What I'm Reading: The World Without Us

Scott Kustes on 15 Feb 2008 08:42 am

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Last night, I finished The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. This was a very interesting read, basically a thought experiment about what would happen to the world if humans completely disappeared tomorrow leaving everything else here. Cities, bridges, roads, pollution, animals, and plants all stay; only humans go, as if some type of rapture or something. The first thing we find out is just how fragile the infrastructure of civilization is and how easily nature would overtake the buildings, bridges, and roads. It may take a few centuries, but rest assured that Mother Nature would just keep pecking away with water damage and freeze-thaw cycles until things broke down. I had never really thought about just how much work is involved in keeping the infrastructure running, for instance cleaning expansion joints on bridges lest they fill with dirt and dust and the concrete has nowhere to expand. So much for Nature being weak.

Most of the chapters are laid out as “past, present, future.” That is, Weisman describes what we know of the area being discussed from historical records, for instance, the megafauna of North America prior to human invasion. He then discusses how humans have changed the landscape, along with the animals that still exist. Finally, he gives several scenarios that could play out if humans were to leave. Naturally, our factories and automobiles would stop pumping carbon into the air and we’d quit wiping out the landscape, but he goes into which flora and fauna would proliferate and which might die out. Obviously there’s a good bit of speculation about how the planet would respond, but it seems to be well-founded based on pretty extensive research.

There are some good chemistry lessons regarding plastics, radioactive waste, and the oil refining plants in Houston, TX. Needless to say, our impact on the world wouldn’t stop just because we left. We would leave behind nuclear reactors that would leak for tens to hundreds of thousands of years. Plastics would continue to pollute the oceans until a microbe evolved the ability to break it down into organic compounds. The human impact will continue, but eventually the planet will shake us off like a wet dog shakes off water.

And in the end, there’s some discussion of ways different groups have devised of lessening our impact on the planet. There’s the group that would have all humans voluntarily stop procreating so that the species goes extinct. And there’s the group that would have all fertile women limited to at most one child, resulting in a worldwide population decrease to about 1 million people by 2150. There wasn’t a lot in the way of practical advice other than “stop driving so much and stop using so much plastic.” Ho hum on the advice.

In the end, I give it a 7.5 out of 10. It’s an interesting and enjoyable book, though I don’t think it’s going to be anything world-changing.

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Tags: nuclear waste, plastic, The World Without Us, Weisman

Filed in Exploring Nature 3 Comments so far

3 Responses to “What I’m Reading: The World Without Us”

Matt on 15 Feb 2008 at 7:05 pm #

I thought it was a pretty good book. That, despite the fact that the final message was that everything good we have done will be gone pretty quickly, and all the bad stuff we have done will hang around for a million years. I think it makes a good case that the world is overpopulated (though the VHEM is not really a viable alternative!). The only way that eating paleo would be sustainable for everyone, of course, would be if the world population was drastically reduced.

donnyrosart on 16 Feb 2008 at 9:01 am #

I always wonder how many people could be sustained if we switched to bugs and bacteria as mainstays of our diet. Many animals eat bacteria in the form of poop, so it’s really not that far out there. I’m sure we’d find a less disgusting form, of course.
Also, I don’t think paleo needs to be all meat, all the time. A few years ago there was an article going the rounds about a paleo group (I think it was somewhere in the British Islands). They found an enormous mass of a single type of nut shell, along with human remains (I don’t remember if the human remains were in the form of bones or tools). The headlines all said “paleolithic man–vegetarian?” and stuff like that, but I don’t think they showed any proof that they were vegetarians, they just showed that at certain times these peoples diets are likely to have consisted almostly entirely of nuts. We’ve all heard the gem about tribes in Africa gorging on nothing but elephant meat if one is killed. Cordain says that man ate two thirds meat as calories and one third plant, and that this should be our guide–but did they eat these on the same days, or drift further toward plant or animal food sources depending on the season?
A common criticism of studies advocating the low fat diet is that the higher fat diet they are compared to is usually not particularly low in carbs. This is a valuable argument when used to defend low carb eating, but should this detract from what seems to be shown, again and again–that a low fat diet is healthier than the standard western diet?
In rodent studies, both a Dean Ornish style low fat diet and a ketogenic diet have been shown to be protective against heart disease when compared to the western diet. Advocates of both diets claim that they will lower insulin levels when compared to the western diet, and they seem, at least to me, to be justified. A recent study in mice showed that both a diet of 84 percent carb 16 percent protein and a diet of 84 percent fat 16 percent protein slowed tumour growth in mice when compared to a diet of 16 percent protein with half of the rest of calories from fat, and half from carbohydrate.
Throw a little intermittent fasting into the mix, and I think it’s possible for the world’s population to eat a much healthier, more paleo diet. (Sorry if I rambled. This is about as close to on topic as I ever get.)

Scott Kustes on 18 Feb 2008 at 8:00 am #

Matt,
I agree that it was disconcerting that it’s our worst things that will stick around, though I don’t know that it’s all that untrue. Our great architecture\ and works of art are fragile, as is everything in Nature. In fact, it seems that the biggest truth of Nature is that things come into and out of existence. So given that, anything we make that resists the natural breakdown of life is sure to be a bad thing in Mother Nature’s eyes.

Donny,
You’re right that Paleo doesn’t have to be all meat, all the time. One of the defining features that explorers have found in traditional hunter-gatherer diets is that there’s really no defining feature. Some are high-carb, some are low-carb, some are all-meat, some are relatively void of meat. But the main feature is that there are no processed foods. That’s the true detriment of the Western diet…food processing. Let’s get back to eating bugs. I hear they’re quite high in protein.

Cheers
Scott