Alan Weisman: The World Without Us

Alan Weisman: The World Without Us (2007, Thomas Dunne Books)

The basic concept here is to explore what would happen to the world if by some unspecified happenstance human beings suddenly vanished, leaving all of our artifacts and effects intact. The concept allows for extensive exploration of those artifacts and effects, a mirror image of how we have change nature, an unorthodox view of how the world works.

Much of this is fascinating. The few quotes are rather scattered.

(pp. 39-40):

The last glacier left New York 11,000 years ago. Under normal conditions, the next to flatten Manhattan would be due any day now, though there's growing doubt that it will arrive on schedule. Many scientists now guess that the current intermission before the next frigid act will last a lot longer, because we've managed to postpone the inevitable by stuffing our atmospheric quilt with extra insulation. Comparisons to ancient bubbles in Antarctic ice cores reveal there's more CO₂ floating around today than at any time in the past 650,000 years. If people cease to exist tomorrow and whenever send another carbon-bearing molecule skyward, what we've already set in motion must still play itself out.

That won't happen quickly by our standards, although our standards are changing, because we Homo sapiens didn't bother to wait until fossilization to enter geologic time. By becoming a veritable force of nature, we've already done so. Among the human-crafted artifacts that will last the longest after we're gone is our redesigned atmosphere. Thus, Tyler Volk finds nothing strange about being an architect teaching atmospheric physics and marine chemistry on the New York University biology faculty. He finds he must draw on all those disciplines to describe how humans have turned the atmosphere, biosphere, and the briny deep into something that, until now, only volcanoes and colliding continental plates have been able to achieve.

Volk is a lanky man with wavy dark hair and eyes that scrunch into crescents when he ponders. Leaning back in his chair, he studies a poster as a single fluid with layers of deepening density. Until about 200 years ago, carbon dioxide from the gaseous part above dissolved into the liquid part below at a steady rate that kept the world at equilibrium. Now, with atmospheric CO₂ levels so high, the ocean needs to readjust. But because it's so big, he says, that takes time.

"Say there are no more people buring fuel. At first, the ocean's surface will absorb CO₂ rapidly. As it saturates, that slows, It loses some CO₂ to photosynthesizing organisms. Slowly, as the seas mix, it sinks, and ancient, unsaturated water rises from the depths to replace it."

It takes 1,000 years for the ocean to completely turn over, but that doesn't bring the Earth back to pre-industrial purity. Ocean and atmosphere are more in balance with each other, but both are still supercharged with CO₂. So is the land, where excess carbon will cycle through soil and life-forms that absorb but eventually release it. So where can it go? "Normally," says Volk, "the biosphere is like an upside-down glass jar: On top, it's basically closed to any extra matter, except for letting in a few meteors. At the bottom, the lid is slightly open -- to volcanoes."

The problem is, by tapping the Carboniferous Formation and spewing it up into the sky, we've become a volcano that hasn't stopped erupting since the 1700s.

Varosha, in Cyprus, appears in the book as a town that has been abandoned due to civil war, its luxury tourist hotels left to decay as would a world without us (pp. 92-93):

After World War I finished off the Ottomans, Cyprus ended up as a British colony. The island's Greeks, Orthodox Christians who had periodically revolted against the Ottoman Turks, weren't thrilled to have British rulers instead, and clamored for unification with Greece. The Turkish Cypriot Muslim minority protested. Tensions boiled for decades and erupted viciously several times during the 1950s. A 1960 compromise resulted in the independent Republic of Cyprus, with power shared between Greeks and Turks.

Ethnic hatred, however, had by then become a habit: Greeks massacred entire Turkish families, and Turks ferociously avenged them. A military takeover in Greece detonated a coup on the island, midwifed by the American CIA in honor of Greece's new anticommunist rulers. That prompted Turkey in July 1974 to send troops to protect Turkish Cypriots from being annexed by Greece. During the ensuing brief war, each side was accused of inflicting atrocities on the other's civilians. When the Greeks placed anti-aircraft guns atop a high-rise in the seaside resort of Varosha, Turkish bombers attacked in American-made jets, and Varosh'a Greeks ran for their lives.

