I remember Paul Cibaric, my Advanced
Placement European History teacher at Stevens Point Area Senior High School
announcing on the first day of class: “The
answer to every question in this course will be “Greed”.” This, I believe,
epitomizes better than any other single anecdote the primary reason why I have
always found the subject of Sociology so baffling and challenging to grasp. As
far back as I can remember, I have always seen the world from what theoretical
astrophysicist Doctor Neil Degrasse Tyson of the Hayden Planetarium at the
American Museum of Natural History’s Rose Center for Earth and Space famously
refers to as “the cosmic perspective”.
The known recorded history of human
civilization dates back only a few millennia, but even the lifespan of a
species as relatively new and young as our own can be measured on the scale of
tens of thousands of years. And from this perspective, much is not most of what
the social science of sociology studies, the majority of which is concerned
very nearly to the exclusion of all else with the interrelationships and
resulting sociocultural problems of the world as it is today, has the tendency
to seem somewhat superficial to say the least. This can be attributed in no
small part to the fact that much if not a majority of the science underpinning
sociology is, consciously or not, social psychology: the study of not only how
people interact with one another but each individual person’s conscious,
subconscious and unconscious motivations for interacting with others in the way
that they do. This is where the shallowness and superficiality inherent in the
study of sociocultural interaction comes from, since as Cibaric said so many
years ago, people’s motivations for behaving the way that they do can all to
often be succinctly boiled down to one word: “Greed”, by far and away the
pettiest of all human impulses.
Problem:
Much of the science of sociology,
like all social sciences, because it studies human cultures and societies and
the interactions between them, has the tendency to be restricted in its focus
to the present. However, in the study of global phenomenon such as
globalization, it is important to recognize the reality that civilization as we
know it is a relatively recent development, and so it is only relatively
recently that humanity has become a significant player, as it were, on the
scale of global events. It is equally important to recognize, however, that
beyond even that, humanity itself is newcomer to the world as well. From this
wider perspective, it is most helpful to conceptualize humanity not as the
dominant species on the planet, but merely as one generation in the much longer
history of life on Earth. Like all such generations, humankind’s had a
beginning and will have an ending. From this broader worldview, what is truly
most important about a phenomenon such as globalization is not the sociocultural
motivations underpinning interactions between cultures and civilizations, as
sociology has the tendency to gravitate towards studying, but rather instead
what those civilizations, including the modern one in the developed
industrialized western first world, will leave behind when they, and on a
broader scale humankind, inevitably disappears.
This is the theme of the 2007 book “The World Without Us” by
University of Arizona Professor Alan Weisman and the History Channel
documentary series “Life After People”
based on Weisman’s book. It is notable that neither Weisman nor any of the
History Channel documentaries in the series make any attempt at all whatsoever
to explain any way that humans may disappear. As they explain, this is because
how the human generation comes to an end is largely irrelevant. Even if mankind
is exterminated by a thermonuclear war, for example, the world after humans
will still be left with not only nuclear power plants but also undetonated
atomic warheads. As Weisman discusses in
Chapter 15, when their casings corrode, their plutonium will be released.
Nor will the motivations that humans had
for building the structures that they did last beyond the demise of the human
species. The earth after humans will not have international trade, for
instance, but if, as the History Channel series posits, every person vanished
tomorrow, the physical alteration of the Earth that is the World Trade Center
in Lower Manhattan’s Financial District would be left behind, and would last
for millennia.
Summary:
In Chapter 2: “Unbuilding Our Home” and Chapter 3: “The City Without Us”, Weisman explains the effect of climate
on all types of housing materials. He explains how nature breaks down the
materials found in our homes: “In the day
after humans disappear, nature takes over and immediately begins cleaning
house—our houses, that is. Cleans them right off the face of the Earth.”
