Taken from World Changing:

Thriving on Earth Forever | Alex Steffen

I've now gotten about twenty emails pointing out the accompanying graphic from the Times of London and this New Scientist story on how long it would take for humanity's impacts to vanish from the Earth:

If tomorrow dawns without humans, even from orbit the change will be evident almost immediately, as the blaze of artificial light that brightens the night begins to wink out. ...With no one to make repairs, every storm, flood and frosty night gnaws away at abandoned buildings, and within a few decades roofs will begin to fall in and buildings collapse. ...Long before any of this, however - in fact, the instant humans vanish from the Earth - pollutants will cease spewing from automobile tailpipes and the smokestacks and waste outlets of our factories. ...The humbling - and perversely comforting - reality is that the Earth will forget us remarkably quickly.

This stuff is zooming around the green blogosphere, people in part cheered by the idea that the planet is resiliant and -- if we'd just go away -- could largely heal itself.

But this sort of Worldending thinking is poisonous. Like so many other ego-apocalyptic fantasies, it plays off two toxic memes: the idea that collapse is a positive force, and the idea that people have no ecologically acceptable place on this planet. Better writers than me have explored why both of these ideas are insane. What isn't explored often enough, though, is the effect these ideas and their like have on our culture: they sap our will to do better.

Collapse and extinction scenarios stoke our resignation, and let us off the hook for taking the tough, hard steps we'll be called to take over the next century if we are to build a sustainable civilization. We can't build what we can't imagine, but there's a corollary as well: what we imagine has a way of deeply influencing us (or, as Montaigne put it, "A firm imagination often brings on the event.").

A culture full of engaged, creative optimists with visions of a bright green future will produce a very different world than a culture of jaded misanthropes waiting for the Planetary Melt-Down. Optimism is a political act, challenging as it does the primary defense of the status quo -- that change is impossible. It is also a creative one. Yet our culture is full of portrayals of the end, and almost completely empty of images and stories and plans that show today to be the beginning of a new era. That's dysfunctional.

We know that we can do profoundly better than we are, that indeed, there's no technical reason why we can't build a society whose impacts on the natural world are positive.

So, yes, it's interesting to read a story about how long it would take for our skyscrapers to fall into ruins -- but it'd be thrilling to read a story about what it would take for humanity to thrive on Earth forever.

Posted by Alex Steffen at October 16, 2006