The human created world that surrounds us is in constant need of maintenance and support. This is an obvious statement to any one that has spent time walking through the woods and come across an old junk car or an old railroad spike . These human-made objects are at most 50 years old, and are already over come with rust and degradation. The few objects that have survived for hundreds, if not thousands of years, have either had constant upkeep, where made of fine and treated material (not the disposable products of the last 50 plus years of human existence) or where fossilized and preserved through random dumb luck. What this means is the artificial, human world, that surrounds us - the houses, the roads, the high-speed internet cables, the subways, ect- that make our current lives "easier," "more manageable" and "privileged" is incredible fragile, as can be seen in this photo gallery. Without constant upkeep, without reproducing and manufacturing new products, the vestiges of human civilization will have a short lived existence. How long do we give our current, cookie cutter, homes before the cement foundation and floor is broken open by roots, till water destroys the roof and warps and rots the wood, until the entire home and neighborhood is reclaimed by natural forces? One year? A decade?
This topic has been brought up by the author Alan Weisman in The World Without Us. In this book, Weisman argues that the vast majority of the human artificial world would degrade and be overcome by natural forces within a few years. The
This does not mean that life, either human or otherwise, will not flourish on the Earth. Many environmentalists, radical or not, seem to believe that we are killing the world; that the Earth itself is in danger of destruction. The comedian George Carlin put it best on The View when he said:
GEORGE CARLIN: The planet is fine. The people are fucked. Because everyone is trying to save the planet. The planet doesn’t need that. The planet will take care of itself. People are selfish. And that's what they're doing is trying to save the planet for themselves to have a nicer place to live. They don't care about the planet in theory. They just care about having a comfortable place. And these people with the fires and the floods and everything, they overbuild, they put nature to the test and they get what's coming to them. That's what I say….There are places that are going to go away. The map is going to change and that's because -- people think nature is outside of them. They don't take into them the idea that we are part of it. They say, "oh, we're going for a nature walk. We're going to the country because we like nature." Nature is in here. And if you're in tune with it, like the Indians, the Hopis, especially, the balance of life, the balance, the harmony of nature, if you understand that, you don't overbuild. You don’t do all this moron stuff. There are too many people-
George is right. The planet will take care of itself. When humans stop laboring to reproduce and maintain the artificial environment surrounding us, it will fall apart, degrade, and slowly compost away. Everything but the toxic waste, CO2 emissions, and nuclear byproducts of current human systems. What we can be certain of is that life will continue on this planet. My only hope is that we, as a species, will be part of that life.
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