18227. (Alan Weisman) The World Without Us

Many years ago, when I was a cal­low sci­ence fic­tion fan among oth­er cal­low sci­ence fic­tion fans, we used to walk about the city, talk­ing about this and that. A top­ic that often came up was: What would hap­pen to the city if all the human beings in it sud­den­ly van­ished? What would become of the build­ings? How quick­ly would nature re-assert itself? How long would it take for human struc­tures to crum­ble, be engulfed by nature? What would go, what would last? From our lim­it­ed stock of knowl­edge, we made our guess­es. It was noth­ing new. Sci­ence fic­tion nov­els had dealt with the sub­ject since the nine­teenth century.

This book, how­ev­er, looks at the prob­lem more sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly than our idle spec­u­la­tions. Weis­man draws on the exper­tise of engi­neers, archi­tects, and sci­en­tists to answer the ques­tion in detail. In the course of his explo­rations, the read­er is grad­u­al­ly drawn into con­tem­plat­ing some of our most com­plex eco­log­i­cal prob­lems. Some of the most inter­est­ing parts of the book draw on the evi­dence of places that have been aban­doned by human beings for polit­i­cal rea­sons, such as the demil­i­ta­rized buffer zones between North and South Korea, and an aban­doned urban sec­tion of Cyprus. The site of Cher­nobyl also gets attention.

Most human struc­tures will not last long before they are erased by nat­ur­al forces. Mod­ern struc­tures, usu­al­ly made with shod­dy mate­ri­als, will go faster than ancient stone struc­tures. Things buried under­ground fare best — the Under­ground City beneath Mon­tre­al, for exam­ple, will still be there when all signs of the city will have van­ished from the sur­face. But one of the most deli­cious ironies is that the last works of human art to exist will prob­a­bly be the first: the bril­liant cave paint­ings made at the dawn of human cul­ture at Altami­ra and Lascaux.

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