Life without people

Maybe it's all the real-life disasters lately, but TV programming currently includes several shows that give us all a look at what Earth would be like if the human race suddenly and completely vanished. I saw an episode of History Channel's "Life After People," or something like that, which is a series, and found it pretty fascinating. The producers of that show go to the actual ruins and remains of abandoned cities and other manufactured structures, and use those findings to project what would happen on a massive scale.

Watched most of National Geographic Channel's "Aftermath: Population Zero," and was quite impressed with a few things. Number One, whoever wrote that show seems to believe that human beings don't belong on Earth. One phrase the narrator repeated a few times -- apparently so we wouldn't forget it -- is "It took 10,000 years for man to impose his will on the planet...."

In your dreams.

I think about Hurricane Katrina and Mt. St. Helens, the last "big one" in L.A. about 10 years ago (I have relatives who lived near the epicenter in Northridge), the tsunami that wiped out whole islands and reshaped coastline in Southeast Asia a couple years ago, and my personal experience of being buried for upwards of three months under the blizzards that blanketed Chicago in both 1969 and 1979. Where I live, the old air raid sirens, designed to warn of the "man-made disaster" of a nuclear attack, now usually indicate that a tornado is likely to touch down dangeroulsy nearby. Tornados last an average of something like three minutes, yet, remarkably, they manage to return us all to a state of nature in that brief span.

In all these cases, it proves difficult-to-impossible to impose the will of mankind upon nature. And note -- many of these events occur in areas that have been highly tinkered with: some of the largest cities on the planet. Despite supposed Global Warming and all the artificial technology, I didn't see any hint of the car in front of my house from early January to mid-March and just got used to struggling through the canyons created by six to eight-foot high walls of snow in temperatures that didn't rise above zero for weeks at a stretch. Twice so far in my lifetime.

My relative in L.A. went outside his home after that impressive shaker a decade ago and said the landscape suddenly included fountains of water spouting from fire hydrants, broken gas mains shooting fire from cracks in the streets, and the cross atop a nearby church was bent and twisted upside down, though it remained on the steeple. His neighborhood, he said, "Looked like something out of 'The Exorcist.'"

But the main thing is, the authors of the NatGeo program work from the assumption that human beings just don't belong here. I suppose they are also proponents of the theory that we are all descended from the Annunaki, extraterrestrial beings who seeded earth primates with their intelligent genes. Else according to them, where did we come from?

Is it that the viewpoint of sociology and anthropology has saturated ecological studies? In sociology, as Margaret Meade and others pointed out, the very presence of the scientific observer tends to modify what they observe. I mean, if you stroll into a thatched-hut village of a pre-agricultural tribe, they're bound to be curious about your cell phone, gym shoes, and video camera, let alone the plastic bottles of Evian water and hermetically sealed packs of trail mix. The very sight of these objects is bound to change their lives forever.

Is this how ecologists study the biological systems on the planet? Sort of a "pretend I'm not here" kind of viewpoint? Just take the human race out of the equation?

That's absurd. Human beings are creatures of nature whether we like it or not. The planet has shaped us vastly more than we've been able to shape it. And I don't think that all of the artificial aerosol sprays mankind has ever injected into the atmosphere have had quite the impact of mankind's "accidental" introduction of a certain kind of flea into Europe in the 1500s, or of bringing African bees into South America, or fire ants into Georgia. And we can't even control these man-made events once they get started.

Have to laugh. When ecologists think of themselves, do they conjure up images of Masters of the Universe who can strike a deathblow to Earth by stabbing an "ozone hole" in the atmosphere with their pinky fingers? Do they believe that they -- or the government, really -- can wave the magic wand of cap-and-trade and return the earth to "a state of nature"? Is the environmentalist's view of a "state of nature" at all desirable? Do you really want to live in a sod hut and hunt buffalo every summer? Or dig a big hole a yard or so from the Mississippi and wait for it to fill up with water, then wait for the mud in it to settle, then use it to make catmint tea over a campfire? Sound like paradise?

You know, a city is one of the most natural things on earth. It reflects and was caused by the biological requirements of a major and pretty successful species. So, we kill mosquitoes. They also kill us. Is the latter more acceptable?

And what, exactly, is the ultimate goal of the environmentalists?

There's a scene in "2001: A Space Odyssey" that comes to mind as an answer to this question. It's rather early in the film, when all these ape-like creatures are huddled together in a cave, terror in their eyes.

I, for one, am very happy that the human race has been able to use its innate survival skills to overcome a small -- very small -- part of that terror.