[Weisman, Page 15] Things will crumble because of water: “Most of all, though, you are beset by what in other contexts is the
veritable stuff of life: water. It always wants in. After we’re gone, nature’s
revenge for our smug, mechanized superiority arrives waterborne.” [Weisman,
Page 16]. Then animals will come in and start chewing and nesting, adding to
the destruction. Weisman explains that people in advanced societies are not as
motivated to keep their houses up as much as people did in Europe two hundred
years ago, and predicts that nature through animals and weather will reduce our
homes to rubble in fifty to a hundred years. [Weisman, Page 17]
Chapter Three uses Manhattan as an
example. Before the land was settled, Manhattan was 27 square miles of porous
swampland covered by pine and oak trees and meadow grasses. Whatever of the 47
inches of annual rainfall the living roots didn’t siphon would drain to lakes,
marshes and the oceans via forty streams. [Weisman, Page 23] Central Park us to
have hundreds of streams that ran through it. Weisman predicts that if New York
were deserted for a hundred years, there would be a couple hundred streams
running through the city. According to Weisman, because there is little soil to
absorb the rainfall and vegetation to transpire it, if it rains hard, sewers
clog with debris and the water, with buildings blocking the sun from evaporating
it, will flow down to add to a rising underground river corroding the subway
lines. [Weisman, Page 24] Eventually the subway lines will corrode and buckle and
become a river. It is essential to constantly pump the thirteen million gallons
of water daily uphill and to monitor manmade water management tools such as
special dams that hold back the flow of water every time it rains. After they’re gone, the pumps would fail with
no power, the water would crash through and destroy the support pillars, the
subway tunnels will flood and cave in within 20 years. [Weisman, Page 26] As
the oceans continue to warm and rise, at some point the water will not subside.
Season 2 Episode 5 of “Life After People”, entitled “Home Wrecked Home” deals with the
destruction of suburban homes in Levittown in Hempstead, Long Island, New York
and the San Remo, a 27-floor apartment building located at 145 Central Park
West in Manhattan opened in 1930. The episode also deals with the fate of
Cooperative City in Baychester, the Bronx in Northeastern New York city.
According to the documentary, the Hutchinson River would reclaim the former
marshland the Bronx and the City was built on within 100 years “after people”.
In Chapter 15: “Hot Legacy”, Weisman begins writing about Global warming. He
then moves on to the subject of the world’s more than 450 thermonuclear power
plants. If humankind was to depart, he writes, the plants would run on
autopilot until the reactors overheat and after two weeks without us, all of
the world’s nuclear reactors would explode. Weisman then explains the effects
of a nuclear explosion, which would first cause a wave of radiation that would
kill anything that was living within a certain radius. “Whatever the correct measure of human mortality may be, it applies to
other life-forms as well and in a world without humans the plants and animals
we leave behind will have to deal with many more Chernobyl’s.” Weisman
writes. “Little is still known about the
extent of genetic harm this disaster unleashed: genetically damaged mutants
usually fall to predators before scientists can count them.” [Weisman, Page 217] In his interview with
Scientific American, Weisman predicts that nuclear reactors could burn and melt
down as soon as seven days after people as their water-cooling systems fail.
The same is true of the basins of cooling water that serve as storage locations
for spent fuel rods. When the water evaporates, the temperature in the basins
rises.
Then the radiation would form into clouds
that would travel around the globe. The radiation radii of the world’s more
than 450 nuclear power plants, , such as the 30-kilometers around Chernobyl, cover such a large area of the world that the
damage that this radiation would cause to the Earth’s ozone layer Weisman
likens to that of chlorofluorocarbons such as Freon. The holes in the ozone
layer created by these radiation clouds would expose whatever remained living
on the surface of the planet to even more radiation, since the ozone lessens
and even blocks exposure to cosmic rays.
In Season 2, Episode 2 of the
history Channel series “Life After People”, without human intervention, spent
nuclear fuel rods spontaneously burst into flame.
