Since you been gone

"To see how the world would look if humans were gone, I began going to abandoned places, places that people had left for different reasons," says Alan Weisman, journalist, in a recent interview in Scientific American. After covering the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster, Weisman became intrigued with the idea of just what would happen to the planet if humanity just up and disappeared. How long would it take for Nature to recover from humankind's many thousand-year attack, especially the last hundred years? And what would that look like? He attempts to answer these questions in his new book, The World without Us.

Visiting no-man's lands like the Korean DMZ, Chernobyl and ancient preserves provided some answers, as did voyages into the murky depths beneath New York City. Says Weisman:

I also went to the Korean DMZ, the demilitarized zone. Here you have this little stretch of land—it’s about 150 miles long and 2.5 miles wide—that has two of the world’s biggest armies facing off against each other. And in between the armies is an inadvertent wildlife preserve. You see species that might be extinct if it weren’t for this one little piece of land. Sometimes you’ll hear the soldiers screaming at one another through loudspeakers or flashing their propaganda back and forth, and in the middle of all this tension you’ll see the flocks of cranes that winter there.

Lacking the everyday maintenance that keeps them going, our cities would crumble and soon become overgrown with plants. Writing in the Daily Mail, Michael Hanlon summarizes Mother Nature's counterattack:

The big cities would crumble with remarkable ease. London or New York, like all large towns near the sea, would start to rot from their foundations up, as underground tunnels and conduits that carried trains and cables, roadways and sewage, started to fill up with water within days. The pumps that keep them dry would have simply ceased to operate.

Indeed, the recent floods in northern England showed just how much damage can be caused when human defences fail. Without people to patch them up, and the rumble of traffic continually to keep them at bay, weeds would win their long battle with the asphalt.

Within a few weeks, grass shoots would begin to shatter every road surface in the world. Within 15 years, the M1 would look like one of those roads built in Africa in the 1960s and never since maintained.

Within a decade, the combined onslaught of weeds, waterlogging from blocked drains and the freeze-thaw action of water seeping into cracks would combine to turn the foundations of the urban world to rubble.

Many buildings would start to fall apart within 20 years. Walls would groan and creak, roof tiles lift, joints between walls and roofs separate. Without central heating, with gutters permanently clogged and no maintenance, most of Britain's homes would be in ruins by 2040.

America's cities, with their generally harsher climates, would fall apart even sooner.

Some of the first buildings that would decay are, paradoxically, some of the newest. The shoddily built box-homes that have sprung up across Britain in the post-war era, the badly-made tower blocks and the cheap conversions, would collapse like houses of cards.

Large, well-designed modern buildings with steel-framed constructions might survive for centuries, however, as would some of the thick-walled buildings of the Georgian era and before.

Of course, some constructions would last a very long time. Massively over-engineered, the Forth Rail Bridge could stand for hundreds of years. And one structure which, interestingly, would survive far longer than you might think would be the Channel Tunnel.

Dr Weisman points out that it wouldn't flood because it is built deep under the seabed, in a single geological layer. That is why it might prove to be a vital conduit for the recolonisation of Britain by dozens of animal species long banished by man.

Meanwhile, as the buildings crumbled and decayed, what about the other works of man?

Our world is still very much the Iron Age, but iron - and its modern incarnation, steel - is the most transient of materials: strong but powerless against corrosion.

"Don't be fooled," says David Olsen, an American materials scientist, "by massive steel buildings, steamrollers, tanks, railway tracks... sculptures made of bronze (an extraordinarily resilient alloy) will outlast the lot".

Again, we are faced with the paradox that some of the oldest artefacts on Earth might outlast the newest. Within a century or two, nearly all automobiles would have rusted away. Within a millennium - without maintenance and painting - the steel fabric of our civilisation would have crumbled.

But bronze sculptures from the ancient world - as well as more modern bronze artworks - might last millions of years.

Indeed, by AD10,000,000, the world would still be littered with hundreds of semi-oxidised bronze artefacts - sculptures and statues, reliefs and delicate instruments. Add to that billions of copper-alloy coins, which might survive just as long. Humans might vanish at the height of the steel age, but it is to the Bronze Age that the Earth would return.

We live in the steel age, but we might also be said to live in the plastic age. Depressingly, it may be the plastic bag that proves to be one of mankind's most persistent legacies.

The billions of bags blowing across the Earth like tumbleweed would continue to blow. Come back in ten thousand years, and most of them will still be there.

Some scary stuff, for sure, but also sort of encouraging as well. Considering the tremendous impact humanity has had on the Earth is the point of Weisman's book.

And he offers a solution, of sorts. Environmental collapse looms ever nearer, at least from a human perspective, but is there anything short of self-extinction that we could do to stave off the worst of the effects of our own industrial lifestyle? Weisman suggests:

What if we tried one child per family for everyone? I don't want to deprive people of siblings, but I don't want to deprive people of species that are wonderful and part of our life. We can't live without them. If we could bring our numbers down, that would buy us some time to clean up our act.

Sticking to one kid per family, by the end of the century we could reduce the planet's population down to around one and a half billion people - about what it was in 1900. Perhaps that might buy us enough time if we also take the vital step of beginning a project of rapid de-industrialization that is the only solution that could both save humanity and the planet while at the same time preserving human freedom.

Plastic oceans, plastic people

I was forwarded this article by a friend of mine. Despite being published in a sad yuppie men's magazine ('Stay Young, Retire Rich' blares this month's cover), the piece is actually very good and I recommend it highly.

