Journalist Alan Weisman has expanded his 2006 essay, Earth Without People, into a prodigiously researched report on how fast human cities and structures would disintegrate and allow natural regeneration of soils and forests in various parts of the world if the planet were to be suddenly de-populated.
It is astonishing how quickly New York City, for example, would crumble, due to the ever- present threat of flooding in its understructures. On the other hand, it is horrifying how many eons would have to pass before nuclear and plastic contaminants would be absorbed or by-passed.
Minute amounts of petro-plastic have permeated the ocean and entered the food chain all the way from micro-organisms to humans. As a species we are poisoning ourselves as well as our environment.
One almost wishes for a virus or other factor that would cut the impossibly burgeoning population down to manageable size. Most hopeful, perhaps, are his figures showing that limiting the birth rate to one child per family would fairly quickly accomplish that….but how to convince the earthly religious and ignorant masses of that necessity?
The bleak alternative is the eventual extinction of our species following an ever more miserable struggle to survive on a dying planet.