(p. 103):

Dr. Sözen sees this difference through an engineer's eyes. Whereas all the previous conquering cultures erected fabulous monuments to themselves like the Hagia Sophia and the nearby ethereal Blue Mosque, the architectural expression of today's hordes is manifest in more than 1 million multi-story buildings jammed into Istanbul's narrow streets -- buildings that he says are doomed to abbreviated life spans. In 2005, Sözen and a team he assembled of international architectural and seismic experts warned the Turkish government that within 30 years, the North Anatolian Fault that runs just east of the city will slip again. When it does, at least 50,000 apartment buildings will fall.

He's still awaiting a response, although he doubts that anyone can imagine where to begin to stave off what his expertise deems inevitable. In September 1985, the U.S. government rushed Sözen to Mexico City to analyze how its embassy had weathered an 8.1-magnitude earthquake that collapsed nearly 1,000 buildings. The highly reinforced embassy, which he had examined a year earlier, was intact. Up and down Avenida Reforma and adjacent streets, however, many high-rise offices, apartments, and hotels had disintegrated.

It was one of the worst quakes in Latin American history. "But it was mostly confined to downtown. What occurred in Mexico City is a flake of what will happen to Istanbul."

Polymers Are Forever (p. 123):

During his first 1,000-mile crossing of the [North Pacific] gyre, Moore calculated half a pound for every 100 square meters of debris on the surface, and arrived at 3 million tons of plastic. His estimate, it turned out, was corroborated by U.S. Navy calculations. It was the first of many staggering figures he would encounter. And it only represented visible plastic: an indeterminate amount of larger fragments get fouled by enough algae and barnacles to sink. In 1998, More returned with a trawling device, such as Sir Alistair Hardy had employed to sample krill, and found, incredibly, more plastic by weight than plankton on the ocean's surface.

In fact, it wasn't even close: six times as much.

(p. 136):

When something malfunctions, the results, unfortunately, can be spectacular. In 1998, Sterling Chemical expelled a cloud of various benzene isomers and hydrochloric acid that hospitalized hundreds. That followed a leak of 3,000 pounds of ammonia four years earlier that prompted 9,000 personal injury suits. In March 2005, a geyser of liquid hydrocarbons erupted from one of BP's isomerization stacks. When it hit the air, it ignited and killed 15 people. That July, at the same plant, a hydrogen pipe exploded; in August, a gas leak reeking of rotten eggs, which signals toxic hydrogen sulfide, shut much of BP down for a while. Days later, at a BP plastics-manufacturing subsidiary 15 miles south at Chocolate Bayou, flames exploded 50 feet in the air. The blaze had to be left to burn itself out. It took three days.

(p. 199):

As a professional birding guide, Hilty has watched the decline of songbirds tilt into a plunge that has even nonbirders noticing the deepening silence. Among the missing in his native Missouri is our only blue-backed, white-throated warbler. Cerulean warblers used to depart the Ozarks each fall for mid-elevation Andean forests in Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador. With more of those being cut each year for coffee -- or coca -- hundreds of thousands of arriving birds must funnel into an ever-shrinking wintering ground, where there isn't enough to feed them all.

(p. 200):

The birds that manage to survive on islands, as Charles Darwin momentously observed among finches in the Galápagos, can adapt so tightly to local conditions that they become species unto themselves, found nowhere else. Those conditions explode, however, once humans arrive with their pigs, goats, dogs, cats, and rats.

In Hawaii, all the roast feral pig devoured in luaus can't keep up with the mayhem their rooting wreaks on forests and bogs. To protect exotic sugarcane from being eaten by exotic rats, in 1883 Hawaiian growers imported the exotic mongoose. Today, rats are still around: the favorite food of both the rat and the mongoose is the eggs of the few native geese and nesting albatrosses left on Hawaii's main islands. In Guam, just after World War II, a U.S. transport plane landed bearing stowaway Australian brown tree snakes in its wheel-wells. Within three decades, along with several native lizards, more than half the island's bird species were extinct, and the rest designated uncommon or rare.

