Humans Off Earth Now

I was reading New Scientist, as I often do, and came across an article entitled 'Earth Without Humans'. The article begins thus:

Humans are undoubtedly the most dominant species the Earth has ever known. In just a few thousand years we have swallowed up more than a third of the planet's land for our cities, farmland and pastures. By some estimates, we now commandeer 40 per cent of all its productivity. And we're leaving quite a mess behind: ploughed-up prairies, razed forests, drained aquifers, nuclear waste, chemical pollution, invasive species, mass extinctions and now the looming spectre of climate change. If they could, the other species we share Earth with would surely vote us off the planet.

The premise of the article is that the animals do vote us off the Earth, and their wish is, democratically, granted. What then? How long will it take for the Earth to recover from our poisonous influence? Because, let's face it, the only reason that we don't view humans, as did the King of Brobdignag in Gulliver's Travels, as "The most odious and pernicious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the face of the earth", is because we are human. That is the only reason. All information available shows the King of Brobdignag's assessment to be true. Our influence upon the Earth has been wholly poisonous, and therefore, after our disappearance, the only sensible question is, how long till the stored up poison is flushed out of the system?

Of course, one little symptom of our pernicious nature is the way in which we project our own vile and selfish values everywhere. Would animals really vote us off the Earth? We would certainly vote off the Earth any species that did to us what we do to the rest of the planet. That's for sure. But perhaps animals are not as selfish as that. I once heard the story of a man who had survived a shipwreck and was adrift in a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific. He would have starved, had it not been for some friendly dolphins who came up beside the boat and exposed their bellies for him to harpoon, so that he might have something to eat. Now, I'm not sure if this story is apocryphal, but let's suppose it's true. The wise, beautiful and gracious dolphins offer themselves to save the life of another. That other, the scraggy human, thinks nothing of it. I am a human, therefore I am at the apex of all things. Great, this dolphin's sacrificing itself! I can live! Mmmm, this is delicious! Would a human being ever dream of offering him or herself to, let's see, a pack of starving wolves? Of course not. See, whatever way you look at it, humans are utterly vile. And maybe the dolphins only actually wanted their bellies tickled, anyway, and the man, in his I-am-God's-gift-to-nature way, made his own interpretation.

Anyway, my point is, maybe nature would be too gracious to vote us off the planet. Then again, if you are into Gaia theory, not in James Lovelock's original form, but in its mystical reinterpretation, then you might think that nature is, in fact, in the process of voting us off the planet right now, and that the hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, viruses and so on, are going to get worse and worse until the human vermin are all finally exterminated.

Is this a depressing thought?

Well, reading the article, although some of it filled me with a sense of cosmic melancholy at the transience of all things, and the ultimate dominion of decay, I found this offered a way of looking at our current environmental problems that was more consoling than depressing.

"The sad truth is, once the humans get out of the picture, the outlook starts to get a lot better," says John Orrock, a conservation biologist at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, California. But would the footprint of humanity ever fade away completely, or have we so altered the Earth that even a million years from now a visitor would know that an industrial society once ruled the planet?

The article goes on to track the changes that would take place, immediately, then within days, then within years. The first thing to go, of course, would be electricity. Without humans to maintain them, roads, buildings, and so on, would begin to crumble surpringly soon. Offered as an illustration of this is the example of Pripyat, which lies inside the exclusion zone created by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster:

"From a distance, you would still believe that Pripyat is a living city, but the buildings are slowly decaying," says Ronald Chesser, an environmental biologist at Texas Tech University in Lubbock who has worked extensively in the exclusion zone around Chernobyl. "The most pervasive thing you see are plants whose root systems get into the concrete and behind the bricks and into doorframes and so forth, and are rapidly breaking up the structure. You wouldn't think, as you walk around your house every day, that we have a big impact on keeping that from happening, but clearly we do. It's really sobering to see how the plant community invades every nook and cranny of a city."

