I’ve never considered myself to be a day-to-day environmentalist, but late last year I read a book titled The World Without Us, written by Alan Weisman. The book was a fascinating “what if” scientific perspective of what might happen to the planet and all the crap we’ve built- if one day man simply vanished from the face of the earth. Not exactly a pleasant thought (especially since we’re planning a family vacation in early August), but a very interesting thesis given how mankind has treated our home as if it were a giant porta-potty.
I have to admit that I picked up the book primarily out of a fascination of how long it might take the average American home (like mine) and the Gotham-like super structures of our cities to erode, corrode, and simply fall apart or collapse. The book didn’t disappoint in that regard. I was simply amazed at how short a lifespan my house, and for that matter, New York City, would have if we were gone and nobody was home to take care of basic maintenance.
I was also pleasantly surprised to read that cockroaches might soon follow our great leap into oblivion. Apparently without our nuclear-fired squalor and propensity for leaving Cheetos laying around the house like stale popcorn on the floor of your local cinema, these disgusting little bastards would starve to death. Other than mosquitoes and the common house fly, I can’t think of another creature I would rather have rotting beside my dusty corpse.
However, the true beauty of Mr. Weisman’s tome wasn’t the scientific expertise of how our post Dark Ages structures would fall apart, but the resurging aftermath of nature taking back the earth once we are all gone. No more fishing trawlers (or human demand) decimating the ocean’s vast species of aquatic life, no more man-made poisons in the fields, and no more cars spewing carbon monoxide into the atmosphere. Environmentalist or not, it’s hard not to fall in love with the thought of a distant future where plants and animals reclaim what was, and is, rightfully their place in the cycle of this planet.
We currently live in a worldwide culture (with apologies to China and their one child per couple policy) where we have lost our ability to count. I’m not even remotely capable of doing the math on how we are going to feed the estimated 10 billion people who will probably be walking the earth in 2075, but I do know that too many people equals not enough food, a messy kitchen, and a very empty refrigerator.
Except for the premise that all mankind would simply disappear with the snap of Mr. Weisman’s talented fingers, I really don’t think it’s such a far-fetched scenario. At the rate mankind is overpopulating the planet, catastrophic disease and famine could be a very real possibility in our lifetimes. Add into the equation our reliance on everything nuclear, and you have the recipe for a disaster of biblical proportions. Given the scenario of the earth looking like a poisoned version of the moon or a landscape repopulated with towering forests and pristine waterways, I’ll take the National Geographic version every time.
Seriously, would it really be all that horrible to imagine a world without us?
5 comments:
The best way to shrink the human population is to convince every other woman to have just one child. All it would take is a decent ad campaign and free birth control.
Oh, and I think we need a new monastic movement too. Maybe not celibate, but to enable people to move their creative energies from their gonads to their frontal lobes. A sort of lifetime college party that does good for a living.
Posts like yours are the first step.
I wasn't very clear. Every other woman would have no children; one baby from the second woman. This would bring our population down to two billion in fifty years. That is the answer...I think.
My grandfather's farm had an old house on it when I was kid. I visited the farm at the end of 2008, thirty years later, and there was no trace of the house. It was not bulldozed; just left to the hungry elements. Thirty years to wipe out a house in the mountains of PA is a blink of the cosmic eye.
Nature's revenge is lurking, waiting for famine or disease to wipe out the human species.
(That last sentence sounds quite gloomy doesn't it?)
Allan- I think some people are beginning to think along these lines, but not near enough to avert disaster. It would also be great if some religious sects would stop condemning birth control and take a lok at the bigger picture. We need it now more than ever...
Tim- Wow! You're right, 30 years in the grand scheme of things is just a blink of the eye. And it is gloomy, especially when you factor in all the evidence that sits before us today; global warming, overpopulation, et al...
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