Fire or Ice OR Trouble in the Horse Latitudes OR In the Year 2525

Categories: In the News , History , Science , Outdoors & Nature , Nonfiction

Alan Weisman's provocative and deeply depressing book The World Without Us does offer a few optimistic scenarios. The good news (1) Look at the New England forests.  Early settlers chopped them down but later abandoned their farms, and now the trees are all grown up again.  In a few more generations the forests will look pretty much like they did before the European settlers came.  Already, three coyotes have made their way across bridges from New Jersey and into Manhattan.

The other good news (2) In the long run, global warming isn't that big of a deal, because in 5 billion years the sun is going to expand and suck in all the planets, anyway.  Also, given the wobble of the earth and its slightly erratic orbit, unless we've really screwed things up, another ice age is inevitable no matter what we do, and it certainly would be more convenient to have one in 14,000 years rather than in 1,000 years.  Think of New York City and England as tundra, for example.

Still, according to Weisman, global warming in the short run will cause all the problems Al Gore has indicated. 

The alternative is that if enough of the Greenland ice cap melts, so much ice will find its way into the Atlantic that the Gulf Stream may be destroyed, and we'll end up in another ice age much sooner than anticipated.  The optimistic viewpoint is that global warming and the shrinkage of Greenland will cancel each other out, and everything will proceed as normal.  This is sort of like the idea that excess ozone in the atmosphere will float up to cap off the ozone holes over the poles.

Alan Weisman's book imagines a virus that only affects humans, a religious Rapture, or a large-scale alien abduction.  Human beings are gone, but everything else is still here.  (Incidentally, Weisman finds a human-only alien abduction unlikely, since why would aliens only be interested in human beings?)  Roaches would freeze to death, but mosquitoes would prosper.  In some places, native species of fauna would grow and prosper.  In others, exotic species would overwhelm the landscape (no more Nature-Conservancy-restored long-grass praries), but at least some sort of ecosystem would muddle through.

It would be a long time, though, for all evidence of humans to disappear.  In one of the most memorable parts, of the book, Weisman describes the horror of a sailor who ventured into a part of the ocean unpopular with sailors--the Horse Latitudes--even before it became a repository for all of the plastic dumped into the Pacific or that blew into it from international dumps.  Except for the tiny amount that has been incinerated, every bit of plastic manufactured since the 1940's is still around, much of it being ground into smaller and smaller pieces in the ocean.  (The grinding up of the plastic is not a good thing, because it will be eaten by animals far down on the food chain with who knows what results.)  After we're gone, the earth will not fully recover until microbes evolve that can digest plastic, just as microbes evolved that now can evolve petroleum.

Banned since 1970s, PCBs, once thought to have sort of just disappeared have resurfaced in the arctic, resulting in hermaphroditic fish and polar bears.  (Weisman mentions the polar bears three times in the book.)

Everything will deteriorate eventually, including whatever keeps contained nuclear waste from flowing or blowing into the atmosphere (although not the Uranium 235 itself, which has a half-life of about 260 million years), and the pipelines that push petroleum from Houston through Louisiana and up the East Coast to New York from exploding.  Whether radiation or petroleum fires (think nuclear winter--perhaps another positive alternative to global warming but probably not) take out the rest of the world after we're gone depends on whether power plant workers have the time or desire to shut down their plants before they go.

The only solution, Weisman suggests, short of the likely to-be-unpopular one suggested by members of the  Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, is a strict adoption of a policy where every woman who wants to have a child has only one.  Even with the anticipated 2.6 percent future world population growth rate, well, the population is still going to be growing, and results are likely to be bad, as Father Time says in Jude the Obscure, "Because we are too many."