Apparently, for roofs to fall in and buildings to collapse takes a matter of decades. Wood structures are the first to go, and all buildings of a jerry-built nature. Then come all monuments to hubris, such as skyscrapers and suspension bridges, which are more precarious than masonry structures. The ruins, of course, will last some thousands of years before crumbling, Ozymandias-like, into oblivion.

I was particularly pleased and intrigued to read of wolves appearing in the Chernobyl exclusion zone:

The first few years after people evacuated the zone, rats and house mice flourished, and packs of feral dogs roamed the area despite efforts to exterminate them. But the heyday of these vermin proved to be short-lived, and already the native fauna has begun to take over. Wild boar are 10 to 15 times as common within the Chernobyl exclusion zone as outside it, and big predators are making a comeback. "I've never seen a wolf in the Ukraine outside the exclusion zone. I've seen many of them inside," says Chesser.

I won't go into all the details of what will recover and what won't recover, should Humans all be transported OFF EARTH NOW. Towards the end of the article, though, is this serene paragraph:

All things considered, it will only take a few tens of thousands of years at most before almost every trace of our present dominance has vanished completely. Alien visitors coming to Earth 100,000 years hence will find no obvious signs that an advanced civilisation ever lived here.

The article concludes:

The humbling – and perversely comforting – reality is that the Earth will forget us remarkably quickly.

I'm well aware of the feelings of defiance that environmental causes can provoke. I have such feelings myself sometimes. Why did Mother Nature give birth to us in the first place if we are so inimical to her? Why were we ever cast out into the cold and hostile wilderness of this planet? We had to survive. We had to build shelters and find food, and make clothes. We were only trying to build some kind of comfortable life for ourselves. Is that a crime? And if one believes in a Cartesian deus ex machina – always handy if you want to be angry at something – one can rail against such a god, saying, "Why did you give us this hunger in our bellies, and this hunger in our hearts, and then put us in a world where all things are limited? Why did you tell us to go forth and multiply, knowing our numbers would choke the Earth?" And so on. I can even take the cold stance that, since everything is, in fact, a part of nature, it doesn't matter what happens. And, of course, it doesn't.

I've been thinking about this for a long time, but became violently depressed again after finding a link to this article on Momus' blog. The article concerns the fact that, due to overfishing, ocean life could be more or less wiped out within fifty years. Someone expressed the opinion on the blog that this was merely evolution. I replied as follows:

I don't think the problem is that fish aren't having sex, it's that we're eating them quicker than they can reproduce. Once numbers drop below a certain level, it's hard to ever get back to original numbers. Of course, all of this – anything you can think of – is within nature, and therefore could be called evolution. But that's another way of saying nothing's ugly, and another way of relieving ourselves of moral responsibilities. Personally, I do find human greed and short-sightedness ugly. I think human values are, in the main, wrong, and that they have created an ugly world. Just as in the film The Mission, we create an ugly world, and then we say, "That's just the way the world is."

Momus responded to my reply as follows:

We're not just talking about the natural cycle of extinction, we're talking about the possibility of all the wild species which live in the sea being wiped out, and within the lifetimes of people now living. When one species becomes so "successful" that it wipes out many of the others, it becomes very clear that this "success" itself is failure on a massive scale. We're failing the planet, and failing ourselves.

I responded to his as follows:

I agree completely. The most pernicious political concept ever is that of continual expansion. Things have really come to a head for the human race. People have talked about utopias in one form or another, and failed to acheive them, for centuries, but now, if we don't fundamentally change our values, it looks like we're done for, unless science manages to manufacture the kind of brave new world that will allow us to sustain our selfish habits even longer. But personally, I think that Mary Shelley was prophetic, and one way or another, our rape/enslavement/manipulation of nature has created and will continue to create monsters that will come back to us.

Whatever attitude we take in order to console or justify ourselves, as Momus has pointed out, when it comes right down to it, our 'success' is really our failure – failure on a massive scale.

Personally, I have more and more sympathy with the Church of Euthanasia and the Gaia Liberation Front. I no longer care so much if humans disappear. I even have more than a slight longing for a world without humans. My only regret would be that I could never be there to see it myself.