The world will be fine without us

My November book-of-the-month summary is Alan Weisman’s “The World Without Us,” in which he explores what the world will be like after humans.

Within a few hundred years residential neighborhoods will return to forests. The longest-lasting evidence of humans will be plastics, metals and radioactive waste.

Future inhabitants will encounter such oddities as fire hydrants and cast-iron skillets sprouting among cacti, and this newspaper still readable in a landfill.

Heavy metals from manufacturing, such as lead, mercury and cadmium, will stay in the soil indefinitely.

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“When factories go dark and stay that way, no more such metals will be deposited,” Weisman writes. “For the first 100 years or so, corrosion will periodically set off time bombs in petroleum tanks, chemical and power plants and dry cleaners … Certain pesticides to plasticizers to insulators will linger for many millennia until microbes evolve to process them.”

Over centuries, industrial toxins will be buried deeper and each succeeding crop of vegetation will become more lush.

Water flowing from mountains, no longer contained by human-built arteries, will entomb entire cities.

Unable to compete, after a couple of hundred years few domestic animals will remain.

“The plants, crops and animal species man has wrought would be wiped out in a century or two … The world would mostly look as it did before humans came along,” writes Weisman. “Like a wilderness.”

Worldwide, every four days human population rises by 1 million.

According to Weisman, if every female capable of bearing children were limited to one, by 2075 the world’s population would be reduced by half.

If we don’t reduce the world’s population to the numbers Earth can support, Earth will reduce our numbers.

Quoting Turkish scholar Abdulhamit Cakmut, Weisman writes, “We take care of our bodies to live a longer life. We should do the same for the world. If we cherish it, we can postpone the judgment day.”

Weisman concludes, “The black hole into which we’re shoving the rest of nature will swallow us as well … The world will be fine without us.”

Contact Wendel Sloan at [email protected]