Alan Weisman Interview On Forum with Michael Krasny
- How the Earth Might Evolve if Humans Suddenly Disappeared
Author of "The World Without Us"
Book had been inspired by the horrible stuff done to the landscape at Chernobyl. 6 years later, the abandoned buildings were becoming overgrown by hedges, and walls, and breaking up the pavement. Population of moles and rodents are showing genetic damage, but they are having more broods earlier, and there is incredible biodiversity in the area. This is probably evolutions way to deal with the higher radiation.
There is hope in this book, similar to the article on Chernobyl.
Forests in poland
Needed an image to let us glimpse something we had once before. While researching the book, people reacted with "that sounds so great". Then they'd think about the sadness. I think there is something in all of us that is a longing for what things used to be like.
The last fragment of forest primeval on border between Poland and Russia. Herman Gering kept it as a nature preserve, and today it is a national park in both countries. Same foliage as a northern temperate zone, but the trees are enormous. The unexpected part of it is that it seems right, it feels good to something in our bodies. I hope readers will get a sense of how nature would perform if it didn't deal with our stresses.
Part of the book concerns how long will it take for Nature to deal with the things we've already done.
The book deals with Nature's capacity to self heal and regenerate.
Survival of Cockroaches
They won't survive so well as they do in the cities now. They come inside looking for heat. With all the power supply plants shut down, they would only survive in the tropics where they came from.
Most power plants would fale safe and shut down very quickly if no humans around. Even nuclear power plants with "perpetual motion fuel" would shut down, and after 7 days of diesel backup fuel exhausted, they would go cold.
Wildlife Refuge Centers
The birds dont understand their reflections, and die from running into the windows. They are killing the very thing they were developed to protect!
What would it take nature to reclaim our houses
- Water coming in the roof
- Mold reforming
More challenging task: What does nature do with concrete cities.
Manhattan
Wall to wall concrete: Could nature return it to the forests? Turns out that nature can. It would start with water, and would start underneath the city. Manhattan comes from algonquin term, with streams draining off the hills into the Hudson. Broadway was a ridge line with mountain lions. Everything was flattenned, and the water pushed underground. It's up to the subway engineers to keep the subway tunnels dry. 13,000,000 gallons of water coming in even on a sunny day. If power goes off, and pumps stop, what would happen? In two or three days, the tunnels would be flooded.
The island would be water logged, the subway columns are made of steel, they will rust, and buckle within a couple of decades, things would cave in, and we'd have rivers again.
Foundations of most sky scrapers are steels. They were not made to be water logged. They will corrode, and when a big building tumbles, it will take down some other ones. Meanwhile, other plants will grow all over the cities. Their will be litter clogging the drains, leaves, seeds germinating in cracks in the sidewalks, as they already do in the spring. Snow thaws, goes into the cracks, freezes and widens the cracks. Eventually forests will start growing with no one to clip things.
What would last?
Some examples: Plastics, bronze sculptures, older edifices. What endures?
Some of the first things built on earth will be the last things to disappear. Why? Because we build with cheaper and cheaper materials. Some stone buildings, without mortar, are still around in the mideast: Tower at Jericho.
Mortaring was started, engineers in New York says that the St Paul's Church will last. It is structurally sound, to the point it will stand maybe even until glaciers return to scrape the city clean, as they've done before.
Radio waves continue travelling through the universe.
Nuclear Weapons
They won't explode on their own. It takes a human mechanism to mash the pieces together precisely.
It would instead corrode, and there would be a radioactive mass sitting there.
The issue of nuclear plants is more series. About 440 in the world. The reactor cools sit in a pool of water that is circulating, and heating up, to spin turbines. If nothing is circulating the water, the heat generating will cause the water to evaporate. And it can happen quickly, like at 3 mile island. Depending on how much fuel is there, it will either cause a fire or a partial or full melt down, releasing a lot of radioactivity.
3000 tons per year of depleted nuclear waste. Those are more radioactive, various elements. Half life of 4.3 billion years. Piles of radioactivity will be left there.
Chernobyl shows that organisms are trying to evolve to become more radioactive resistant. It's amazing how tenacious life is. It finds a way in any crack.
The cooling mechanism at plants will last about 7 days.
Douglas Erwin - Extinction expert. Says the earth has endured worse before. Permian extinction killed off 90% of the species. Later we had age of dinosaurs.
Africa gives a sense of what the world was like before there were human beings. All the continents used to have mega fawna. It's somewhat controversial, but it was no coincidence of the arrival of man with the extinction of those large species.
Related books
Books by the Author
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