In her essay “The Spirit of the Rillito,” Ruxandra Guidi looks at how Indigenous worldviews can help us understand the world we live in. The piece in High Country News grew out of conversations at the Religion and Environment Story Project, a fellowship that trains journalists and scholars interested in the intersection of the environment and religion.
Homelands senior producer Jonathan Miller reports from Ithaca, New York, whose ambitious Green New Deal seeks to deliver drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and major benefits for the community’s most vulnerable members. It’s a hometown story with implications for hometowns everywhere.
Ithaca sustainability director Luis Aguirre-Torres (second from left) meets with college students, scientists, and artists at the Soil Factory maker space in Ithaca, NY.
In “The Little Town that Would Transform the World,” Homelands senior producer Jonathan Miller reports from Ithaca, New York, whose ambitious Green New Deal seeks to deliver drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and major benefits for the community’s most vulnerable members. It’s a hometown story with implications for hometowns everywhere.
The half-hour piece is the latest episode of Living Downstream, a podcast about environmental justice produced by Steve Mencher of Mensch Media and distributed by Northern California Public Media.
Miller introduces us to Ithaca’s sustainability director, Luis Aguirre-Torres, a Mexican engineer (his Ph.D. research was on entropy) with a global vision and an activist’s passion for disruption. Aguirre-Torres is both an insider and an outsider, a veteran of international climate policymaking but new to Ithaca. Since he arrived this spring, he has sought to broaden the climate conversation to include social change agents and people whose lives are likely to be most affected by climate change — and by climate policies.
We also meet Richard Rivera, an outreach worker at Ithaca’s sprawling homeless encampment, who deserves a podcast of his own, and civil rights activist and organizational consultant Laura Branca. Both know how hard social change can be, but both are hopeful that progress is possible. Both also appreciate a local government that doesn’t just see the connections between social justice and climate change, but pushes hard to bring the two together.
On the 50th Earth Day, it’s long past time to recognize that this overcrowded planet has run out of room to cut us any slack. By Alan Weisman Originally published in the Boston Globe Magazine, April …
Manila, Philippines. Photo by Alan Weisman.
On the 50th Earth Day, it’s long past time to recognize that this overcrowded planet has run out of room to cut us any slack.
By Alan Weisman
Originally published in the Boston Globe Magazine, April 22, 2020
In China, I always admire how when it comes to food, nothing goes to waste. The Chinese eat practically everything: I’ve been served turtle knuckles, gelatin cubes made from duck’s blood, tuna eyeballs, sea horses, bowls of chicken feet, whole songbirds, and, yes, their nests. I once dined in a Chengdu Buddhist temple with biologists who counted more than 30 plant species on our plates.
Since I don’t eat mammals, I’ve avoided horseshoe bats or the endangered, anteater-like scaly pangolins — rare Chinese delicacies that, as we’ve learned, harbor a virus they can tolerate, but humans can’t. But before blaming China for igniting a global pandemic, we should understand why its people are such extreme epicureans: their long, sad history of famines. The last one, just 60 years ago, killed an estimated 40 million people.
Wouldn’t you eat everything you could find, too? Yet the reasons why you don’t have to — so far, anyway — make us all responsible for this plague’s breathtaking explosion, and explain why we can expect more. COVID-19 is a warning to brace ourselves for corrections that nature always makes when a species outstrips its environment.
It’s painful, though, when your own species is the one being corrected.
***
Calling this coronavirus Mother Nature’s revenge is evocative, but ecology — the science of how everything connects — doesn’t require a sentient, angry Gaia to smite us. Nature isn’t some peaceable kingdom from which we’ve strayed. It’s a violent place where big things devour smaller ones, which feed on even smaller ones. Nature’s balance is a bloody pyramid scheme that, since everything’s recycled, actually works, with multitudinous, prolific little critters below constantly being sacrificed to sustain the fewer but larger, more powerful predators above.
Like every other species, we Homo sapiens once mainly spent our time searching for food—searching so far that by the end of the last ice age, we’d reached nearly everywhere but New Zealand. By then, we’d started to notice that seeds would germinate where we spilled them, so we didn’t have to roam as much. Likewise, instead of immediately killing animals, we could capture some to eat later — and, like those crops, we could breed even more.
