An interesting article on this subject
http://www.chicagotribune.com/entert...,6996429.story
Chicago ... without us
Imagining a crumbling, rotting, ratless urban wasteland; the squirrels move in
By Patrick T. Reardon
Tribune staff reporter
December 11, 2007
Standing on Navy Pier, scanning the imposing forest of proud Loop towers, Alan Weisman envisions a Chicago without us.
He sees roofs leaking, frozen pipes bursting, basements flooding and falcons nesting in the former offices of corporate go-getters. He pictures Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks" and Georges Seurat's "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte -- 1884" covered with mold, ruined. Trees growing out of the State Street pavement. Bricks crumbling to dust. Fires. Vines crawling up the sides of buildings. And skyscrapers with weakened foundations tumbling down.
"If a building topples," he says, "it'll bring down other buildings, just like a big tree falling in the forest will bring down other big trees."
Weisman, an environmental journalist who lives in western Massachusetts, is the author of "The World Without Us." The book, based on interviews with scientists and other experts around the world, describes what would be likely to happen across the planet if, for some reason, human beings were suddenly to vanish all at once.
The disappearance of people from an otherwise undamaged landscape is a favorite Hollywood story line. "I Am Legend," set for release Friday and based on a Richard Matheson novel, stars Will Smith as a scientist who, somehow immune, appears to be the only survivor of a deadly virus -- except for the creepy mutants who stalk him. If that sounds familiar, it may be because two earlier films, "The Omega Man" (1971) and "The Last Man on Earth" (1964), used the same story from the same Matheson book.
Weisman's point, though, isn't to creep anyone out. His isn't a book of horror. It's a book of wonder and of warning.
He's clearly fascinated by the power of nature -- by the relentless push of the natural world to retake possession of a planet that human beings have made their own. At the same time, he's alarmed at much of what we people have done to that planet.
The result could have been yet another environmentalist sermon on the evils of a gluttonous, self-obsessed humanity. Instead, Weisman came up with a gimmick -- the disappearance of humans -- that puts the subject at arm's length.
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Among those interesting facts:
- Humans use more than a third of the world's land surface for food production.
- In the ocean, north of Hawaii, there is a 1,000-mile-wide area containing 3 million tons of trash -- bottle caps, fish netting, six-pack rings, limp balloons, plastic bags and other detritus of human civilization -- that oceanographers have dubbed the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
- Over the past half-century, humans have produced 1 billion tons of plastic.
Virtually all of that plastic remains somewhere on the planet, and, even if humans disappeared tomorrow, it would stick around for a long, long time.
How long?
"No one knows," writes Weisman, "because no plastic has died a natural death yet. It took today's microbes ... a long time after plants appeared to learn to eat lignin and cellulose. More recently, they've even learned to eat oil. None can digest plastic yet, because 50 years is too short a time for evolution to develop the necessary biochemistry."
But, someday, that will happen.
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"The foliage in [Lincoln Park] will definitely be the seed source from which the forests will start succeeding down the streets and eventually inside of the buildings," he says. "Winds will blow all kinds of seeds out of the park."
Squirrels in high-rises
Helping the process along will be squirrels throughout the city, taking up residence in bungalows, two-flats and high-rises. They'll bring in seeds of all sorts, and, pretty soon, trees will be growing out of living room windows.
"Within a few decades," he says, "you'll find a tremendous wild snarl of stuff growing over buildings, coming up from the streets. Just imagine, no one maintaining the streets anymore. And the plastic bags would be clogging the sewers, and you'll get all this leaf litter because nobody would be raking leaves."
Gone will be the cockroaches, which only survive in the northern climate in the comfort of our heated buildings.
Gone, too, will be the rats -- no garbage for them to eat, and a lot more raptors to prey on them.
On the other hand, Weisman says, "You'll get wildlife coming back in here. Certainly there will be plenty of coyotes. They will outcompete the dogs. Eventually wolves will probably range all over America. They'll be eating deer. There's going to be plenty of deer.
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What about Navy Pier?
Navy Pier itself, where Weisman is standing, Chicago's urban playpen, with its mix of glass, brick and steel structures, including the 150-foot-tall Ferris wheel, will have a mixed future.
"The buildings on top will probably be more vulnerable than the pier itself," Weisman says. "Any building, if it's not being maintained constantly, is going to start springing leaks within five or 10 years. If those leaks are not attended to, then there's going to be a cascade of events that will start decomposing things rather quickly."
By contrast, the 20,000 wood pilings that have been holding up the pier since it was built in 1916 are likely to survive much longer.
"Wood, if kept away from oxygen, can last a long time," he says. "There have been many cases of shipments of lumber on boats that got sunk and ended up down at the bottom of a lake. That lumber was salvageable years later. In my book, there's a description of this wooden ship that's something like 2,300 years old that was found off Cyprus. It was preserved perfectly because it was away from the air and it wasn't being allowed to decay."
The point of all this fantasizing, of course, is to help readers understand the impact humans have on the world -- with the unstated hope that maybe we'll start to do a better job of stewardship.
But Weisman adds that, with the book finished, he realized there was a subtext as well.
"If it weren't for the maintenance people, the ones who pump the subways and keep the bridges painted, the people who maintain our streets and roads and keep our power plants going -- without them, civilization would crumble," he says.
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A bronze Lincoln beats a steel Picasso
In a Chicago without us, no one would be around to take care of public art. So which would last longer -- the 50-foot-tall steel sculpture, designed by Pablo Picasso, at Daley Plaza or the Augustus Saint-Gaudens bronze statue of a standing Abraham Lincoln behind the Chicago History Museum?
He explains that steel is an alloy created through the application of intense heat to iron and other ingredients. Given enough time, he says, "Nature will gradually break it down to its most elemental energy state, and it will eventually be oxidized."
In other words, it'll rust away.
"Bronze, on the other hand," he says, "is almost pure copper. It's 90 percent copper. It's very, very durable because it's much closer to its elemental energy state. When it reacts with oxygen or other elements in the ecosystem, it tends to form this patina that's kind of a protective layer around it."
-- Patrick T. Reardon
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