Intent
` Weisman published an article in the Sunday
February 6, 2005 issue of Discover
Magazine entitled “Earth Without
People”. In the article, Weisman speculated on what might happen to human
civilization’s structures if the humans who built and maintain them vanished.
In the article, as in Chapter 3 of “The
World Without Us”, Weisman referred to “rising groundwater” as a “problem
that already plagues New York”, writing that if New Yorkers disappeared “sewers would clog” and “natural watercourses would appear”. At the end of his Discover Magazine article,
Weisman provides a timeline strikingly similar to that in the History Channel’s
“Life After People”, in which he
predicts that within twenty years after human vanished from New York “water-soaked steel columns supporting subway
tunnels corrode and buckle” and that oaks would re-cover the land with a
hundred years.[1]
In researching the article, according to an interview published in the July
2007 Scientific American[2],
Weisman discovered there was more material, enough for a whole book. So began what
became Weisman’s work on his book “The
World Without Us”, published in July 2007.
Reception
The two-hour pilot the History
Channel series “Life After People”
aired on Monday January 21, 2008 and had an audience of 5.4 million viewers,
the most-watched program ever on the History Channel[3],
which launched on January 1 1995.
Weisman’s book “The World Without Us” reached number one on the San Francisco Chronicle nonfiction
bestsellers list on September 23, 2007[4],
ranked number one on TIME Magazine’s
top ten nonfiction books of 2007[5]
and on the same list from Entertainment
Weekly[6]
and placed number one in the nonfiction category of Amazon’s Best Books of 2007
in Canada.[7]
The book placed number four on the same list in the United States [8],
peaked at number three on the Globe
and Mail’s nonfiction bestseller list on August 11, 2007 on its way to
ten weeks on the list. It was number six on the New York Times Best Seller list from August 12 through
September 9, 2007 on its way to nine weeks in the top ten.
In an August 11, 2007 review for the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,
Chauncey Mabe of South Florida’s Sun-Sentinel
called Weisman’s book “one of the most
satisfying environmental books of recent memory, one devoid of
self-righteousness, alarmism or tiresome doom saying”, writing “Weisman’s book transcends gimmickry to
attain a kind of brilliance”.[9]
On July 23, 2007, Gay Kamiya of Salon
called Weisman’s book “brilliantly
creative” and “an audacious
intellectual adventure”, writing that:
“The
World Without Us” taps into one of
our deepest, if only furtively acknowledged, pleasures…It also appeals to out
love of looking the cosmic rearview mirror: Like “A Christmas Carol” or “It’s a Wonderful Life”, it sucks us in with a vision of what is,
what has been and what is yet to come…Just a few pages into it and I was as
enchanted as I was by the imaginative books I loved as a boy…“The World
Without Us” makes saving the world as
intimate an act as helping a child.”[10]
Time’s Lev Grossman called Weisman’s book “a mesmerizing and grandly entertaining
meditation” writing “I don’t think
I’ve read a better nonfiction book this year.” In the September 2, 2007 New York Times Book Review,
Jennifer Schuessler calls Weisman’s book “a
fascinating nonfiction eco-thriller”, writing that “Weisman’s gripping fantasy will make most readers hope that at least
some of us can stick around long enough to see how it all turns out.”[11]
At the same time “we are taught through
the course of this book;” wrote Nicholas Lezard of The Guardian; “to feel
good about the disappearance of humanity from the Earth”.[12]
Anthony Doerr of the Boston Globe
called the book “a beautiful and
passionate Jeremiad against deforestation, climate change and pollution”,
writing that “Weisman has an
extraordinarily farsighted point of view, and he is actually at his best when
exploring the past, tracing the world as it was.”[13]
Jerry Adler of Newsweek wrote
“journalist Alan Weisman has produced, if
not a Bible, at least a Book of Revelation.”[14]
“His research is prodigious and
impressive;” wrote Janet Maslin of the New
York Times in an overall negative review; “So is his persistence.”[15]
Analysis and Discussion
Having taken courses in Anthropology and
Archaeology, History; Philosophy, Political Science and Psychology; as well as
Sociology, I can now confirm that what my high school AP European History
stated was indeed true. Very nearly everything that humans have built since the
beginning of the known recorded history of civilization has been motivated in
one way or another by some form of greed.