Since a few farmers can raise food for many, the population grew. But nature had limits: like other species, until fairly recently people died about as fast as they were born. Most children didn’t survive long enough to reproduce, and human life expectancy averaged around 40 years. A few good harvest years might let the settlements that sprouted near fields and water sources boom, until drought or disease regularly knocked their numbers back.
Then, in 1796, a British surgeon discovered a vaccine for one of the most virulent scourges, smallpox. The 1800s brought pasteurization of milk, disinfectants, and even more vaccines and treatments for rabies, anthrax, diphtheria, and tetanus. As life spans lengthened and infant mortality plunged, the nearly flat-line graph of human population rose past 1 billion. After German scientists in 1913 discovered how to suck nitrogen from the air and slather it on the ground, we shot up like a rocket.
No other invention has likely ever impacted the world so much. Previously, that essential nutrient was limited to what a few nitrogen-fixers like beans and legumes added to soils, and to how much manure we could spread. With artificial nitrogen fertilizer, we now grow far more plants than nature ever could; without it, nearly half of us wouldn’t be here. Despite two world wars and the murderous Spanish flu, by mid-century all that extra food pushed us past 3 billion. In the 1960s, after Green Revolution agronomists coaxed wheat, corn, and rice to produce far more grains per stalk, we skyrocketed again.
In nature, no large animal’s population can quadruple in just one century, but we did it by forcing our food supply with chemistry. Unfortunately, the sprays to protect lab-bred crops also slay pollinators and natural pest-controllers. Artificial nitrogen fertilizer sterilizes soil; its runoff fouls downstream waters, and its production emits vast amounts of greenhouse gases. When it degrades, even more wafts skyward. The combined exhaust from our engines, agriculture, industries, appliances, furnaces, and air conditioners has so overloaded our atmosphere that it’s turned on us — turning our seas to carbonic acid, torching our trees, unleashing ticks and mosquitoes, perverting the weather, and sabotaging our future.
Humankind’s presence on Earth is now so lopsided that growing and grazing our food supply requires nearly half the world’s ice-free land, literally pushing other species off the planet. As we invade their habitats, and poach remaining wildlife for market, their resident viruses and bacteria jump to the handiest species left: us. That’s how nearly 75 percent of new infectious diseases this century originated. As temperatures rise, even more will spawn.
With 7.8 billion of us bound tightly by trade and travel, even comparatively weaker contagions like COVID-19 — much less lethal than, say, Ebola — can now trash our economy, crash our lives, and expose how shaky civilization’s scaffolding really is, including our now-flimsy food chain: The few genetically-enhanced monocultures we depend on — try counting the species on your plate — are as susceptible to plagues as we are.
Yet even as we shudder to realize how near collapse looms, we marvel at strangely placid streets, at birdsong, and at glimpses of unexpected animals. Amid our yearning to throng those streets again, COVID-19 reminds us of the natural balance we miss, even to the point of wondering if collapse might not be so terrible.
Following the Spanish flu, this country went on a binge called the Roaring Twenties. But that 1918 pandemic was conflated with a world war; an armistice celebration was inevitable. This one is coupled with a far greater existential threat, from which we’re momentarily distracted. When this coronavirus finally burns out, there’ll still be a deepening climate crisis that will take much longer than any pandemic to abate. Will our deadly brush with COVID-19 help us finally see that nature’s run out of room to cut us any slack?
To get through this century alive, we must stop burning things for energy, and give animals the space they need — as Noah understood, we can’t save ourselves without them. (Underscoring United Nations warnings that we only have until 2030 to keep global warming from waxing out of control, a recent paper in the journal Naturefinds that by then — just 10 years from now — untold thousands of our companion species may be irretrievably beyond their temperature tolerance.)
How best to clear space? Start by educating every girl alive. Rich country or poor, regardless of religion, females who get past high school average fewer than two children apiece, and are indispensable to the social equity needed to engage with problems facing us all. And as we salvage our wrecked economies, let’s discard the notion that growth equals health. Endless economic growth clearly isn’t possible on a planet that doesn’t grow — look where it’s gotten us.
