How long would it take the climate to recover if we all disappeared? We asked Alan Weisman, bestselling author of The World Without Us.
 | Alan Weisman, Author, The World Without Us and Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World (Photo: Ronn Spencer) |
Your book - which shows how the Earth would change if humans suddenly disappeared - might strike some as bleak. Why such a negative perspective?
It's not that I want people to disappear. I got rid of human beings theoretically to see how nature would respond without having to deal with us constantly heaping more abuse on the planet. Ultimately, the aim is to figure out if there is a way to add humans back into the mix so that we could live in harmony with nature as opposed to mortal combat with it.
The problem with environmental books, as brilliant as they often are, is that they are so depressing and scary that only environmentalists read them. I wanted to write something that would reach a huge audience, but still be realistic. I wasn't going to pull any punches.
You discuss different human impacts on the Earth's environment. How does climate change compare with these?
In the shorter term, global warming is our biggest problem, because it's the one that we can see threatening us. Can we survive it? I think so, at this point. But from here on out, it would be a good idea not to throw any more carbon up in the atmosphere. If not, what will happen? The Earth will warm up. Sea levels will rise. This has happened a lot in the past. You can go to any mountain range and find fossils of sea creatures. The Earth will cleanse itself of stuff that is creating an imbalance.
When I was talking to atmospheric scientists a few years ago, the consensus was that if humans disappeared, it would take about 100,000 years for the CO2 that we have pumped up to be reabsorbed. But most of it would be absorbed during the first few centuries. So, there's no question that if we started tomorrow, things would start to improve rather quickly.
 | G8 Climate RankingClick on the image to see how each country performed in the fight against climate change (Animation: Allianz) |
One of the proposed solutions - nuclear energy - will also be one of our most enduring legacies. Will this really be a problem for billions of years to come?
Radioactivity is going to be around for a long time. Either the radioactive material gets buried very deep, we come up with some magical way of neutralizing radioactivity - which so far seems to defy the laws of physics - or it's going to sit around in containers.
After humans go extinct, because every species goes extinct eventually, all of the temporary storage facilities will eventually corrode and expose this stuff to the elements, and we'll either get meltdowns or fires or both. That is something that I'm not sure nature has ever dealt with before - a whole lot of radioactivity being released at once. I'll bet stuff survives. Stuff has survived around Chernobyl. I think a lot of life would die off, but new life would eventually evolve.
You frame human population growth as a root cause of mankind's impact on the Earth. Why?
We were all sold an idea by the founders of the Green Revolution, who were brilliant agricultural engineers, but very bad ecologists. They kept saying this is going to solve hunger on the planet, but any ecologist knows that the population of a species will always rise to meet the available food supply. That's exactly what has happened. That's why the population has doubled and re-doubled.
Now we're faced with so many more people demanding so much more food, which requires so much more clearing of habitat and application of chemicals on the land. The result is more demand for energy, more carbon in the atmosphere, and all of those fertilizers and shipping...obviously stuff is spiraling out of control.
I had no idea I was going to get into this stuff about population when I started the book. That wasn't my intention, but it became logical. I realized that it all comes down to having a million more people on the planet every four days. This guy who I interviewed left me with this amazing image: just imagine if we all stopped procreating. Every decade, as there were fewer humans, the world would become wilder and more beautiful. Within a century, we would go back to the same population we had before the gigantic population explosion that began at the beginning of the 20th century.
What would you say to those who think the problem is consumption rather than overpopulation?
Who do they think is doing the consuming? Trying to change human behavior is going to take a whole a lot longer than coming up with technologies or doing something radical, like reducing our population, which by the way, is not that radical, because it's going to happen. The question is do we manage it, or does nature do it, as it always does when any species outstrips its resource base.
We are created to make copies of ourselves. To control our numbers goes not against human nature; it goes against nature. But we now live on a planet where nature has to be managed. I'm not suggesting that we go out there and cull our numbers, like we do with coyotes or deer, so they don't eat everything up. But I am suggesting that we consider managing our reproduction in a way that we don't eat ourselves out of house and home, because that's what we are doing.
Did you find mixed reaction to your treatment of population issues?
You don't see a lot about how much we are procreating because it's loaded politically. There are people on the right and left wing who don't want population touched. "Humans are sacred." But this book isn't preaching what to do. It is simply a piece of journalism that opens readers' minds up to this interesting idea: what if all these people weren't here? Which is a completely different way of looking at things, and eliminates the fear factor that is in so much environmental writing. "If we don't stop doing what we are doing, everybody's going to die." In my book, everybody's already dead, so we don't have to worry about that.
After writing this book, are you still hopeful for the future?
I was very worried about the fate of the world, but I'm no longer worried about it. I think the world is going to be fine. Now whether the world as we know it is going to survive - that's an open question.
editor: Valdis Wish
publishing date: November 20, 2008
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World without us
There were times when there was no human being on the earth.Since about 100000 years humans have inhabited it.May be it takes another 100000 years for the earth to saturate with this...