Category: Environment

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.

I am puzzled by my own reaction to E.O. Wilson’s THE CREATION, An Appeal to Save Life on Earth, which takes the form of a letter to a Southern Baptist pastor from an eminent entomologist who grew up in that church group.

I had seized on the book’s title because I had myself been thinking we ought to be able to enlist the aid of devout believers in THE CREATION into urging their followers to start trying to save it from destruction.But on page five Wilson raises the issue that will turn off the fundamentalist: he believes that human centered ethics and preparation for the afterlife are the only things that matter, and the Second Coming is imminent and therefore the condition of the planet is of little consequence. Such preachers will never have picked up his book in the first place, let alone pursued it.

So Wilson’s elegant descriptions of the incredibly complex, multiplicitous, most as yet not even identified organisms of this planet, their rapid rate of extinction, the utter dependence of the human on his biological environment and the relative ease and economy by which sufficient segments of wild areas could be preserved will be appreciated only by liberal and scientifically sophisticated church leaders, such as have begun to show Al Gore’s AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH to their congregations.

And of course by every wilderness- loving adult and parent of potential biologists.