Real health means fewer of us crowding and infecting each other, clear skies and water, ample room to breathe, and thriving wildlife: not for sale, but in its element, where it’s thrilling to see, and where it can keep its microbes and viruses to itself.
Alan Weisman reconsiders the Genesis story in the light of what we now know came after it. His essay originally appeared in the 2018 book “Eden Turned on Its Side” by photographer Meridel Rubenstein.
Triptych: Ehmad and His Boat in the Central Marshes. Photo by Meridel Rubenstein, from Eden Turned on Its Side.
This essay originally appeared in Eden Turned on Its Side, by photographer Meridel Rubenstein, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Art Museum/University of New Mexico Press, 2018.
We are stardust,
billion-year-old carbon.
We are golden,
caught in the devil’s bargain.
And we’ve got to get ourselves
back to the garden.
—Joni Mitchell, Woodstock, 1969
Everyone knows which garden she meant. Something in us yearns to go back there. But could we, somehow? And to what, exactly, would we be returning?
To anyone whose cultural roots are entwined with a certain mystical history emanating from the Middle East, the Garden of Eden evokes either a carefree time before sin appeared, or a pristine, untainted planet—or possibly both, if you believe that the twenty-first century’s eco-perils stem from our sins against nature. But whichever it may be, it hearkens to a time before any of us was alive—yet one for which we oddly feel a visceral nostalgia.
That gut longing is even stranger, given that our notion of Eden comes not from experience, but from a book—in fact, from one of its most problematic passages. The Judeo-Christian Bible begins, logically enough, with God creating the world. Within six days, there are stars overhead, sun by day, moonlight by night, seas and sea creatures, land, plants, land animals, and finally people, both male and female. It’s a world we’d basically recognize, other than that it is entirely vegetarian: fruit, seeds, and green herbs shall be for meat, God tells humans and beasts alike.
All of that is described in Chapter 1—where, incidentally, there’s no mention of any garden: the entire Earth is bountifully blessed. But in Chapter 2, after the seventh day when God rests, logic begins to unravel.
Suddenly, the whole story starts over from scratch. This time, there’s no workweek plus a Sabbath; instead, God conjures up Heaven and Earth in a single day. And the sequence changes: again, he invents plants early on, but he sets them aside in some celestial nursery because, unlike before, he hasn’t created water yet. Next, he does so—then, just as the soil begins to moisten, he selects some dust to mold into a human being. A male.
Only after breathing life up man’s nostrils does God add the foliage—but this time, it’s to a garden. However gorgeous and fertile it might be, Eden isn’t all bliss and leisure. Here, God intends for man to “dress,” “keep,” and “till the ground.” He sets guidelines about what can or can’t be harvested, designates a network of rivers for irrigation, and finally, lest man be lonely, creates animals.
Adam gets to name these animals and to identify which are domestic and which are wildlife, yet they fail to assuage his solitude. So, borrowing one of his ribs, God clones him a more tempting companion. And you know the rest.
Much has been made by Biblical scholars of these two conflicting, coexisting creation tales. As their syntax and even their names for God differ (Elohim in Chapter 1; Yahweh in Chapter 2), it’s widely assumed that they were written at different times by different authors, drawing on different versions of earlier Assyrian and Sumerian legends that were later conflated, often awkwardly, into a single testament by anointed redactors, who thrashed out what was canonical and what wasn’t.
Small wonder religion breeds so much discord. To literalists who claim that the Bible is divinely inspired and thus entirely true, the second chapter simply details Chapter 1’s sixth day when man appears, to underscore God’s special relationship with us. (Thus, presumably, it’s more fitting that humans should precede the flora and fauna over which they hold dominion.)
Babylonian Talmudists tried reconciling another notable discrepancy, over whether woman was born simultaneously with man or later ripped from his rib cage like a bloody afterthought, by declaring that both were true. Appropriating a Sumerian legend of a she-demon, they concluded that Chapter 1’s female was Adam’s rebellious first wife, Lilith, who disdained his authority and abandoned him. In Chapter 2, God tries to ensure that this doesn’t happen again. The woman fashioned from Adam’s own bone is merely his “help meet”—so subservient she doesn’t even get a proper name until after she also proves too disobedient and seductive to control and gets them booted from the garden.
