The World Without Us
I just finished a great book called The World Without Us by Alan Weisman http://www.worldwithoutus.com/index2.html
While this book is not directed at the sustainability movement, it includes a great deal of the information and data that supports the effort. It brings to light how much we as humans have effected the planet and how long lasting our effects will be on the earth if we were suddenly removed from its’ surface. There are passages in the book that are beautifully moving with detail and imagination about what the world will look like without us.
“As pavement separates, weeds like mustard, shamrock, and goosegrass blow in from Central Park and work their way down the new cracks, which widen further. In the current world, before they get too far, city maintenance usually shows up, kills the weeds, and fills the fissures. But in the post-people world, there’s no one left to continually patch New York. The weeds are followed by the city’s most prolific exotic species, the Chinese ailanthus tree. Even with 8 million people around, ailanthus—otherwise innocently known as the tree-of-heaven—are implacable invaders capable of rooting in tiny chinks in the subway tunnels, unnoticed until their spreading leaf canopies start poking from sidewalk grates.” Alan Weisman
The book introduced a few new things to me like the island of trash in the pacific and the planned nuclear waste storage center in Nevada. Another concept that it cleared up for me was clean coal. The name itself seemed counter intuitative when I heard it for the first time. Clean coal? Really? The way Alan Weisman describes it, it proves to be counter productive and putting off the inevitable. Clean coal does not change our need to move away from the carbon it produces. We cannot hide the waste beneath the carpet so we look better. The new ads the Coen brothers put together for Reality Coalition has the right take on this problem.
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