Dude!
Dude!
Uh, WTF?
OMG!
OMG!!!!
Uh, I don’t feel so good.
WTF?
OMG!
OMG!!
Uh, it’s something terrible.
Why is this happening to me?!
Roar!

The end. ‘Nuff said.

I’ve just finished reading Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us, and found it to be a wonderfully written book – an immensely enjoyable read, a true page turner (the companion web site to the book is here). As the title of the book suggests, the narrative revolves around a seemingly simple hypothetical question: what would happen if we humans were to disappear one day, suddenly, from the face of the earth? What would become of our cities and buildings, our cultural remains and technological artifacts? What would happen to the oceans and air, the forests and fields? What would happen to the species we hunt, and those we have domesticated?

The idea that we would disappear suddenly sounds like the stuff of science fiction, and so it is, but this little trick of the imagination allows Weisman to bring into relief and with unusual clarity the intricacies of our involvement in nature. He takes us on a whirlwind tour – much of the fun of the book is its travelogue aspect – of sites both familiar and strange: old growth forests in Poland, the ghost city of Varosha in Cyprus, the Korean DMZ, the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre (where millions of pounds of trash and plastic debris float, captured as runoff from the continents and deposited there by the Pacific currents), Manhattan, nuclear waste storage facilities in the American west, the vast chemical production facilities surrounding Houston, the fertilized fields of southern England, the Panama Canal, the Seregenti Plain, and so on. Everywhere, the complicated nature of our couplings with the natural world are clear. We have abused nature with abandon and disregard – but we’ve also domesticated and subdued it, rendered it productive, and even collaborated with it in ways intricately and astonishingly choreographed. We’re embedded in the world in ways extremely complex, a fact that would not lose its force were we to suddenly vanish; and were we to disappear, Weisman’s narrative suggests, the world as know it would become unravelled in ways both beautiful and terrifying.

This insight is what prevents the book from becoming just another screed, a simple fantasia in which the world is quickly rid of its most voracious and destructive species, and glad of it, too. This isn’t to say that Weisman doesn’t make his sympathies clear. Though it’s something of a romance and a fiction to think that previous human civilizations lived in ‘harmony’ with the natural world – traditional societies too threw their garbage over the side of the mountain while cutting down whole forests and hunting entire species into extinction – Weisman does see our technological prowess, expanding population, and material consumption as a cause for alarm and concern. The fact that our massive plastic pollution is a problem of but a scant fifty years’ making is just one example, and Weisman reminds us that except for a small percentage that’s been incinerated or recycled, virtually every piece of plastic we’ve produced in the past half-century is still around – it’s just been dumped either in landfill or in the oceans. Since most plastic is virtually indestructible (though new and partially biodegradable plastics are now coming onto the market), we’ll simply have to wait until some microorganism evolves that will make dinner out of the stuff. The world’s resources, and its inherent beauty, are under incredible strain, and the most poignant chapters of the book are descriptions of territories and lands where humans have been removed or prevented from entering whether by force or by circumstance, allowing nature to retain some of its original beauty or recover some semblance of rich biodiversity. Undeniably, Weisman takes some comfort in the fact that there are many species that would benefit from our disappearance: marine life, whose stocks are rapidly depleting with the advent of dynamite-fishing and other human-created stressors, would probably make a quick and healthy recovery. And I was convinced by his account that our buildings and even our most incredible engineering feats such as the Panama Canal are but temporary constructions waiting to be swallowed up by plants and animals in quick order, once we stop or are no longer around to maintain and care for them.

Of course, the idea that we can observe our world without us is a paradox: how can we observe the world if there are no observers left to observe? So much of the argument is surmise and conjecture, based in projection and extrapolation from what we can already see and what we already know to be true. If there’s anything that I took away from the book – it’s the lesson, familiar but terrifically illustrated here, that in nature, the only constant is change, even if change some times takes place slowly, over the eons of millions of years. But the history of change also suggests the inevitability of extinction: there are few species that have been so successful at embedding themselves so as to survive all of the sources and kinds of change thrown at them. So when we take up environmental ethics, a care for the earth, what processes of change are we trying to preserve, what processes are we trying to accelerate, what processes are we trying to prevent? And for what ends?

Even though I’ve never been particularly sentimental about the end-of-year holidays, and belong to those who find the rampant commercialism of the season a cause for even more sociopathic behavior than is the norm, I found myself last night in a panic at the thought of showing up on Monday at my brother’s house in Seattle, sans gifts for his wife and kids. So, I decided to schlep into Manhattan to go to Macy’s Herald Square to do some late-night shopping. I thought I was being clever, taking advantage of Macy’s 24-hour Christmas schedule to avoid the crowds, but it was I, naif that I am, who was fooled: the store was jam-packed even as I got there, shortly after 11. To be expected, the displays were in a mess with clothes and other items strewn about every which way; I was jostled by other like-minded shoppers struggling to find deals; the staff and cashiers were already pummeled into a state of utter exhaustion.

Unfortunately, I didn’t find anything I thought would make a good present – not for others, or even for myself (and one reason I try not to shop is that these sorts of expeditions invariably become exercises in looking for what I want rather than what I think others would like). I did see a nice messenger bag to replace my ratty school satchel, but it wasn’t on sale and I found it difficult to accept that I should buy something at full price when everything around it was discounted 30-50%. The one thing that should catch my eye not be on sale: surely the gods of Macys intended it this way, as a test of my notoriously weak willpower.