And us, too, so the tale goes—but that may well be why both creation myths are included in Genesis. Taken together, they reflect an evolutionary truth sensed by whoever compiled the Bible from collective memories inherited through their forebears’ stories and perhaps even through their cells and genes. In one version, we had the whole Earth’s bounty to pluck for our nourishment. (Archeology, littered with spear points, choppers, and blades, belies the vegetarianism, which probably seeped into the account much later, during the time of Isaiah: an ardent herbivore who condemned animal sacrifice and who prophesized a post-Messianic paradise where wolves would dwell among lambs and leopards lie peacefully with kids.)
But in version two, we are no longer hunter-gatherers. We’re stewards of orchards, tillers of soil, and pastoralists of the cattle that Adam named. Thus was born agriculture. Yet by giving us a garden, was the Lord setting us up for a Fall?
To grow, conveniently close at hand, food that we once roamed hither and yon to scrounge might have seemed to our ancestors an astonishing improvement over what Chapter 1’s God—or gods, or Mother Nature—had originally given us. But since a few farmers and herdsmen can feed many, the concentration of sustenance eventually led to concentrations of people. Soon our increasing numbers had to seek more fields and pastures, but they found that the greater world wasn’t all an oasis like Eden. Before long, as Genesis recounts repeatedly, people were warring over the choicest lands, and especially over water. This has not abated.
What Genesis doesn’t mention, of course, is that we were fighting long before we were human: Our chimpanzee cousins have never traded foraging in trees for working the soil, but they battle for territory anyhow, as our common primate ancestors also surely did. What sets us apart from them, however, is what else agriculture ignited.
Once farming and grazing were established, for the first time in our or any species’ history, a significant portion of the population didn’t have to spend all day finding food. Gradually people devised new things to do for a living: from artisanship to architecture to trade, from prostitution to priesthood. Soon many of us lived farther from crops and livestock and nearer to each other, in settlements, then villages, then cities. Whatever grief early urban dwellers might have sustained for some fabled, lost Edenic profusion gave way to the thrill of something entirely new: civilization.
A New Adam and Eve in the South Iraqi Marshes. Photo by Meridel Rubinstein from Eden Turned on Its Side.
Long before that happened, successive waves of Homo sapiens had begun dispersing from our African origins. By fifty thousand years ago, we had spread all the way to Australia—and, by about fourteen thousand years ago, to the Americas. As a result, civilization emerged independently in several places. Among the first to appear was likely the one in the fertile crescent that our prehistoric ancestors followed from Africa into Asia. As we continue to learn about it, it turns out that Eden may be more than just a metaphor.
Genesis locates the Garden of Eden quite precisely, near the confluence of four rivers: the Tigris and Euphrates—whose joint Mesopotamian valley is often called civilization’s cradle—and the Gihon and Pison. The 1611 English-language King James Bible placed the Gihon across the Red Sea in Ethiopia, rather far from Mesopotamia. But several modern scholars believe that its translators confused Ethiopia’s ancient name, Cush, with a similar Hebrew name for the land of the Kashshites, who lived in what is now Iran’s Zagros Mountains. From there a substantial river, the Karun, flows southward, reaching a delta just above the Persian Gulf at a point almost directly opposite Saudi Arabia and Kuwait’s north-flowing Wadi Al-Batin.
That point is sixty miles below where the Tigris and Euphrates meet today, but back then—as noted by archaeologists who contend that the Karun and Wadi Al-Batin are the Bible’s Gihon and Pison—local topography was far different.
Until about eleven thousand years ago, repeated Pleistocene glaciations locked much of the world’s water into ice sheets, and oceans were hundreds of feet lower than today. When the first Homo sapiens reached the Persian Gulf, its upper third was well above sea level. British archaeologist Jeffrey Rose calls it the Gulf Oasis: a luxuriant delta, continuously fed by nutrient-rich sediments borne by the Tigris, Euphrates, Karun, and Wadi Al-Batin.
