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An Inconvenient Move
By Neil Ransom | November 8, 2007
I just started reading the dreadfully interesting painfully detailed book, “The World Without Us,” by Alan Wiesman. The book is fairly straight forward…it’s about what would happen to the world if humans all disappeared today and nature had her chance to reclaim. As I delved deeper into the mysteries of the post rapture earth I found myself first wishing there was a way humans could coexist with a healthy environment, then hoping technology would save nature, and now thinking the only solution to the environmental problem is for all of us humans to pack up our bags and head to another planet. Seriously from what I’ve read we have tortured nature beyond the point of no return. Now every ecosystem on our poor little planet is so stressed they’re starting to act like an I.R.C. refugee case manager.
Maybe I have exaggerated a little. Nature is one hell of a fighter and will take back what ever she can get…and I mean whatever; streets, towns, garbage dumps, Las Vegas, Lake Chad, Geneva Steel, even a Wal Mart if you give her some time. The book is filled with anecdotal examples of abandoned human hot spots reclaimed by nature. Apparently the border between North and South Korea is one of the most biodiverse areas in the region because it is official no-mans-land and since the truce in 1960 no one has touched the place, leaving nature to do her thing. This got me thinking. Humans are stressing nearly every ecosystem on the planet through agriculture, housing development, mining, pollutants, and general wear and tear. So without killing off 90% of the world’s population (a real solution to the problem) what can be done to stop human impact on the earth. Here is my solution. Lets move every single person on the planet to one giant city located in North/South Dakota and Minnesota. According to my calculations if we turned just these three states into one giant city every human on the planet plus some could live with a population density a little less than New York’s currently population density. Just imagine with only .4% of the earths land surface occupied by humans, the planet with the other 99.4% of her land mass to regenerate herself back to health. 
Now I know we have to think about land for food cultivation, the mega relocation process, and the cleanup of our former populations centers…but that will all come, let’s not shy away from the only viable solution to date (except drastically reducing our consumption…but is that ever going to happen??). We could recycle all the old cities into our new mega city- St. Fargopollis. The worldwide effort would unify us all into a new age of peace and tolerance.
Tagged with: Earth • ecosystem • Environment • geneva_steel • human_impact_on_the_earth • Nature • population_density
November 16th, 2007 at 10:23 pm
Hi Neil,
Had some questions for you, and they are real, they are not in any way facetious or hostile. You offered three potential solutions, one was moving to another planet, one was killing ninety percent of the population, and one was moving to North/South Dakota. Were they all genuine solutions?
If so I have some questions about the first two. How exactly does it help to move to another planet? Wouldn’t we have an impact there, also? I think that since we are dependent on some type of plantet that is hospitable to living organinsms, we would either transfer our impact to the new planet or continue to live off of the old one, since if we couldn’t grow crops, burn energy on the new planet, etc, we would have to do most of those old activities in the manner similar to its being done now added to it the transportation of getting back and forth.
The second solution must have been somewhat hyperbolic, so I won’t go into too many questions about it, save pointing out that it would, also, be a fairly major impact to at least one aspect of the planet’s ecosystem, if we count.
The third system of course seems the least extreme, but I wonder, like the first one, whether it would change much. If we all eat the same and burn similar amounts of energy (and those are drastic clilmates there so relocating people from tropical regions to the Dakotas may be causing more fuel to be burned than saved) and put out similar amounts of garbage, I am not sure which ways, other than reduced square footage of living space, that will be much different than it is now.
Then there would be the tree falling in the forest problem. If there are other areas on the planet nicer than the Dakotas but everyone lives in the Dakotas, what would be the point of their being pristine? The blackberry bushes that would take over my yard may have more right to it than I do in some way, but I am not sure that they would exactly appreciate it. Appreciation is actually one of the ways that there is a net gain of good accomplished by man’s existence on the planet. It is only because of a predefined value system of subhuman life=unspoiled that necessarily makes any other animals or plants living in our place an automatic good. But in my opinion, there is something to be said for the fact that when you add humans to the equation, someone is understanding, appreciating, and caretaking the biodiversity that exists here. We are the only species so far that sees beyond the welfare of our own kind, and we could even possibly be the planet’s ultimate salvation and not just its potential destruction.