Anyway, after that tiring trip I decided to slip across the street to catch the midnight showing of the new Will Smith movie, I am Legend. Based on the Richard Matheson book and made into a movie a few times already – the most significant previous adaptation was Charlton Heston’s The Omega Man – the movie follows the effort of Robert Neville (Smith) to survive as a lone man in Manhattan fending off a horde of his fellow citizens who have turned into crazed nighttime vampire-zombies. Wait, didn’t I just go through that? In any event, if you’re not familiar with the story: Emma Thompson has engineered a virus that cures cancer but has the unfortunate side effect of killing 90% of humanity in the process. All that’s left are a few survivors who are immune to the bug – including Neville, a brilliant military geneticist – while others mutate into the aforementioned flesh-eating vampire-zombies who feast on anything living that passes their way (in the night, since daylight is now lethal to them).

Having seen Omega Man, I pretty much guessed how the film was going to turn out. However, this film is much better, since the main point of tension in the Omega Man was trying to see who was going to out-ham the other, Charlton Heston or Anthony Zerbe (the chief bad guy, Matthias). Smith’s a better actor than Heston, and the film makes a few smart decisions that make it more satisfying than your usual monster flick. For example, there’s the inevitable moment when the hero has to go into a darkened building where you know he’s going to encounter a monster or two. Normally, we’re left shaking our heads, wondering at such stupidity, but in this movie he does so for reasons that are intelligible. And, the movie also does a brilliant casting job by making the most expressive dog actor I’ve seen in a long while as Smith’s sidekick for most of the movie – I think it’s fair to say that for many in the audience last night it was the dog that became the most involving and touching character in the film.

Still, the Christmas shopping season must have put me in a sour mood, because my favorite part of the film – other than the usual Manhattan real estate porn* – was just watching Neville walk around a depopulated Manhattan, enjoying the run of the island without having to deal with annoying crowds and rude people (other than those zombies, of course). On this point, I have to say that the movie’s CGI effects are astounding: while some of the scenes were obviously shot on location, there are stretches of Manhattan that have been made to look almost exactly as one would imagine it, had it been abandoned overnight (actually, some of the streets don’t look very made up for the end-of-the-world at all, which is kind of scary).** Stores and landmarks are easily recognizable, and the streets he travels seem utterly familiar to me – this New York didn’t seem like a soundstage, or like Toronto. It’s the same kind of effect achieved the famous London scenes in 28 Days Later, but here done much more extensively and convincingly, thanks to the fantastic CGI work.

Speaking of 28 Days Later, however, the main disappointment rests in the monsters themselves. No monster movie can be satisfying without good monsters, but these folks seemed like short-haired cousins of the potato-headed orcs from The Lord of the Rings. They certainly grunted and bellowed in the same language, it seemed, and while in 28 Days Later the zombies were just monstrously brutal the monsters in this film become capable of ridiculous acts of physicality, running down an SUV, scampering up lightpoles, tearing masonry apart with their bare hands, and so on. I thought it would have been good enough just to leave them as crazed cannibals, but in this film they’re more like a cross between Spider Man and Gollum – quick and loathsome but not very scary.

After witnessing the ‘alpha male’ zombie deliberately expose himself to sunlight, Neville observes that that this was evidence of utter irrationality, confirmation that the ’social devolution’ of humans into monsters had become complete. In fact, he misinterprets the alpha male’s action, which is a sign of the growing intelligence of the monsters and their slow transformation from instinctive mass into organized pack. Neville is apparently a great geneticist but proves to be a poor sociologist, which leads to a fatal misreading of the disease as biological, when – the movie suggests – it is also social. But that’s to treat too seriously what’s essentially – all the allegory aside – a pretty good popcorn movie, if not something you should take the kids to on Christmas day.

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*Neville lives in a Manhattan townhouse that, even after the apocalypse is far better than what I’ll ever see in my lifetime. How it gets its electricity given that most of the world is dead, I don’t know. In any event, he says that he lives at ‘11 Washington Square’ without specifying whether it’s Washington Square North, East, South, etc. 11 Washington Square is actually on the south side of Washington Square Park, where the zombies congregate before attacking his house. But judging from his view of the Washington Square Park Arch, I’d say that the savior of humanity is living right above the offices of my former coworkers at Graduate Enrollment Services for NYU’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

**Of course, assuming that the city somehow escaped being ravaged by fire, which seems to me would have been the natural consequence of 90% of the population suddenly dying off or turning into flesh-eating zombies. That was a problem I had with 28 Days Later. Why was Manchester burning but not London?

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Updated: Posting about the latest Will Smith blockbuster always helps to boost the blogroll hit count. But judging from the kinds of search terms that are bringing visitors to the site, people seem to be interested in getting more information about two things: (a) where was Robert Neville living? and (b) who manufactured the messenger bag was he carrying around? Neville gives 11 Washington Square as his address, but while 11 WS is on the south side of the park, the angle of vision he has of the Washington Square Arch indicates that he’s living on the north side of the park, right off where 5th Avenue meets Washington Square North. That’s my guess, at any rate. As to who made his bag, I haven’t the foggiest idea, but now I’m intrigued since I’m in the market for a new bag myself. Funny I didn’t notice it; the movie must have been entertaining because when I’m bored I tend to take note of things like the clothes the characters are wearing, and so on.