This is what makes my study of Weisman’s
book “The World Without Us”
both fascinating and challenging. Like the History Channel series “Life After People”, which I also
studied, Weisman makes no attempt at explaining the cause or reason for human
disappearance from the surface of the planet Earth. As such, unlike much of
sociocultural sociology, his book and the documentary series it inspired look
less at Human greed in and of itself than at the monuments, both figurative and
literal in nature, to our greed that we as a civilization have erected
throughout the few millennia of our history.[16]
This applies even to things that the majority of laypeople would never think of
as being greed-driven, such as roads and writing.
As early as 8,000 BCE in Mesopotamia between the Tigris and
Euphrates Rivers, accounting was being done with clay tokens in the shapes of
different good that were later wrapped up in clay balls. These clay balls were
later marked with shapes representing those of the tokens inside, indicating
the number of each token contained. By the late fourth millennium BCE, these
token had been done away with all together in favor of only the drawn shapes
and the clay was flattened into tablets. The shapes were imprinted into the
clay with sharpened reeds, lending this writing system its name: “Cuneiform”, meaning “wedge-shaped”.[17]
In
so many words: Capitalism invented writing. When people had more wealth than
they could physically hold onto, they needed a way to keep track of how many of
what things they had. So they invented writing for the purposes of trade…for
the purposes of attaining ever more material wealth for themselves. So even
writing, as an invention of western civilization, was a product of human greed.
As
for roads, which according to both Weisman’s “The World Without Us” and the History Channel’s “Life After People” will be among
humankind’s longest-lasting creations. The purpose of roads in trade is
obvious, so the construction by different civilizations throughout the Old
World of roads was conducive to the accumulation of both the wealth of society
as a whole and that of the wealthiest members therein. In the case of the
Ancient Roman Empire, the clichéd proverb that “All roads lead to Rome” was literally true in many cases due in no
small part to the fact that many of the Empire’s famous roads were patronized
either by the Emperor’s themselves or by the Empire’s aristocracy, because they
understood that roads benefited not only the treasury of the empire as a whole
but their own pocketbooks as well [albeit, more often than not, the two were
one and the same].
Conclusion
Like Weisman, I possess what Tony Doerr
from the Boston Globe called an “extraordinarily farsighted point of view” and
what Degrasse-Tyson calls a “cosmic perspective.
The phenomenon of globalization can be
succinctly summarized, in a word, as the erasure of the borders and boundaries
between the countries of the world and their cultures. The sociological study
of globalization has, however, continued to present a challenge for me, since
from the dispassionate objective outsider’s perspective that Weisman and I
take, the borders and boundaries being erased by the globalization process
never existed in reality to begin with in the first place. Good social science,
however, like all good science, strives to see all sides of a given phenomenon.
Throughout my sociology courses, I have been requested, and expected, on
numerous occasions to conceptualize and articulate the negative harms of
globalization. Needless to say, it is difficult for me, as it would be for
anyone, to come up with any way in which erasing imaginary borders and
boundaries that never existed anywhere within the physical universe of
perceptible reality outside of our own minds might potentially be a bad thing.
The process of globalization is, in a
word, the process of humans around the globe becoming one species in one shared
world. What makes imagining potential negative ramifications to this difficult
is the fact that a single species on a single planet is what humans are and
have always been.
I started off this project with the
stated “Problem” of exploring and investigating how globalization has impacted
the planet Earth, the problems that it has caused and the threat that it poses.
