There is something deeply fascinating in the concept of a post-apocalyptic world. The Matrix, Terminator, even Firefly, to an extent, all create a future for mankind that has included a world-changing event. Dark Angel, cheesy as it was, was interesting for the same reason. I Am Legend was worth watching not for the vampires, but for the exploration of how Will Smith’s character survived in a world without other people.
This is something I have always been interested in. Back in drama school, I won second prize for my re-design of Les Miserables, setting it in a post-apocalyptic world, commenting on the timelessness of the story, etc. You may have noticed in my previous post how my drive-time musings have involved wondering how quickly the forest would take over Northern Ontario again if humans disappeared, and how it is almost in the process of doing it already. So imagine my delight when, not long after I wrote about that, I happened to catch an episode of The Hour wherein George Stroumboulopoulos interviewed a man called Alan Weisman about his new book, The World Without Us. The premise is simple but riveting: what would happen to the planet if humans suddenly disappeared?
Alan Wiseman goes through, step-by-step, breaking down what would happen to a house, a city, a farm, an oil refinery, even the Panama Canal if humans weren’t around to maintain them. What would leak, what would rot or rust or crumble or burn. How long would it take nature to recolonise the spaces humans have occupied? On the whole, not very long, as it turns out. He goes to places – a resort in Cypress, the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea – that have been forcibly abandoned and charts what happened there, current examples of this possible future. This is the part of the book I found most interesting.
Because there is another side to his research. In order to chart what would happen without humans, Alan Wiseman explores what it is that humans have done to the planet in the first place. And if it is somehow encouraging that the urban scars we have inflicted on the planet, our physical impact, would be relatively quickly erased, it is enormously depressing to read about how long it will take for our chemical footprint to disappear. The plastics, the heavy metals, the toxins, the poisons, the fertilisers we have put into the air and the water and the soil will outlast us by thousands, in some cases hundreds of thousands of years. This part of the book was somewhat heavier going. I started to get that feeling of my own overwhelming impotence, my inability to do anything substantive to make things better, and found myself wishing that humans would just disappear, if only so the planet could start to heal itself before we make things any worse.
There was one thing about the book that got under my skin a little. When exaplaining that, for example, Central Park could never go back to the way it was before humans came to live in the area, because of the species of plants and animals that we have introduced from other parts of the world that are outcompeting the native plants, there is a sense of disappointment. Even if we disappeared tomorrow, the world could never go back to the way it was before us. My quibble is: why should it? Why should we want it to? The Earth wasn’t a pristine, unchanging Biblical paradise before we got here. It’s a complex system of living organisms, constantly in flux. The environment got hotter and colder, volcanoes and asteroid impacts spewed chemicals and particulate matter into the air. Some species went extinct, others evolved to take advantage of the changing circumstances. Once upon a time, oxygen was toxic to the organisms that lived on this planet. Some of them adapted, evolved. Now, most life depends on it. The planet is constantly changing, acted upon by a myriad forces. We have become one of those forces. It will be a different place after we’re gone. End of story. It’s not better or worse, just different. Mr. Wiseman wanted to explore what would happen if we all disappeared; the idea of it going back the way it was before us only confuses the issue.
On the whole, however, I highly recommend this book. It’s well written and quick to read, and I came away having learned a number of things I didn’t know before. And I’m already accumulating a waiting list of people who want to borrow my copy.
kithika