An Earth Without People.


Alan Weisman, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Arizona, wrote a book entitled The World Without Us, imagining a scenario where all the world’s people suddenly dissapeared. What would happen to the earth?
According to Weisman, large parts of our physical infrastructure would begin to crumble almost immediately. Without street cleaners and road crews, our grand boulevards and superhighways would start to crack and buckle in a matter of months. Over the following decades many houses and office buildings would collapse, but some ordinary items would resist decay for an extraordinarily long time. Stainless-steel pots, for example, could last for millennia, especially if they were buried in the weed-covered mounds that used to be our kitchens. And certain common plastics might remain intact for hundreds of thousands of years; they would not break down until microbes evolved the ability to consume them.

Link -via Gothamist

(While the Scientific American site is down, here's the link to the Gothamist article.)

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If anybody interested in just such a scenario, read "Earth Abides" by George Stewart. It tracks one mans life after a deadly virus wipes out most of humanity.

Men may come and go, but Earth Abides.

Brilliant!
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Its judgement day for eco-sinners. This is what environmentalists envision as the equivalency of the Judeo-Christian Judgement Day and Millenium of Peace. All the people go away and the bunnies and mountain goats can finally live in peace without "the man."
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