Pretty much every piece of plastic ever made is still around, you know, and less than five percent of all plastic made is ever recycled, so the rest has to go somewhere. Ever wonder where?

Short answers: (1) into the ocean; (2) into YOU!

The plastics industry wants you to think of convenience or even beauty when you think plastic, but the truth is a lot more sinister, and all over the world huge sections of the ocean have become giant, swirling dumps for plastic, sometimes measuring the size of the state of Texas. Meanwhile, back on dry land, plastics break down into tiny particles and make their way into our bodies.

According to the article, written by Susan Casey:

At the same time, all over the globe, there are signs that plastic pollution is doing more than blighting the scenery; it is also making its way into the food chain. Some of the most obvious victims are the dead seabirds that have been washing ashore in startling numbers, their bodies packed with plastic: things like bottle caps, cigarette lighters, tampon applicators, and colored scraps that, to a foraging bird, resemble baitfish. (One animal dissected by Dutch researchers contained 1,603 pieces of plastic.) And the birds aren’t alone. All sea creatures are threatened by floating plastic, from whales down to zooplankton. There’s a basic moral horror in seeing the pictures: a sea turtle with a plastic band strangling its shell into an hourglass shape; a humpback towing plastic nets that cut into its flesh and make it impossible for the animal to hunt. More than a million seabirds, 100,000 marine mammals, and countless fish die in the North Pacific each year, either from mistakenly eating this junk or from being ensnared in it and drowning.

Bad enough. But Moore soon learned that the big, tentacled balls of trash were only the most visible signs of the problem; others were far less obvious, and far more evil. Dragging a fine-meshed net known as a manta trawl, he discovered minuscule pieces of plastic, some barely visible to the eye, swirling like fish food throughout the water. He and his researchers parsed, measured, and sorted their samples and arrived at the following conclusion: By weight, this swath of sea contains six times as much plastic as it does plankton.

This statistic is grim—for marine animals, of course, but even more so for humans. The more invisible and ubiquitous the pollution, the more likely it will end up inside us. And there’s growing—and disturbing—proof that we’re ingesting plastic toxins constantly, and that even slight doses of these substances can severely disrupt gene activity. “Every one of us has this huge body burden,” Moore says. “You could take your serum to a lab now, and they’d find at least 100 industrial chemicals that weren’t around in 1950.” The fact that these toxins don’t cause violent and immediate reactions does not mean they’re benign: Scientists are just beginning to research the long-term ways in which the chemicals used to make plastic interact with our own biochemistry.

Read more here:
Our oceans are turning into plastic...are we?

The end of Phoenix (again).

I stumbled upon an interesting article link at Black and Green Bulletin's Collapse Bulletin page today. The piece, entitled, "Phoenix Falling?", is a fascinating history of my home town, and ran originally in the High Country News. It compares the rise and fall of the Hohokam civilization that preceded Phoenix to the current situation facing us. With a record breaking drought continuing into the foreseeable future - and with global warming threatening to add five more degrees to our already maxed-out thermometers - folks living in the Valley ought to be paying attention to this article.

“Is it going to last?” I asked him, the question I must ask of every archaeologist.

“How long, is the question,” Wright replied.

“The Hohokam were a hydraulic society, and so are we,” he explained. “We depend on the presence of water, the storage of water, the transport of water, and as long as the water is there and can serve our needs, we’re fine. But if the water is not falling on the watershed, or if our needs start to outstrip what is available, that’s a problem.”

It does not take an archaeologist to make such a deduction. However, it does take an archaeologist to see what that deduction might mean in the deep time of this city.

“With the Hohokam, you can see the change,” he said. “They went from a large number of small villages to a small number of large villages. You have growing social complexity, but you also have greater and greater dependence on resources that are existing in smaller and smaller areas. They lost their diversity of resources. They lost flexibility.”

“How long do we have?” I pressed.

Wright laughed, but did not answer my question. He could not. There is not yet an answer, just speculation.

“When it does finally happen, whenever that is, what do you think the end will look like?” I asked.

Peering across dazzling fields of light, Wright said, “Like this.”

I looked out to what he was seeing, freeways streaming like arteries, and it looked like the city was on fire, the great bird of Phoenix burning once again. I thought he must be right. At a certain point, the rise must be indistinguishable from the fall, cycles of death and rebirth too tightly interwoven to pick apart.

It was the same so many centuries ago, one arc skyrocketing while the other plummeted; populations mounting while water dwindled. Some archaeologists look at the 14th century, right before the ancient city was deserted, as a time of Hohokam fragmentation and decay. Others look at the same data and see rejuvenation, the building of corporate centers more impressive than anything the Hohokam ever made before.

We now appear to be at a similar juncture. The balancing act may continue for centuries, or the city may topple tomorrow. Archaeologists are not foolish enough to give an exact date, but they are lifting warning flags. They are looking to the future and into the past, and they see the story of Phoenix repeating itself.

Anyone who has lived in Phoenix for long knows instinctively that this kind of development and sprawl cannot continue. The neighborhood in which I grew up used to be considered the West Side but now seems more like downtown. The Valley of the Sun is steadily spilling down the I-10 all the way to Tucson while the rest of the city has vomited up suburbs in all directions so that now you can drive more than an hour and a half east to west or north to south on the freeway without leaving the city.

As millions of new residents pour into the Valley over the next few years (adding to an already massive population explosion) we need to be asking ourselves what kind of future there is for Phoenix when the water runs out? The essay above gives us a very interesting answer to that question.