The conclusion that I have come to, however, is very nearly the opposite: that,
if indeed any solutions do exist to the problems our planet is experiencing and
the threats that we face, then there can be little or no reasonable doubt that
whatever solutions exist lie within globalization. The one commonality that all
problems and threats facing our planet, from climate change to pollution to
thermonuclear war, share amongst them, it is that if, when and where they
happen, none of these are any great respecters of arbitrarily drawn imaginary
national boundaries. If solutions to these problems and threats exist,
therefore, they are not to be found at the state or national level. Both
climate change and thermonuclear war pose a danger to the survival of the human
species regardless of nationality, and are threats that can only and should
only be addressed by the human species, not by nations. The damage we have done to the planet has not
been the sole exclusive responsibility of any one nation, and the legacy that
we leave behind won’t be either.
[1] Weisman, Alan. “Earth Without People”.
Discover Magazine. Sunday February 6, 2005: http://discovermagazine.com/2005/feb/earth-without-people
[2] Weisman, Alan. “An Earth Without People”. Scientific
American, Volume 297, Issue 1, July 2007, Pages 8-104: http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v297/n1/pdf/scientificamerican0707-76.pdf
[3] Tucker, Neely. “Depopulation Boom”. Washington
Post. Saturday March 8, 2008: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/07/AR2008030703256.html?hpid=artslot
[4] “San
Francisco Chronicle Best-Sellers”. San
Francisco Chronicle. Friday September 21, 2007: http://www.sfgate.com/books/article/San-Francisco-Chronicle-Best-Sellers-2539363.php
[5] Grossman, Lev. “Top 10 Nonfiction Books”. TIME
Magazine. Sunday December 9, 2007: http://content.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1686204_1686244_1691768,00.html
[6] Reese, Jennifer. “The Best Books of 2007”. Entertainment
Weekly. December 20, 2007: http://www.ew.com/article/2007/12/20/best-books-2007
[7] “Editor’s
Picks: 2007’s Top 25 Nonfiction”. Amazon. December 20, 2007: https://www.amazon.ca/gp/feature.html?docId=1000175351
[8] Harrison, Kate. “UA Journalism Prof Collect Year-End Kudos For book: Alan Weisman’s “The
World Without Us” Continues to
Attract Attention from Readers and Critics Alike”. University of Arizona.
December 14, 2007: https://uanews.arizona.edu/story/ua-journalism-prof-collecting-year-end-kudos-for-book
[9] Mabe, Chauncey. “Don’t Think About Us When We’re Gone”. Pittsburg Post-Gazette, August 11, 2007: http://www.post-gazette.com/book-reviews/2007/08/11/The-World-Without-Us-by-Alan-Weisman/stories/200708110131
[10] Kamiya, Gary. “What Would the Earth Look Like If Humans Suddenly Disappeared? An
Audacious New Book Imagines a People-Free Planet and Restores Our Sense of Awe”.
Salon. Monday July 23, 2007: http://www.salon.com/2007/07/23/weisman/
[11] Schuessler, Jennifer. “Starting Over”. New York Times. September 2, 2007: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/02/books/review/Schuessler-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
[12] Lezard, Nicholas. “Goodbye To All This”. The
Guardian. Friday May 2, 2008: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/may/03/society1
[13] Doerr, Anthony. “Alarms, Ideas to Help Save a Damaged World”. Boston Globe. July 15, 2007: http://archive.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2007/07/15/alarms_ideas_to_help_save_a_damaged_world/
[14] Adler, Jerry. “After We Are Gone: If Humans Evacuated, the Earth Would Flourish”. Newsweek. July 23, 2007.
[15] Maslin, Janet. “A World Without Humans? It Falls Apart”. New York Times Sunday Book Review”. August 13, 2007: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/13/books/13masl.html?_r=2&ref=books&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
[16] For more information on this topic, see
the 2001 book “Affluenza: The
All-Consuming Academic” by Duke University Professor Thomas Naylor
[17] Heise, John. “Cuneiform Writing System”. Netherland Institute for Space Research.
May 4, 1995: https://personal.sron.nl/~jheise/akkadian/cuneiform.html
