The remarkable thing is how strangely comforting it is to know this. Not just because of their longevity (and 'biodegradable' plastic bags are, sadly, not as biodegradable as we have been led to believe), but because, in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre (also known as the horse latitudes, or, more recently, as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch), the amount of plastic circling around on top of and beneath the waves has already passed beyond computation.įew books I have read have done as good a job, then, of putting humanity in its place. The gimcrack, slipshod, ecologically disastrous building developments in Northern Cyprus may last just 10 years, all things being well.Īs for the plastic bags. And the underground network of cave homes in Cappadocia may last even longer. The Channel tunnel (incidentally, this is a very un-parochial book - it ranges across the globe) will last for ages, although rising seawater will probably slosh in from the French side. Your best bet, with the notable exception of the carvings on Mount Rushmore, is to store everything underground. Weisman is very good at describing the decay of man-made artefacts, from your own home to the underground system of New York. Although whether these containers won't have already leaked their contents by then is another question altogether. I did not know, for instance, that ships the length of three football pitches entering the locks of the Panama Canal have only two feet of clearance on each side that there may well be at least one billion annual bird deaths from flying into glass in the United States alone or that graphic designers have been called in to imagine what warnings against coming too close to nuclear waste containers will be comprehensible 10,000 or more years from now.

That said, the science and factual stuff is, almost invariably, mind-boggling. This is partly down to Weisman's little touches of description: we learn, for instance, that the director of the Harvard Forest laboratory, David Foster, looks 10 years younger than his 50 years, and is 'fit and lean, the hair falling across his forehead still dark', which is not strictly speaking information that gets us any further in understanding our desecration of the planet, but does at least stop the book from being an unbroken stream of science. It really is quite hard to close it and get on with other things. The book is, moreover, designed to be readable. But there is something about a description of our own extinction that pulls at the heart, like gravity, and it's not just like the thrill you might get at the thought of reading your own obituary it makes you think there really is something to Freud's concept of the death wish. This might sound like a message you've already heard - and, sympathetic though most readers of this paper would be to the notion, you might feel you've heard and read enough on the subject.

The world without us book