52 pages • 1 hour read
Alan WeismanThe World Without Us
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Chapters 9-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2, Chapter 9 Summary: “Polymers Are Forever”
Marine biologist Richard Thompson has spent his career studying ocean-borne plastic waste at the port of Plymouth in southwestern England. Thompson and his team discovered that beach detritus contains vast amounts of “nurdles”: tiny plastic pellets from which larger plastic products are manufactured. Microplastics are also used to scour paint from boats and aircraft, and in cosmetic exfoliants in place of sea salt or ground-up seeds. Additionally, just as the slow mechanical action of waves and tides gradually turns rocks into sand, it also grinds plastic objects into ever tinier fragments, small enough to be consumed by tiny organisms. Even if all human activity ended tomorrow, Thompson says, marine organisms would be dealing with microplastics for thousands of years.
The first synthetic plastic, Bakelite, was invented by Belgian chemist Leo Baekeland in 1907. His fellow chemists promptly began developing new types of plastic, including polyvinyl chloride (PVC), Styrofoam, and nylon, which, in the form of nylon stockings, contributed to plastics’ widespread popularity in the post-World War II era. The most “world-changing” plastic invention of all, Weisman writes, was “transparent packaging, including self-clinging wraps of polyvinyl chloride and polyethylene, which let us see the foods wrapped inside them and kept them preserved longer than ever before” (119).
Contrary to popular opinion, plastics take up a relatively small amount of space in landfills compared to construction debris and paper products; however, plastic waste is a much more serious problem in the oceans. In 1997 a California sailor named Captain Charles Moore came upon the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a vast vortex of floating trash in the horse latitudes of the western Pacific Ocean, gathered by currents from the entire Pacific Rim. It so horrified him that he made understanding the Patch his life’s work. Moore learned that its contents were 90% plastic and that only around 20% of this plastic was dumped from ships at sea, while 80% was originally discarded on land: “It had blown off garbage trucks or out of landfills, spilled from railroad shipping containers and washed down storm drains, sailed down rivers or wafted on the wind” (123). Returning to the Patch the following year with a trawling device, Moore found six times more plastic by weight than plankton on the ocean surface. He found nurdles—which were being manufactured at a rate of about 250 billion pounds a year—everywhere, including in the bodies of jellyfish and other filter feeders. A Japanese colleague discovered that nurdles both attracted and absorbed toxic substances, including dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). These substances have been banned since the 1970s, but their presence in plastics ensures their long-term survival: “Like time-release capsules, pre-1970s plastic flotsam will gradually leak PCBs into the ocean for centuries” (124). Furthermore, because plastics are so new, scientists have no idea what will happen over time to their chemical constituents or additives.
In 2005, Moore estimated the size of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch at 10 million square miles, and it is not the only one: Six other major tropical oceanic gyres are similarly filled with trash. All of this plastic has been produced in little more than 50 years, but plastic accumulates rapidly because it biodegrades extremely slowly, if at all. However, plastics researcher Dr. Anthony Andrady predicts that microbes will eventually evolve the capacity to digest plastic, just as they previously learned to eat oil: “It’s just a matter of waiting for evolution to catch up with the materials we are making” (128).
Part 2, Chapter 10 Summary: “The Petro Patch”
Mosquitos would benefit from human extinction, their numbers no longer limited by efforts to exterminate them or destruction of their habitat through wetland drainage. They would also inherit ample manmade habitat in the form of rubber automobile tires that fill with rainwater. Humans will leave behind many billions of vulcanized rubber tires, which are not biodegradable; their longevity will depend on the degree to which they’re exposed to direct sunlight.
Synthetic rubber is made from crude oil. The world’s largest synthetic rubber producer, the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company’s plant in Houston, is located within “the largest concentration of petroleum refineries, petrochemical companies, and storage structures on Earth” (132). This “industrial megaplex” stretches without interruption for 50 miles from the east side of Houston, Texas to the Gulf of Mexico. Vast networks of above- and underground pipelines thread throughout the complex. Deep below the surface are some 500 natural salt domes that have been converted into massive storage caverns for explosive gases. If humanity disappeared, these would remain for a very long time.
Weisman questions “[h]ow nature [could] possibly dismantle, let alone decontaminate, the great Texas petroleum patch” (134). Without humans to maintain them, fuel-storage tanks would either corrode through the bottom or be blown up by lightning-ignited vapors. Fires in natural-gas wells, which can be sparked by static electricity alone, would burn until all the fuel was consumed, releasing enough particulates into the atmosphere to mimic a nuclear winter. A plant inspector identified only as E.C. tells Weisman,
They would also release chlorinated compounds like dioxins and furans from burning plastics. And you’d get lead, chromium, and mercury attached to the soot. Europe and North America […] would be the most contaminated. But the clouds would disperse through the world. The next generation of plants and animals, the ones that didn’t die, might need to mutate in ways that could impact evolution (140).
Exotic invasive Chinese tallow trees would spread through grasslands. Dredged ship channels would refill and periodically flood, adding to the flooding caused by land subsidence (a side-effect of extracting oil and groundwater) and sea-level rise. Eventually, oysters would cover the oxidizing metal. Even further into the future, the layers of silt and oysters would be compressed into limestone. This would have a “rusty streak”—the remains of the former industrial complex.
Part 2, Chapter 11 Summary: “The World Without Farms”
As a rule, agricultural lands have a much greater environmental impact than cities do: “Nearly 12 percent of the planet’s landmass is cultivated, compared to about 3 percent occupied by towns and cities. When grazing land is included, the amount of Earthly terrain dedicated to human food production is more than one-third of the world’s land surface” (146). In a world without humans, Weisman wonders whether agricultural lands would revert to their former state—and what that state looked like.
