Abandoned Things
Hashima "Ghost" Island, Japan
I've been reading Alan Weisman's fantasy The World Without Us, in which he explores what the world would look like if we disappeared tomorrow. Millennialism is as old as our capacity to envision the future. A certain self-importance comes with being the last generation, and this is why I think we fantasize about the disasters. Disease and climate change may have replaced gods and demons, but the moral impetus remains unchanged, because The End Of The World is always due to our present degeneration, whether it's worshiping false gods, or dumping plastics in the ocean.
He draws an amusing picture of houses collapsing in the rain, and pavement broken by tendrils of plants. It turns out that not much of us will remain in a thousand years, let alone geologic time. Stainless steel pots, ceramics, subways, and stone buildings will be our most lasting monuments, along with elevated CO2 levels, and microscopic plastics in the ocean.
Rubjerg Knude Lighthouse, Denmark
Mr. Weisman occasionally annoys me with his platitudes. One particular paragraph so dripped with irrelevant white guilt that I nearly threw the book across the room.
From [Olduvai Gorge], humans radiated across Continents and around the planet. Eventually, coming full circle, we returned, so estranged from our origins that we enslaved blood cousins who stayed behind to maintain our birthright.
Let's forget for a moment that slavery is an ancient tradition shared by nearly every civilization and race of man, and that the Africans themselves practiced slavery, so that selling their neighbors seemed perfectly natural to them. What really wound me up was the last clause. What does it mean to "maintain our birthright?"
I don't think Mr. Weisman has any idea what he's talking about, or even what he intended to say. It's just a throwaway comment that sounds high-minded but is actually patently false. The Maasai are not the same people who lived in the Olduvai Gorge one million years ago. They aren't even as connected to the land as the French are to Paris; they migrated to Kenya in the 1400s! Weisman is perpetuating the myth that tribal culture is static, and that fringe groups like Aborigines or Maasai are somehow closer to primitive humans. These cultures appear primitive because they live in marginal land, or were isolated, not because of some slavish devotion to the past.
Maunsell Sea Forts, UK
When we're thinking about a subject we tend to find it in more places. So it is no surprise that I stumbled on Artifical Owl while reading a book about ruins. Owl is a marvelous blog devoted to abandoned things: buildings, shipwrecks, factories, and other detritus of human industry.
All the pictures in this post are from Artifical Owl. Be careful, you can lose hours of your life browsing their blog.
Aral Sea shipwreck, Kazakhstan