EARTH WITHOUT PEOPLE & A RESPONSE

Imagine Earth without people

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. Now just suppose they got their wish. Imagine that all the people on Earth - all 6.5 billion of us and counting - could be spirited away tomorrow, transported to a re-education camp in a far-off galaxy. (Let's not invoke the mother of all plagues to wipe us out, if only to avoid complications from all the corpses). Left once more to its own devices, Nature would begin to reclaim the planet, as fields and pastures reverted to prairies and forest, the air and water cleansed themselves of pollutants, and roads and cities crumbled back to dust. "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....

Eden Without Us?

The October 12 edition of New Scientist magazine ("Science Fact not Science Fiction") offered an article called "Imagine Earth without people" (online version ). Author Bob Holmes imagines what is evidently meant to be a heart-warming future in which all humans disappear from the planet instantaneously and things begin to "work their way back to a natural state" - "a natural state" being "the way they were before humans interfered." To begin with, then, we are to assume that the rise of mind, of consciousness, the development of language, the invention of civilization - all these and their implications - are somehow not "natural," and that their presence on the planet for these hundred thousand years or so has amounted only to "interference." Holmes writes as though he had in mind a peculiar theory of panspermia, in which seeds of our uniquely predatory species have drifted through interstellar space for eons, infecting first one and then another planet with their deadly spawn. Earth's bad luck was to have been in the wrong place and the wrong time. Holmes carefully traces out the changes that would occur in the very near term, such as the collapse of many structures (old fashioned masonry ones holding out the longest), and then at progressively longer intervals. One of the first effects, as power stations run out of fuel, is the elimination of "light pollution" of the night sky over formerly populated areas. This effect of artificial illumination was dubbed "pollution" by astronomers decades ago and is perfectly justified, given their special needs. Why it is to be thought of as pollution more generally is unexplained by Holmes, as is why its elimination would be a welcome development when there is no one left to look at the stars....