Weisman identifies New England forests as the key to answering this question, at least in the US. This region was sparsely populated before European colonization, and Europeans stopped farming there before the use of chemical pesticides and the introduction of invasive exotic vegetation became widespread. A posthuman New England “could return to what North America once looked like from Canada to northern Mexico: beaver dams spaced regularly on every stream, creating wetlands strung like fat pearls along their length, filled with ducks, muskrats, willets, and salamanders” (150).
The story of modern agriculture begins with fertilizer. John Bennet Lawes built the world’s first artificial fertilizer factory in England in 1841, selling “superphosphate” made from ground bones and sulfuric acid. He used a process invented by German chemist Justus von Liebig, later adding two nitrate mixtures. To determine the effectiveness of various mixtures, Lawes established a series of test plots on his family’s land at Rothamsted Manor. The plots remain, and archived samples of plants and soils have been preserved in glass jars and tins since 1843. Weisman imagines alien scientists visiting a posthuman Earth and puzzling over the archive’s evidence of changes in soil composition resulting from industrialization, the traces of plutonium from early-1950s atomic-bomb tests, and the increasing presence after 1950 of toxins like PCBs, polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), and dioxins, introduced in pesticides or defoliants.
The Rothamsted archive also records large increases in levels of metals such as zinc (from factory smoke and livestock feed supplements) and lead (from vehicle fuel, industrial exhaust, and coal-fired power plants). These metals will linger for a very long time, especially in poorly drained clay or peat soils: zinc for 3,700 years, cadmium for 7,500, lead for 35,000, and chromium for 70,000. By contrast, the Rothamsted archive shows declining levels of PCBs—a form of persistent organic pollutant (POP)—in the soil after their use was outlawed in 1977. However, the non-biodegradable chemicals eventually end up in the ocean, bioaccumulating in the fat cells of whatever consumes them. Elevated levels of PCBs have been found in the breast milk of Inuits and Laplanders, whose traditional diets include seals, fish, and polar bears, all of which are high on the food chain and have high fat content. In a posthuman world, metals and POPs will continue to filter through plants, with some species adapting to tolerate the pollutants and others dying out. The impacts of the phosphates and nitrates in fertilizers, on the other hand, are most apparent not in the soils but in downstream water bodies, where farm runoff causes eutrophication. However, if humans stopped dumping nutrients, the water would very quickly clean itself.
Many scientists are concerned about the possible long-term impacts of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), which were pioneered in the mid-1990s. Crops such as Monsanto’s suite of “Roundup ready” corn, soy, and canola—designed to withstand glyphosate, the active ingredient in this brand of pesticide—are considered doubly dangerous. Their sustained use has prompted the evolution of Roundup-resistant weed strains that require even more herbicides to control, and they can invade neighboring fields through cross-pollination. Weisman warns that the introduction of these genes into the environment has unpredictable consequences: “Some will be roundly trounced by competition toughened over eons by evolution. It’s a fair bet, though, that others will pounce on an opportunity to adapt, and evolve themselves” (162).
Global warming will turn many former croplands into tropical rain forest, but beneath the tree canopy, the soil will bear traces of humans, just as the charcoal that permeates Amazonian soil offers evidence that paleo-humans burned the forest for cultivation thousands of years ago.
Part 2, Chapters 9-11 Analysis
In Chapter 9, the focus shifts from the impermanence of human edifices to the permanence of plastic, which, thanks to its non-biodegradability and ubiquity, is for Weisman a symbol of humans’ impact on the environment. Weisman’s language is frankly condemnatory: Plastic “embodies our collective guilt over trashing the environment” (120), the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is “a widening horror of industrial excretion” (121), and a Japanese researcher undertook “a gruesome mission to personally research exactly what evils were leaching from garbage dumps” (124). Weisman wonders: “Were there any benign, less-immortal substitutes that civilization could convert to, lest the world be plastic-wrapped evermore?” (125). This religiously inflected language suggests that plastic is almost godlike, as does researcher Anthony Andrady’s comparison of plastic buried in landfills or on the ocean bottom to Egyptian pyramids, the tombs of kings who were worshipped as gods. However, the chapter ends on a hopeful note, with nature ultimately recovering from humanity’s insults: Microbes may eventually evolve the capacity to digest leftover plastic, and even if they don’t, geologic upheavals will eventually transform it into a different substance. “Change is the hallmark of nature” (128), Andrady tells Weisman—one of several expressions of the idea that Nature Is Flux. The Earth will ultimately erase our civilizations but also our poisons.
In Chapter 10, Houston’s “Great Petro Patch” serves as one of the book’s most extreme examples of Anthropocene precarity. Manufacturing, storing, and transporting so many toxic and explosive substances on such a vast scale in one place is inherently dangerous, Weisman suggests. He drives home this point by detailing various potential breakdown scenarios in different facilities. “Even on a normal operating day, a petrochemical plant is a ticking time bomb” (138), warns the anonymous plant inspector E.C. Houston’s petro patch has been made even more vulnerable by two hallmarks of the Anthropocene: sea-level rise and drilling-induced land subsidence. Even here, however, the artifacts of human activity would eventually fade into near imperceptibility—the “odd, intermittent rusty streak” Weisman imagines in the area’s limestone (144).
Chapter 11 continues in a less apocalyptic tone, opening with a discussion of the old-growth forests of New England and moving on to the Rothamsted agricultural experiment station. Nevertheless, Weisman suggests that the contents of the Rothamsted soil archive might lead future alien scientists to “wonder if we were trying to kill ourselves” because the most enduring artifacts of millennia of human farming will be toxins (156): Heavy metals and POPs will linger in the soil, or be bioaccumulated in fatty tissues and recycled by plants, for thousands or tens of thousands of years.
