Causes explosions at every nuclear reactor, chemical plant, and petroleum refinery

The more environmentally conscious have all had the thought, whether they admit it or not: what would the world be like if there were no humans here?

That question is at the heart of a wonderful, relevatory book by Alan Weisman titled The World Without Us.

Weisman’s premise is simplicity itself: imagine what would happen to the world if humanity abruptly disappeared. He doesn’t spend more than a moment speculating as to the means of that disappearance—that’s left to a much darker book than this one, which is, despite its subject matter, inherently optimistic.

Weisman is a veteran freelance journalist, not a scientist, and this fact hugely aids his book: instead of flogging a pet theory, he exercises his considerable skills in getting all the right people to give the quotes of their lives.

What if humans vanished tomorrow? That’s the question he poses to all the experts he interviews—hydrologists, microbiologists, paleoecologists, conservationalists, archeologists, and dozens of others, and the answers he gets, and the pictures they paint, are stark, indelible, and eye-opening.

The book’s premise would seem to make it the perfect vessel for an extended tirade against [hu]mankind’s many environmental abuses. Early on he Weisman seems ready to set up such an approach:

In the 1960s, British atmospheric scientist, chemist, and marine biologist James Lovelock proposed his Gaia hypothesis, which describes the earth as behaving like a super-organism, its soil, atmosphere, and oceans composing a circulatory system regulated by its resident flora and fauna. He now fears that the living planet is suffering from a high fever, and that we are the virus.

But there’s no rancor in Weisman’s approach; he’s too busy with the facts to let rancor get in the way of a great story.

The story here is: if humankind were to miraculously disappear tomorrow, what specifically would happen to the rest of the world? The question itself is fanciful, admittedly: a catastrophe that would very quickly eliminate only humans is unbelievably unlikely—even a super-virus would invariably leave pockets of humanity still alive. Weisman’s hypothetical is in this sense overly neat, an exercise designed as much to extract real-world solutions as to play out imaginary scenarios. This book is in the best sense of the term a call to action rather than a doomsday scenario. This central attitude is present throughout the book: fully understanding the enormous hurts mankind is currently doing to the planet is the best way to stop or even reverse them.

So: what if humans suddenly up and vanished? In very specific terms, what would happen?

That’s where the fun begins (one of the greatest charms of Weisman’s book is its sense of fun), getting some of the world’s smartest people to speculate about a human-free tomorrow.

Turns out the changes would happen pretty much immediately. Needless to say, the many types of head and body lice who’ve specifically evolved to feast on the sloughed-off skin cells (you’ve got thousands of such microscopic creatures on your eyelashes right now) would be fatally discommoded. Two or three days later the subways of New York, most of which are kept dry by manual pumps, would flood. This would be the case for most of the world’s subways systems (although not, amazingly, the English Channel Tunnel, which was carved from a single geologic layer and so wouldn’t flood—although Weisman points out it would be pitch-dark 35-mile trek for any enterprising animal wanting to cross over; Weisman might be wrong about the pitch-black part, since some of the Chunnel’s iron-bracketed battery-run lighting fixture’s will stay lit for many years, even untended by humans). Likewise all the world’s dams would quickly silt up without manual pumping, spilling over or breaking, flooding back to the sea and on the way wiping out all human cities built on the floodplains in their path.

The pyramids of Giza, the Panama Canal, the Great Wall of China…within a dozen years all would start to disintegrate without constant human upkeep (oddly enough, Weisman maintains Mount Rushmore would be spared a similar fate, although in this one instance he might not have his facts entirely right: the Black Hills are as avid to resurrect as any other abused greenspace—in a few dozen years, Lincoln, Jefferson, et al would be overgrown beyond recognition, same as ordinary folks).

In a week, two at the outside, the fuel supply to the generators circulating cooling waters to the world’s nuclear reactors would be gone. What happens after that is a nightmare the world has already rehearsed, at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl—catastrophic nuclear despoliation of the surrounding environment:

If everyone on earth disappeared, 441 nuclear plants, several with multiple reactors, would briefly run on autopilot until, one by one, they overheated. As refueling schedules are usually staggered so that some reactors generate while others are down, possibly half would burn and the rest would melt. Either way, the spilling of radioactivity into the air and into nearby bodies of water would be formidable, and it would last, in the case of enriched uranium, into geologic time.

This is the high point of Weisman’s optimism, this very point: how localized, how survivable, would the meltdown of those 441 nuclear reactors be (in a forgivable civilian reflex, he forgets to tally in the 80 or 90 additional reactors constantly afloat in the world’s various nuclear warships and submarines)? Weisman implies these meltdowns would be relatively localized events, creating “hot” areas surrounding wildlife would learn to avoid until it was safe. He cites the speed with which wildlife returned to the neighborhood of Chernobyl, and it’s hard to argue with that. Nevertheless, it’s unsurprising that many of the experts he quotes think along gloomier lines. Groundwater contamination, soil contamination, and most of all irradiated air patterns—there are experts who take these things into account and reason from them that these 500 meltdowns might well spell the ultimate strangulation of the planet. Certainly this scenario has been the bread and butter of every writer of post apocalyptic science fiction in the nuclear age, but Weisman tries to smile on the dire. He prefers to listen to the songbirds of Chernobyl.

Of course, nuclear reactors aren’t the only dead man’s switches humans have created and maintained. Chemical plants and petroleum refineries work night and day under the explicit assumption that there will always be human hands to tend that work. Should that work cease, Weisman maintains, the results would be harsh but not catastrophic. But some of his experts, such as chemical plant inspector E.C., disagree:

But imagine a runaway reaction with burning plants throwing up clouds of stuff like hydrogen cyanide. There would be massive poisoning of the air in the Texas-Louisiana chemical alley. Follow the trade winds and see what happens.

Follow the trade winds and see what happens, yes, and this is the tenor of the more bloody-minded of Weisman’s interviewees: that petrochemical plants and nuclear reactors, run wild and fed by the wind and water-currents of the world, will poison the earth beyond all hope of any life whatsoever remaining.