Minimizing technology might do some things that are seen as goods in the short term, but it is probably not going to result in the kind of advances that would keep the whole place from turning into a smouldering rock some day when an asteroid hits. I agree that technology is probably the key to making things better for the whole of the place. Human beings can be a resource and not just a consumer of resources. I like my chances of a cure for cancer now that there are a million or so doctors working on it than when there were just thousands, and added population brings more heads to all of the worlds problems. Technology started exploding toward the end of the 1800’s right when population started increasing exponentially, so there have been benefits, too. If there was just 10 percent of us here, there would perhaps be 10 percent of the energy consumption, but we would have to give back 90 percent of the technology we enjoy.
And no, the first few technologies weren’t great, coal factories and such, but there have been improvements, and my guess is that tomorrow’s technology will make the planet a better place, maybe than it ever was. That is looking on the bright side, I know, but if anyone had seen today 500 years ago, when they were going to witches and astrologists to try to save their children from the plague, at least the half they hadn’t already buried, I think that they would have thought it sounded too good to be true.
November 17th, 2007 at 12:58 am
I also got to thinking about the solutions you raise and they must all be fairly academic, right? I mean in no situation where any human freedom is allowed to exist anywhere on the globe are all people going to be moved to the Dakotas.
I mean, in your world that would be an impossible sacrifice, right? All those thousands of years where our ancestors fought for our freedom wouldn’t be given up so that we could try to pretend we were never even here? I would hate to be there when they found out.
So in other words, these must just be mental exercises about what kind of solutions there are to the problems you see? If these are the types of solutions, I am thinking that your fears are probably justified–there probably are no solutions.
That is why rather than wracking brains to arrive at solutions such as these about how to change the planet or human nature, it is probably easier to change attitudes or perceptions of those who choose see such dire consequences. Most of yesterday’s doomsayers end up eventually being discredited. Paul Erlich, who started the ball rolling in terms of the terrible things that would result when human population exploded, couldn’t have been more wrong if he had been trying to describe the future by throwing darts.
In fact the whole concept of demography brings up an interesting feature of those who would teach us about our own future. Demographers’ predictions always assumed that nothing would keep any birth rate falling for long enough that it would go below replacement, so they ended up writing a fictitious floor into all of their projected population models. Now that it appears that every society will eventually stop replacing itself, they had to hurry up and pretend that they didn’t have that fictitious assumtion in their models. And still it doesn’t encourage them to think about the how irresponsible it is to encourage people to get scared out of their gourds and guilty about having a family like they have for the last thirty years. Instead of worrying about the fictitious doomstay scenarios of social scientists who projected human population would grow out of control, we have to come up on our own with the solutions to the very REAL solutions to what will happen in less than fifty years when human population actually DOES begin to shrink. No intellectuals have be preparing us for these consequences or theorizing endlessly about what to do about them, so governments have been left to come up with their own. With little success.
I don’t see such dire consequences to humanity. I see some, but they are in the context of the fact that it is humanity who would in fact be the one who moans when an acre gets developed or a species goes extinct. And these things happened before we came on the scene. Lands turned to desert or glacier, millions of species dissapeared before the arrival of the only one to ever chronicle either change.
We are the species to see the good and bad things that happen here. Without us, it is meaningless. So I think defining a pure environment as one without us, defines it without the one factor making that purity have any purpose. And so because we are the species that sees the good in the planet, I think we can be the ones who participate in bringing it out. And just like today’s advances were unthinkable yesterday, tomorrows may make us very glad that we hung in there and had faith that good things might happen rather than just holing up and containing the damage.
Sorry these comments are so long, I guess I was bored tonight, but it kind of gets me a bit upset that people get very well intentioned people so fearful and dour about the problems of a tomorrow that won’t come and in the process help to bring about problems of the one that will.
November 17th, 2007 at 2:18 am
I thought these posts were going to be like those ones behind those really tiny things that say (2 comments)you have to be really interested in to look at, so I didn’t mean to take up your whole page, sorry. Especially since I didn’t even spell check. Now I don’t remember what I came here to find, maybe an old response to a blog I did here that I wanted to cut and paste, but Neil, hide me if you can, or just delete. Cheers!