When we humans become extinct ourselves, part of our legacy will live on in the predators we introduced. For most, the only constraints on their rampant proliferation have been the eradication programs with which we've tried to undo our damage. When we go, those efforts go with us, and rodents and mongooses will inherit most of the South Pacific's lovely isles.

(pp. 201-202):

As befits a chain reaction, it happened very fast. In 1938, a physicist named Enrico Fermi went from Fascist Italy to Stockholm to accept the Nobel Prize for his work with neutrons and atomic nuclei -- and kept going, defecting with his Jewish wife to the United States.

That same year, word leaked that two German chemists had split uranium atoms by bombarding them with neutrons. Their work confirmed Fermi's own experiments. He had guessed correctly that when neutrons cracked an atomic nucleus, they would set more neutrons free. Each would scatter like a subatomic shotgun pellet, and with enough uranium handy, they would find more nuclei to destroy. The process would cascade, and a lot of energy would be released. He suspected Nazi Germany would be interested in that.

On December 2, 1942, in a squash court beneath the stadium at the University of Chicago, Fermi and his new American colleagues produced a controlled nuclear chain reaction. Their primitive reactor was a beehive-shaped pile of graphite bricks laced with uranium. By inserting rods coated with cadmium, which absorbs neutrons, they could moderate the exponential shattering of uranium atoms to keep it from getting out of hand.

Less than three years later, in the New Mexico desert, they did just the opposite. The nuclearn reaction this time was intended to go completely out of control. Immense energy was released, and within a month the act was repeated twice, over two Japanese cities. More than 100,000 people died instantly, and the dying continued long after the initial blast. Ever since, the human race has been simultaneously terrified and fascinated by the double deadliness of nuclear fission: fantastic destruction followed by slow torture.

(p. 207):

The first site to begin shipping to WIPP [Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, a nuclear waste repository in New Mexico] was Rocky flats, a defense facility on a foothills plateau 16 miles northwest of Denver. Until 1989, the United States made plutonium detonators for atomic weapons at Rocky Flats with somewhat less than a lawful regard for safety. For years, thousands of drums of cutting oil saturated with plutonium and uranium were stacked outside on bare ground. When someone finally noticed they were leaking, asphalt was poured over the evidence. Radioactive runoff at Rocky Flats frequently reached local streams; cement was swirled into radioactive sludge in absurd attempts to try to slow seepage from cracked evaporation ponds; and radiation periodically escaped into the air. A 1989 FBI raid finally closed the place. In the new millennium, after several billion dollars' worth of intensive cleanup and public relations, Rocky Flats was transmutted into a National Wildlife Refuge.

Simultaneously, similar alchemy was recasting the old Rocky Mountain Arsenal next to Denver International Airport. RMA was a chemical-weapons plant that made mustard and nerve gas, incendiary bombs, napalm -- and during peacetime, insecticides; its core was once called the most contaminated square mile on Earth. After dozens of wintering bald eagles were found in its security buffer, feasting on the prodigious prairie dog population, it, too, became a National Wildlife Refuge. That required draining and sealing an Arsenal lake where ducks once died moments after landing, and where the bottoms of aluminum boats sent to fetch their carcasses rotted within a month. Although the plan is to treat and monitor toxic groundwater plumes for another century until they're considered safely diluted, today mule deer big as elk find asylum where humans once feared to tread.

(p. 266):

Within recent historic times, reefs swarmed with 800-pound groupers, codfish could be dipped from the sea by lowering baskets, and oysters filtered all the water in Chesapeake Bay every three days. The planet's shores teemed with millions of manatees, seals, and walruses. Then, within a pair of centuries, coral reefs were flattened and sea-grass beds were scraped bare, the New Jersey-sized dead zone appeared off the mouth of the Mississippi, and the world's cod collapsed.

Yet despite mechanized overharvesting, satellite fish-trackers, nitrate flooding, and prolonged butchery of sea mammals, the ocean is still bigger than we are. Sine prehistoric man had no way to pursue them, it's the one place on Earth besides Africa where big creatures eluded the intercontinental megafaunal extinction. "The great majority of sea species are badly depleted," says Jeremy Jackson, "but they still exist. If people actually went away, most could recover."

posted 2008-06-21