The World Without Us

I didn’t find the book as entertaining or as stimulating as Ronald Wright’s novel (A Scientific Romance) with a similar theme (the sudden extinction of humanity, leaving other species more or less intact). And I will confess that while I agree with the prescription in the book’s Coda I don’t think it fits well with, or follows from, the rest of the book. But my copy is already full of underlined passages of intriguing arguments, facts and figures. A sampling:

• Thomas Jefferson said “such is the economy of nature that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct”. This was before Darwin, of course.
• The Americas were once home to most of the world’s largest and most exotic mammals, almost all of which were hunted to extinction long before the Europeans arrived to begin their murderous reign.
• The existence of much of the Great Plains is likewise due to fires set by early human inhabitants to concentrate game and create grazing land; it is not the ‘natural vegetation’ of these areas. Except in New England, pre-European invasion America was already extensively cleared and planted, dependent on maize.
• Species extinction is the result of humans’ (and quite probably other large-brained apes’) “acquisitive instincts that can’t tell us when to stop, until something we never intended to harm is fatally deprived of something it needs. We don’t actually have to shoot songbirds to remove them from the sky. Take away enough of their home or sustenance, and they fall dead on their own.” Isn’t that a marvelous way of summing up the paradox of being a conservationist?
• The reason wild animals have done comparatively well in Africa is that they co-evolved with humans, so they learned the danger we posed, whereas elsewhere we arrived abruptly and wiped them out before they could learn.
• Only 6000 years ago the Sahara was green savanna.
• If humans suddenly vanished tomorrow, it is quite conceivable that baboons would quickly evolve to fill the niche created by our absence.
• The vast majority of plastic sent to landfills ultimately ends up, instead, in the ocean, over a billion tons of it, all the plastic ever created (since its invention about 60 years ago)
• Close to a trillion non-biodegradable tires have been produced since the automobile was invented scarcely a century ago.
• Left unattended, petrochemical ‘alleys’ would eventually explode in a runaway chain reaction creating a toxic band of poison that would circle the Earth, creating a chemical ‘nuclear winter’ producing massive die-off and mutations. A large gas well that caught fire and was left uncapped could likewise burn for millennia, making the CO2 created by Saddam’s oil well arson look like child’s play.
• Likewise, left unattended, nuclear warhead depots would leak waste products that would take a quarter million years to neutralize, CFC depots would leak enough mothballed toxins to wipe out the ozone layer, and stored depleted uranium from thousands of nuclear power plants would…well you get the idea. Half the nukes would ultimately burn down, and the other half would melt, adding to the mess.
• The soils in much of North America were already severely depleted and poisoned with man-made toxins a century ago. As early as the 1800s, every conceivable form of fertilizer from everywhere on the planet was harvested to try to renourish Europe’s depleted soils. The buildup of lead in our soils will take 35,000 years — several ice ages — to disappear naturally.
• The algae blooms that are consuming more and more freshwater lakes due to runoff of artificial phosphate and nitrate fertilizer, weigh tons and choke so much oxygen out of the water that everything living in it quickly suffocates.
• Songbirds are dying in massive numbers — billions of birds in North America per year alone, and perhaps 2/3 of all songbirds in the past generation alone — due to a combination of attractive red lights on transmission towers, high-voltage lines, cats, and chemicals (notably dioxins, which are even more toxic and long-lasting than DDT — which is making a resurgence in many countries as mosquitos build up resistance to newer chemicals).

If this book makes you want to learn more about how we got into this mess,you’re ready for the grim but liberating truths of John Gray’s Straw Dogs or Ronald Wright’s A Short History of Progress. Happy reading!
Artwork from Salon.com’s review of the book.