Imagining a World Without People

Adam Weisman's The World Without Us imagines what would happen to Earth if humans suddenly disappeared, answering a question that all of us, contemplating our own mortality or that of our species, have asked: how long would it take for nature to swallow mankind's traces?

Once the power goes off, the pumps stop working. Once the pumps stop working, the subways start filling with water. Within 48 hours you’re going to have a lot of flooding in New York City. Some of this would be visible on the surface. You might have some sewers overflowing. Those sewers would very quickly become clogged with debris—in the beginning the innumerable plastic bags that are blowing around the city and later, if nobody is trimming the hedges in the parks, you’re going to have leaf litter clogging up the sewers.

“But what would be happening underground? Corrosion. Just think of the subway lines below Lexington Avenue. You stand there waiting for the train, and there are all these steel columns that are holding up the roof, which is really the street. These things would start to corrode and, eventually, to collapse. After a while the streets would begin cratering, which could happen within just a couple of decades. And pretty soon, some of the streets would revert to the surface rivers that we used to have in Manhattan before we built all of this stuff.

Ah, Manhattan. Why is it that post-apocalyptic fantasies always seem to start with Manhattan? Maybe I'd understand better if I hadn't lived in
NYC to the point where Manhattan seems less a concrete testament to
America's dreams than a playpen overcrowded with faux hipsters and rich people.

I also must confess to feeling more than a little envy of Weisman, as
I've wanted to write just such a book ever since Bruce Sterling's Viridian posts turned me on to the "involuntary parks" of Chernobyl (above), the demilitarized zone between the Koreas, and other spaces rendered uninhabitable by politics and pollution. Weisman visited these places while researching his book; if you want to see the edifices of the present through the lens of a future history, you don't have to go far....

An Earth Without People [Scientific American]

Image: Vaclav Vasku