By Alan Weisman
Reviewed by Cheryl Hammond
Alan Weisman imagines a world where all the people have suddenly disappeared from the earth. Many films and books have explored this facinating theme, including the recent film, I Am Legend, starring Will Smith living in a world where a virus has wiped out most humans.
On the other hand, Weisman’s The World Without Us gives us well researched, scientific insight into the fate of the natural and built environment without us. There are examples of places where humans have already departed. The Korean DMZ between North Korea and South Korea is 151 miles long and 2.5 miles wide and has been essentially without people since the 1953 armistice left the two parts of Korea in a state of cold war hostilities with the DMZ as a no-man’s land. This strip of land has become a refuge for wildlife that would have otherwise disappeared.
Asiatic black bears, Eurasion lynx, an endangered mountain goat known as the goral, and other mammals precariously survive in only a small fraction of the range needed for genetically healthy populations. The red crowned crane, a highly significant symbol in Chinese literature and art, with only an estimated 1,500 birds left in the wild, finds sanctuary here. Rice paddies, 5,000 years old, have reverted to wetlands.
The messy Cyprus conflict in the early ‘70s ended in a truce which left the city of Varosha deserted, suddenly empty of its 20,000 residents and workers. Now, 30 years later, no resolution has been reached and Cyprus remains divided into Turkish and Greek zones.
Varosha is a time capsule where hotel balconies have fallen with cascading damage below, hunks of walls have dropped from buildings, paint has dulled, bats roost in the bell towers of Greek churches, houses have disappeared under heaps of bougainvillea, and streets have been overtaken by plants and trees whose roots and tendrils defeat pavement even without the freeze and thaw cycle that we know in the Midwest. Geisman expands on this real-life example of the world without us to describe how our built environment would degrade very quickly, including how cities of massive skyscrapers would return to nature.
Unfortunately, the worst aspects of the legacy of man will far outlast us. The North Pacific Subtropical Gyre is an area of the north Pacific with a slowly rotating high-pressure vortex of hot air that creates a whirl of water beneath it with a depression at the center. Everything that blows into half the Pacific rim ends up here in an area almost the size of Africa and it has become known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Sailors travelling here find themselves crossing a sea of refuse, including plastic cups, scraps of sandwich wrap, plastic bags, six-pack rings, and so on. Despite the millions of pounds of plastic discarded annually by ocean going vessels, 80% of the plastic garbage floating in this Gyre was first discarded on land, and then blown by the wind or floated down sewers and rivers to the ocean. The planet has six other major tropical gyres and plastic debris is now the most common surface feature of the world’s oceans. Because plastic is not biodegradable, almost all plastic produced in the last 50 years is still with us and that amount surpasses 1 billion tons.
The Rothamsted Experimental Station is the oldest agricultural research site in the world. The station has accumulated bottles of soil samples since 1843 and studies there show that the original 35 ppm of zinc has nearly doubled in the control plots, with the increased zinc on these control plots coming from airborne industrial fallout. This and other man-made changes are hard to reverse and will be here even if all humans disappear. Weisman reports that zinc will stay in the soil 3,700 years, and compares it to the time it took to get from the Bronze Age to today.
Cadmium also builds up in farmed soil because it is an impurity in artificial fertilizers. Cadmium will persists 7,500 years. PCBs also built up in the soil beginning from the time they were invented in the 1930s. Since they were outlawed in 1977, Rothamsted noticed a decrease to practically pre-industrial levels. However, it turns out they have not disappeared, but instead migrated to Arctic regions to cause havoc there.
We are now living though a period of great extinctions. Biologist E. O. Wilson estimated in 2002 that, if current rates continue, one half of all species on earth will be extinct in 100 years. Could we foul our environment so much that we are one of those extinctions? Could there really will be a world without us? I was able to attend a book signing with Alan Weisman in St. Louis last summer. He signed the cover page, “With hope.”