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.

A response to a liberal criticism of the anti-Gore flier

Typically I do not do this, but I have been involved in a discussion on another blog about technology and it's applications, as well as the relevance of a critique of technology and, specifically anti-industrialism, and I thought it might be of interest to readers of my blog. This discussion got its start as a response by a blogger to a flier I wrote and handed out at an Al Gore speech at ASU. I engaged the blogger on her/his page and a pretty lively back and forth has developed. There are two threads to this discussion, which I will link below. The first is the current one and the last is the older one, which includes his/her original response to my flier. Aside from the interest that I think readers here will have in the arguments there, I post my response here because of size limitations on livejournal. I am the anonymous poster on the thread. I would post under Phoenix Insurgent, as I normally do on discussion threads, but I don't have a livejournal account.

Here are the two links for background:

(1) The newest discussion thread, to which the below text is a response
(2) The older thread, which contains his/her response to my flier.

Below is my response to the blogger's most recent post:

The point on direct action being criminal is really not an important one, I think. By definition, much direct action is criminal because it breaks the law. Sometimes that is precisely the point. Nevertheless, the law is not generally useful as a metric of what is right and wrong. I think this is a red herring and not relevant to our discussion. For Black folks to sit at a lunch counter in Mississippi in the 50’s was illegal, too, so the direct action that challenged it was obviously criminal. Surely you are not advocating against that direct action merely because it was against the law? I know you must not really think that. White people made the law and Blacks were entirely forbidden to participate in the electoral process, so what legitimacy did it have for Black people that they were bound to recognize beyond that which the violence of the government and the terrorist Klan compelled them to?

We just fundamentally disagree here. Despite your assertions, I have said, for instance, that I am much more interested in the dismantling of industrialism than I am in hunter gathering. I will take hunter gathering if we can get it, because it is the freest humanity has ever been, but being a realist I recognize that this jump is not feasible now. Not immediately. As a long term goal, it is entirely possible to consciously reduce population and begin to re-introduce wildness and other pre-agricultural lifestyles. In the short run, dismantling industrialism can be managed without a state through self-organization, federation and mutual aid. No one needs to be marched to a work camp in the countryside (although in a real sense, the current system marches billions more into work camps in the cities right now).

But specific technologies have been refused before through the work of mass-movements or the spread of critical ideas. The Amish do indeed offer an American vision of a broad and useful critique of tech. But, take nuclear power, for instance. Between the anti-nuclear direct action movement and a series of terrible accidents, the US and other countries were basically forced to impose a nuke plant freeze for quite a long time. Similar debates and direct actions are taking place around gmo food, stem cells and other technologies. Cell phones are banned from certain places, and cultural pressure serves to limit their use despite the ubiquity of the technology (theatres, for instance). Families in many cities have gathered together to stop the proliferation of cell phone towers in their neighborhoods and on their schools. To say that we cannot choose to refuse or end certain technologies is to say that these debates and political/cultural struggles did not take place. Further, it is to offer the technology boosters free reign to manipulate our lives based on other than human-centered values. That is clearly wrong. These movements result from the self-organization of people against systems and technologies they see as detrimental and against their interests. So, we know that given good solid arguments and evidence, a case can be made for the refusal of specific technologies and even broader sciences and that people will participate. There is precedent.

Maybe the carrying capacity of the planet, with non-industrial agriculture is only 600 million to a billion or so (after all, much of the population still doesn’t subsist on the produce of industrial agriculture). Neither of those is an impossible number to achieve. Nevertheless, one could, for instance, dismantle much of industrialism without even having to touch food production immediately. A huge chunk of industrial capitalism is completely unrelated to real needs. Further, much has already been produced. Unnecessary production can be stopped immediately without serious consequences to life. Ending that then provides space for the dismantling of still further production, like oil and other energy. Heck, the elimination of the US Navy alone would also eliminate the planet’s largest user of diesel fuel.

So a movement against tech is both totally realistic and possible, and we know that there is a base of resentment and distrust of technology – not to mention the alienation it creates - on which this movement can and is building. The media doesn’t represent it, but why would it? Does the media, lapdog of the capitalists (to use some jargon) and dominated by rich, white men generally represent adequately workers struggles, or the struggles of people of color or poor people or of women? Of course not. That doesn’t mean those struggles don’t have support or that there isn’t an opportunity for successful organizing.

But, will it succeed? That is what I suppose you really mean when you ask about whether it is realistic, etc. That’s a good question. There isn’t much time. Tech has wrought havoc on the planet for sure, but also on our social relations, making and remaking them in the interests of a ruling class that wants isolated and easily manipulated and replaced workers. Despite the assertions of pro-tech folks, organizing has not been made easier with the internet – not when it comes to regular working class folks. The internet is pretty useful for organizing middle class folks, no doubt.

But time is surely running out.

Still, we need to ask ourselves what the high tech solution has to offer us. More of the same? So far it has brought us mechanized warfare, industrial devastation, alienated work, hundreds of thousands dead on the roads and more from pollution related diseases every year. It has entrenched and enriched a ruling class that was very vulnerable a mere century or even less ago (witness the rise of super-national organizations). The rate at which diseases are jumping species is off the charts now thanks to industrialized medicine. Large swaths of Africa are now un-farmable thanks to global warming, and massive and unpredictable storms sweep the planet both of which we can also lay at the feet of industrialization. Earthquakes proliferate as the ice caps melt. Millions upon millions upon millions are displaced from their homes thanks to the so-called free markets that industrialism demands. The armies of the industrialized societies likewise displace millions more. The rate of extinction has now reached the point where it is now considered the sixth great wave in the last 400-odd million years. The last one was not the emergence of humanity – it was the one that got the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

The promise of technology is always over the horizon, but no one ever feels the need to determine exactly how that will come about. What is the mechanism that holds tech developers or appliers accountable and guarantees us all nothing but wine and roses from the machinery of a system that has sought primarily to enrich and ensure the domination of an elite class? The state funds a massive percentage of the research (as a recent study revealed with biotech). The state is controlled by the elite, so it uses the machinery of government to subsidize (socialize) its quest for profit and control of society (and the working class in particular). What is left over is developed and applied by capitalists of massive wealth and privilege. Sure, there are some liberatory aspects of technology. For instance, we can have this conversation on the internet (although, in truth, we could have it either way because we live in the same city – probably the same neighborhood).

Still, those liberatory aspects come with a price, and that is the control that these technologies give to the ruling class and the technocrats. And the alienation we all feel every day. Think about it: Why is it that when it comes to technology we somehow assume that despite who funds it, who applies it, who develops it and who can afford to consume it, somehow this one thing in all of society will benefit everyone equally!? I mean, I don’t even have health insurance. This society can’t even make sure I and tens of million of others can go to a doctor! Why would I believe that it would use the rest of technology in some egalitarian way? It doesn’t do that with anything else, after all.

This is the burden that apologists for the current technological society must bear. It is their question to answer. If I had to answer it myself, I would suggest that the dominant view of technology is not, indeed, scientifically based, despite the emphatic assertions of its supporters to the contrary. Instead, it is ideological. Knowing that the dominant ideas of any time are in fact the ideas of its ruling class, why would we expect elite projects as they are expressed through their various mouthpieces in the media and government to be presented as anything other than universally held? Didn't they do also that with the invasion of Iraq? There is no difference.