Seriously Eccentric Saturday Musings

Ok, brace yourselves. When nothing in particular occupies my mind, it leaves a lot of room for randomness. And so it begins …

Mama elephant and her kids - Kilimanjaro in background

Still reading The World Without Us. The author, Alan Weisman, is jumping around quite a bit from topic to topic; era to era; location to location. Since we’re often dealing in geologic time, you can imagine how disorienting this is. It suits me to a T. It forces the reader to seek patterns in trends and events across time and invest them with meaning that might not occur if she was led down a straight, chronological path.

Current mood: a heightened sense of excitement brought on by the bracing winds of chaotic intellectual stimulation. (Bite me, facebook and myspace. Let’s see you come up with an emoticon for that.)

After the jump, we travel to the origins of Homo sapiens accompanied by Paul Simon’s Graceland and U2’s One.

The World Without Us

I’m reading a book called The World Without Us. It’s “speculative non-fiction” by a writer named Alan Weisman, who poses the scenario of the elimination, in the blink of an eye, of all human life from the planet. Poof. We are gone, and the buildings, animals, plantlife, air and water start to revert to their natural state, decaying or growing as the case may be, without human intervention.

He details what will happen in 100 years; in 1,000 years; in 10,000 years: as seasons change, as the oceans rise and lakes and rivers reassert their natural pathways, and as trees, vines, plants and animals retake their habitats until the next ice age–which we’ve pushed back through the climate change already wrought–scours the slate clean again. In a best-case scenario he presents, it will take a minimum of 1,000 years for the earth’s oceans to cleanse the air of the carbon we’ve dug from the earth and spewed into the atmosphere since the dawn of the Industrial Age in about 1750. Eventually, there will be no trace left of us except, perhaps, for some stainless steel pots that will befuddle the next lifeforms to evolve or arrive on Earth; and the Statue of Liberty, cast in bronze, barnacled and buried under a mile of silt in the Atlantic Ocean.

Weisman is saying that it will take a tremendously long time but left to its own devices, the earth will replenish itself. This, evidently, is supposed to be good news–a message of hope that, despite our current predicament, if humans finally drive ourselves to extinction before doing too much more damage to the earth, air, water and other species, things will rectify themselves.

Well, ok … but the problem I’m having (and granted, I’m only on p. 51) is the implausibility of that scenario actually transpiring. Weisman overtly says that the premise is not to speculate on what ends humanity, only that it ends quickly and completely–all at once, everywhere.

But, but … it won’t happen that way, will it? Even a massive asteroid hit, a broadscale nuclear war, biological warfare or the outbreak of a world-wide plague will have human life petering out slowly, unevenly, inconsistently. There will be no quiet overtaking of our cities by kudzu, birch and aspen. Instead, as human beings slowly–slowly and agonizingly–die off, those small bands of survivors who’re left will not go gently into that good night. As resources dwindle, as infrastructure fails, as hope fades … human nature and, never mind that, our basic will to survive, will remain intact. And the will to survive is an individual, not collective, one. Individuals will fight for the basic resources to survive: food, water, shelter. Maybe, maybe, parents will share those resources with their own children. Maybe, maybe, small bands or communities will form, if they are more powerful together than alone. But civilization, government, order and what we in the coddled, so-called developed world construe as morality and humanity, will cease in any meaningful, effective way.

It won’t be pretty.

Perhaps I am a pessimist about human nature, informed by my study of social psychology, and more recently, my reading of The Road and Blindness, which foretell gruesome, cruel and barbaric acts perpetrated by humans on humans in the face of just such doomsday scenarios. There has never been a situation, in the lab or in the real world, throughout history, where–especially in the face of annihilation–those with power and resources have not wielded them to their own advantage, to the extent of overtaking and enslaving those without.

So. I struggle with the premise, and before humans are wiped from the face of the earth, I wonder how much more damage we will do, not just to each other but to our home planet.

Perhaps this doesn’t matter. Perhaps the lingering, cruel destruction of humanity–the “every man for himself” phase–is just a blip on the timeline, as brief as the 15 or 20 minutes of twilight marking the transition from day to night.

We are on an inevitable path, though, to this twilight. By 2100, if we do nothing to curb it, the earth’s atmosphere is projected to contain 900 parts per million of carbon dioxide (CO2), up from 380 ppm today, which is up from 280 ppm in the pre-industrial age. In other words, in less than 100 years, we will triple our CO2 emissions, which have taken 250 years to rise by slightly more than one-third. This is just one measure of the escalating destruction of our planet. Another is the exponential increase in the number of species we have eradicated in the last 100 years by deforestation–and the proportion of species that will be made extinct by climate change in the next 45-50 (between 15 to 37% by 2050, according to a January 2004 Nature article).

Mr. Weisman–as much as I appreciate your long-term view, I can’t buy it. We will not get to your 1,000 year recovery scenario. We have less than 50 years to dramatically and unequivocally turn back the clock on climate change, on the destruction of habitat, on greenhouse gas emissions and on species extinction. If not, there will not be much left to recover.

I leave you with a poem. In the end, I can’t process this kind of information with scientific facts, journal articles or non-fiction treatises. I need poetry and literature to fully grasp the beauty of what we are destroying, and to galvanize me into the action required to save it.

We Have A Beautiful Mother

Alice Walker, Earthling Poems, 1965-1990 Complete

We have a beautiful

mother

Her hills

are buffaloes

Her buffaloes

hills.

We have a beautiful

mother

Her oceans

are wombs

Her wombs

oceans.

We have a beautiful

mother

Her teeth

the white stones

at the edge

of the water

the summer

grasses

her plentiful

hair.

We have a beautiful

mother

Her green lap

immense

Her brown embrace

eternal

Her blue body

everything

we know.

What’s Up On Hump Day!

Mid-Week Highlights!

It’s SYTYCD tonight–Top 6! Mark and Courtney are likely in trouble, but let’s see if there’s another upset this week. They will all need to be in top form tonight, and the choreography will make or break them. I hope we get Mandy Moore back. Can’t wait … I’ll try to get my review up quickly this week, but I’m in post-vacation mode at work, and so quite busy. So check in again here frequently (bookmark the site or subscribe to my feed–look up and to the right; it’s the orange box that says “posts”).

I’ve added a daily quotation to the page, and I’m keeping these on a static sub-page called “WoW” (Words of Wisdom) Archive. I’m pulling these from some of my own personal faves that I’ve been collecting for years. You will see lots of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, some snark, and many that are inspirational to me about art, culture and the flaws and foibles of human nature. Many of them have a double, or triple, meaning. I like things that can be interpreted multiple ways. Ambiguity. Random juxtaposition. These things, in and of themselves, inspire creativity and lateral thinking.

What I’m reading right now: Blindness, José Saramago. It’s a bit harrowing, but I trust the reviews I’ve read (and the fact that it won a Nobel Prize for Literature). It feels to me very much like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Possibly even bleaker. It has been made into a movie (another one that will be premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival) starring one of my favourite actresses, Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo and Gael Garcia Bernal. I will be doing my darndest to get to see this one and The Secret Life of Bees, also premiering here in September. Ideally, I will have a review of the novel up sometime on the weekend.

And now, for something truly uplifting: After the jump.