The future is plastics

I've been reading a fascinating book by Alan Weisman, The World Without Us. I picked it up at the First Year conference in San Francisco - it's used by some universities as a common reading for incoming students. The premise is simple but powerful - were all human beings suddenly to disappear, how long would it take for all we've made to be broken down, eroded, decomposed, reabsorbed by nature? Some things would go much faster than you might think - an early chapter chronicles the disappearance of a typical suburban house; the next chapter takes on old fave New York City. Fascinating to know how bird guano, rot, ground water, the freeze-thaw cycle, rust and the like do their work; rather more disconcerting to be reminded that New York is built atop a number of natural springs - if pumps stopped, the entire subway system would be filled with water within 36 hours. Other things, like plastics, vulcanized rubber tires and stainless steel, might never disappear; for things like aluminum, we don't really know: they haven't been around long enough for us to know what a few hundred years would do to them!
Weisman's really teaching environmental science, but the sci-fi premise makes it as exciting as a novel. The point, of course, isn't that the world would be better off without us (though some might well conclude this; reading about Houston's petro landscape made me recall Nietzsche's observation that humanity is a Hautentzündung der Erde). It is, rather, that it is in our power to limit the damage we do - if once we own up to the nature and extent of it. And oh what damage it is, especially since the discoveries of organic chemistry.

Weisman's a very gifted writer, and takes the reader all manner of fascinating places, historical as well as contemporary. Did you know that some of the oldest human cities are multi-storyed subterranean cities in Cappodocia? And even if so (I didn't), did you know that they're likely to outlast anything we've built on the surface of the planet? I'm of course getting a kick out of it also as an amateur futurologist - and as someone who's only just learned to understand the rudiments of chemistry, too! (At some point, remind me to tell you how much of an advocate of a science requirement I've become at our free-form requirement-free college, if not for students then at least for the faculty!!)

[UPDATE, 13 Dec: Do not be misled by the crass ripoff, History Channel's movie "Life After People." It's a sensationalistic fantasy of the destruction of humanity, with a sound track from horror and disaster films and CGI renderings of the collapse of monuments from the Golden Gate to the Eiffel Tower to the Sears Tower (usually repeated so you can feel the thrill again), and the inevitable complement of scenes of a devastated New York (this one reverting to verdant hills and marshy valleys). The contrast with Weisman's book - not credited in any way - is illuminating. This television film is full of lines like "the signs of our vulnerability have always been there," "man’s mastery of nature has always been just an illusion" - it's all about a struggle for "mastery" between "man" and "nature," and nature wins. Weisman, by contrast, shows a world of ongoing natural processes, which we've affected in various ways, and will continue without us. The film's experts are engineers and pop scientists who like telling scary stories; Weisman's are scientists and others who have worked to understand and appreciate nature's cycles and limits. It's not just that in The World Without Us nature is shown to be vulnerable, too, but that in Weisman's book we learn that there is no cataclysmic battle between man and nature. We're part of it in all its wonder - and should behave accordingly!]