Alan Weisman (1) (1947–)

Mr. McGuire: I just want to say one word to you—just one word.
Ben: Yes sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Ben: Yes I am.
Mr. McGuire: Plastics.
Ben: Exactly how do you mean?
Mr. McGuire: There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?
Ben: Yes I will.

While reading Alan Weisman’s fascinating book “The World Without Us,” that scene from The Graduate kept playing in my head. Plastics. It turns out that there is a great, or at the very least, long future for show more all one billion tons of it as it never really breaks down—pieces just become smaller and smaller and by doing so can be swallowed by organisms at the very bottom of the food chain. Which is bad.

It was frightening to read how quickly plastics have permeated every aspect of our lives (they’ve only been around since the end of World War II), and just how badly we manage what happens to them when we’re done using them. Weisman describes in detail the great wastes of floating plastic that circle the center of each of the world’s oceans.

There was something about growing up in the waning years of the Cold War that left an indelible mark on the collective imagination of my fellow Gen Xers and myself. We are suckers for stories of our own destruction. Maybe it was the sight of the Statue of Liberty sticking out of the sand at the end of Planet of the Apes, or just the constant fear of nuclear destruction, but as kids, I think most of us had spent some time thinking about what would happen to the world once all of us were gone.

That is the chief conceit of Weisman’s book as he looks at all of the things that may benefit from our demise (almost all other species except those that have been domesticated), and all of the things that will simply go to hell without us here to manage them (it turns out that nuclear reactors, refineries, and power plants don’t really run themselves for very long).

As we all learned in science class and/or the Discovery Channel, water is the one unstoppable force on Earth. You can try to dam it, pump it, or redirect it, but whatever you choose to try and force it to do, you’ve created yourself a full time job. Without us around to maintain the infrastructure, it will just be a matter of time before rivers undermine and retake the streets of New York, the delta washes away Houston, and, well we’ve already seen what could happen to New Orleans.

Weisman’s book isn’t all doom and gloom, there are very interesting scientific tidbits scattered throughout that I have not encountered anywhere else. His glimpses of the last remaining piece of the primeval forest that once covered Europe made we want to book a flight to the border of Poland and Belarus.

The human narrative emerging from the Eastern African Rift Valley really points up how we are all really the same, like it or not. For those that will never wrap their minds around that fact, there is the cold comfort that war is actually beneficial for some species, if only by reducing the number of people degrading the environment. The amazing return of several endangered animals to the Korean peninsula’s DMZ echoes an idea by environmentalists from The Rewilding Institute who are committed to developing naturalized corridors crossing each of the continents where wildlife could live, migrate, and hopefully, thrive.

As for humankind, well … we had better get our house in order. To paraphrase Weisman, we choose not to see the biggest elephant in the planet-sized room, although it’s harder and harder to ignore it. Perhaps the last great hope for us is to reduce current population trends before we experience total environmental collapse. It wouldn’t be the first time the Earth has pushed the reset button, and it won’t be the last, it’s just that we are supposed to be the smart ones.

Every four days, the population of our small planet rises by one million people. If things continue at the current rate of projection, we should reach a mind-blowing total of nine billion people by the middle of this century. According to Dr. Sergei Scherbov from the Vienna Institute of Demography of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the World Population Program, if families were limited to having only one child, we would be back down to 19th century levels by 2100. show less

It started out fun, as I imagined those pesky vines in my backyard that are already threatening to take over the house. Even without water, in a megadrought. And how the wildlife would move into the cities and the buildings would crumble over time.

But then it got real scary.

The Texas petrochemical patch near Houston -- a patch I've traveled through as a child, on our way to Galveston beach -- requires constant maintenance by humans to control the heat and the chemicals. Without maintenance show more or shut-downs, all the tanks and towers could detonate at once, or at least spew major leaks till the whole region and the Gulf of Mexico are contaminated with a toxic brew.

Great!

Then there are the 441 nuclear power plants. Without maintenance... well, think Chernobyl.

Sigh...

Still, the book shows an interesting hypothetical scenario with both good outcomes and not so good. So... more damn things to worry about. But, okay, I'm game. Bring them on!

Highly recommended! show less

It’s an easy speculation to say that without humans, the earth will restore, recleanse, rectify itself. Indeed, in his book The World Without Us, Alan Weisman repeatedly hints to the reader that the world doesn’t need us as much as we need it. But Weisman goes beyond the obvious implication and details just how incredibly short-sighted we humans have been in just a brief time on this planet.

Weisman thoroughly stresses home the point that despite our tendencies toward toxicity, life will show more indeed find a way, whether it be millennia or billennia. There are a whole lot of ideas to take away from this thought experiment, for example the futility of our marvelous infrastructure once we are no longer around to monitor it; what will happen when wonders like the Chunnel, the Panama Canal, our volatile oil refineries and nuclear reactors/repositories as well as our subways have no one to flip the off switch or close the valve? How will the unmeasurable amount of polymers (plastic) dumped in our oceans annually begin to degrade, and what are the hopes of a hungry microbe that evolves the ability to feed on them?

Of the many thought provoking speculations and projections Weisman so meticulously researches and thoughtfully relates, he proposes the irony that the realization of our collective death may just perhaps contribute to the saving of ourselves. Interviewing the organizer of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, and yes it it’s a real organization, he postulates that if humans were really serious about curbing overpopulation, thereby eliminating juvenile delinquency among other issues, we might just have an epiphany:

" …spiritual awakening would replace panic, because a dawning realization that as human life drew to a close, it was improving. There would be more than enough to eat, and resources would again be plentiful, including water. The seas would replenish. Because new housing wouln’t be necessary, so would forests and wetlands.

…Like retired business executives who suddenly find serenity by tending a garden, Knight envisions us spending our remaining time helping rid an increasingly natural world of unsightly and now useless clutter, in pursuit of which we’d once swapped something alive and lovely."

As improbable it may be that people would go to such extremes or even somehow suddenly become extinct, Weisman’s book is an ambitious and enlightening experiment that brings us closer to acknowledging our impact upon and responsibility to the world, while we’re still with it. show less

Weisman uses as his starting point a hypothetical future in which humans vanish and the earth slowly reacts to our absence. However, his real purpose seems to be to provide a tour of some of our most ecologically endangering activities, the damage that even without us the earth will not be able to decompose, grow over or otherwise heal. Written in an engaging style with plenty of human interest through interviews and great description, this helped me see environmental issues in new ways.