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July 25, 2007

Who wants a "World Without Us"?

There's a line from Bill McKibben that critics of environmentalism trot out from time to time to illustrate the nihilism that lurks in the most consistent exponents of that ideology: "Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along."

But surely, you say, this McKibben fellow is just on the lunatic fringe of environmentalism. Most environmentalists are concerned with ensuring a healthy environment conducive to human survival. This is probably true. But McKibben's lunacy is not "fringe." A new book suggests that it is entering the mainstream.

Gary Kamiya of Salon reports on a new book by Alan Weisman, The World Without Us which tells the story of what the world would look like if human beings suddenly vanished. Like recent disaster movies that revel in the spectacle of New York destroyed by aliens or asteroids, Weisman paints his own picture of the consequences of environmentally-induced human extinction:

Weisman describes how millions of gallons of water under New York City, unchecked by pumps, would flood the subways. "Within 20 years, the water-soaked steel columns that support the street above the East Side's 4,5 and 6 trains corrode and buckle. As Lexington Avenue caves in, it becomes a river." Meanwhile, pavements would be breaking apart as ice expands in cracks. Weeds and potent invaders like ailanthus, with no city maintenance crews to stop them, would wreak havoc. Lightning fires would start, and gas mains ignite. As skyscrapers' windows break, water would corrode even concrete floors. Subbasements would weaken. High winds from hurricanes, more powerful in the future, would topple giant buildings. Bridges, their unpainted joints cracking as they expand, would collapse. The strongest, like arch railroad bridges, could last 1,000 years, although earthquakes could bring them down. Even the gigantic garbage fills on Staten Island would finally disappear, when the next Glacier Age returned

It is interesting to think about how a city like New York requires constant maintenance simply to keep in existence—just like every other living thing. And Weisman is hardly the first to have realized it:

Motive power—thought Dagny, looking up at the Taggart Building in the twilight—was its first need; motive power, to keep that building standing; movement, to keep it immovable. It did not rest on piles driven into granite; it rested on the engines that rolled across a continent....On her way through the plant, she had seen an enormous piece of machinery left abandoned in a corner of the yard. It had been a precision machine tool once, long ago, of a kind that could not be bought anywhere now. It had not been worn out; it had been rotted by neglect, eaten by rust and the black drippings of a dirty oil. She had turned her face away from it. A sight of that nature always blinded her for an instant by the burst of too violent an anger. She did not know why; she could not define her own feeling; she knew only that there was, in her feeling, a scream of protest against injustice, and that it was a response to something much beyond an old piece of machinery.

But Weisman doesn't share Dagny's outrage. Kamiya tells us that his purpose is not merely to engage in an interesting thought experiment:

Paradoxically, it's the fact that Weisman envisions the Earth enduring that becomes motivation for us to change our ways. The twist, of course, is that his imagined happy ending for the Earth only comes about because mankind is absent. Yet this isn't depressing, as one might think, but oddly inspiring. Weisman concludes that many of those happy endings are possible even if humanity doesn't disappear -- as long we curb our appetites and our population. And even if we end up causing our own extinction, it is profoundly reassuring to think that the Earth will not only survive, but flourish.

Did you hear that? Our extinction might be reassuring because a river begins running through New York and the buildings will begin to collapse. Hurray for the destruction of our greatest achievements! This really is pure nihilism, and its right there in Salon for all to see. And remember the virus Bill McKibben was waiting to come along?:

In Africa, unlike the New World, the megafauna survived -- because they grew up with humans, and learned to fear them. If man disappeared from Africa, Weisman notes, the big mammals would flourish, with the elephant population, which now numbers half a million, returning to perhaps 10 million, where it stood before the ivory trade. But reality is less encouraging. Africa is the only place on Earth, except Antarctica, never to suffer a major wildlife extinction. As a result of overpopulation, poachers, cattle and changed habitats, however, the extraordinary African collection of megafauna is severely threatened. In what he calls an "insidious epitaph," Weisman notes that "Only one thing, too terrible to contemplate, might slow all this proliferating before all the animals go extinct": AIDS. Noting that the HIV virus probably spread to humans through bush meat, he asks rhetorically, "Could AIDS be the animals' final revenge?"

Granted, Weisman does call the AIDS epidemic "terrible," but he also calls it "revenge"—revenge for inhibiting the "encouraging" flourishing of African megafauna.

I think there may well be serious environmental problems in need of solving. I am also now less skeptical of environmental science than I used to be. I think there may even be something to the manmade global warming hypothesis (gasp!). But I also will not tolerate the nihilistic ideology that motivates much environmental investigation. If you want to read this Weisman book to see what the world without us would bring, read it as motivation to preserve industrial civilization. For all the problems there may be in our environment, human beings and their glorious cities are still the best things to be found in it.

Posted by admin at July 25, 2007 02:19 PM

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Posted by: dgp at July 25, 2007 08:34 PM

Posted by: Galileo Blogs at July 28, 2007 01:16 PM

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