way for fresh life. It’s a vision familiar to those who have watched Will Smith stalking wild deer through downtown Manhattan streets in I Am Legend, or read Tyler Durden’s wild-eyed back-to-nature rant in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club.
He even rubs salt in the wounds (or is it offering comfort?) to those saddled with subprime housing mortgages they can no longer pay for: the day you enter your new home, Weisman notes, it’s already begun to disintegrate. (“No matter how hermetically you’ve sealed your temperature-tuned interior from the weather, invisible spores penetrate anyway, exploding in sudden outbursts of mold… or you’ve been colonized by termites, carpenter ants, roaches, hornets, even small rodents… Water always wants in.”)
Does anything built by man last? Yes, a few things, such as ceramics and bronze, are resistant to erosion and decay for centuries. “That’s why we have the Bronze Age,” notes one anthropologist. If we should cease to exist, then, our human record might consist entirely of a lot of unearthed ashtrays, candy dishes and kitschy lawn gnomes.
Another problem looms for man: the planet’s diminishing resources cannot sustain a burgeoning population much longer. Weisman posits other scenarios, such as limiting women worldwide from having more than one child. (Yeah, that’ll work. Especially in the Philippines.) But, like most cheery doomsday scenarists, Weisman offers this cold comfort: in five billion years or so it really won’t matter because the sun will start collapsing, sucking everything within its reach — including us — into a supernova of extinction. Long before that, of course, melting polar ice caps will flood North America and Europe, freezing into glaciers that will descend and level pretty much everything in their path. Can’t wait to YouTube that one.
As I said, it’s a strangely gleeful picture of life without human interference, possibly because Weisman knows he doesn’t have to hammer home his ecological message; the facts speak for themselves. In any case, what The World Without Us offers people is something in short supply as we get more distracted by human concerns: a sense of perspective. All this, too, shall pass.