For hunter-gatherers, it would have been a paradise. But post-Pleistocene warming, which allowed their descendants to learn how to farm local wild wheat and legumes, also meant that to the north, vast glaciers were melting. As the thawing accelerated, worldwide coastal flooding commenced. At its peak, eight thousand years ago, Persian Gulf waters were encroaching so fast, according to American archaeologist and Middle East specialist Juris Zarins, that with each generation they advanced several kilometers farther inland. By the time civilization awakened in its cradle a millennium later, paradise had been lost beneath rising seas.
Fall and flood: memories passed from prehistoric ancestors to Mesopotamia’s Sumerians, Assyrians, Akkadians, and Babylonians, who passed them on to the Hebrews, and to us. Today, the last traces we have of the oasis that inspired them are some lush wetlands in Iraq’s Tigris-Euphrates floodplain, upstream of that now-submerged Eden. During the 1990s these rare marshes were also nearly lost, when Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein tried to drain them to expel Shia rebels. But following his ousting, a courageous local and international effort has recovered almost half of them.
Staunching that ecological disaster is one of the few encouraging stories from that tortured region in recent years—but unless we act decisively, it could prove in vain, as ice is melting again. In an elaborate, circuitous lineage that humanity has confected, agriculture begat civilization, which begat industrialization, which inevitably—some might say incestuously—begat industrialized agriculture. Force-feeding soil with chemical fertilizer, and genetically developing hybrid grains with many extra kernels per stalk, we multiplied our foodstuffs far beyond what nature ever could supply. But unintentionally this unprecedented abundance also multiplied ourselves.
Averting famine means more people live to beget more people. And so human numbers quadrupled during the past century—the most abnormal population leap for any large species in the history of biology. With all of us hooked on energy, the exhaust from our swollen industrial civilization keeps turning up the heat, forcing seawater up river deltas and over coastlines. If the result of Adam and Eve’s original sin was procreation, here we are again, headed for another fall.
Pushed to this modern brink, more than ever we long to reclaim the fresh hope of Eden. Yet lest we despair, it’s comforting to realize that one day this Earth will surely see Eden restored.
Should our yearning help us muster the environmental wisdom and the will to act upon it, we’ll do whatever it takes to bring humans back into balance with the rest of nature.
Or, should we fail, we’ll drag many more species and much priceless Earthly beauty down with us. But not forever. This planet has endured enormous losses and massive extinctions before, from cataclysmic volcanic eruptions to colliding asteroids—yet each time, life, miraculously resilient, has rebounded, lovelier than ever. As it will again.
One way or another, we’ll be there too. Either we’ll have survived our excesses, and, like Noah, saved enough animals to give our own species another chance—or, like Adam, we will have returned to the dust from which we sprang.
Bear Guerra has been spending a lot of time around the Los Angeles River, contemplating its meaning and (lucky for us) shooting photos. His photo essay “A Possible River” was recently published in Emergence Magazine …
In a major piece for Pacific Standard magazine, Homelands’ Alan Weisman goes deep into the wilderness of northern Mexico and southern Arizona on the trail of jaguars who venture across the border. The 300-pound cats are at the …
For the last several years, Homelands’ Ruxandra Guidi and Bear Guerra have been visiting California’s Coachella Valley to document the environmental and health disasters there, from contaminated water to pesticide pollution to hazardous waste. Now, in a major piece …
Sandy Tolan made five trips to North Dakota this past fall and winter to document the standoff between opponents of the Dakota Access Pipeline and the pipeline’s supporters in government and business. As he reported on …
Last year, Homelands’ Bear Guerra spent two weeks in the Ecuadorian Amazon making images to accompany anthropologist Mike Cepek’s upcoming ethnography about the impacts that oil has had on the life of the indigenous Cofán. The …
Sandy Tolan has returned to North Dakota to report on the status of the Dakota Access Pipeline protests in the aftermath of the presidential order instructing the Army Corps of Engineers to expedite the approval of construction permits. …
At a time when so much of the nation is divided by politics and ideology, the protest against the Dakota Access pipeline in North Dakota forged an unlikely coalition of veterans, Native Americans, and environmentalists who …
In his latest story from North Dakota for the Los Angeles Times, Sandy Tolan asks what we can expect now that the Army Corps of Engineers has declined to approve a permit that Energy Transfer Partners, the company building the Dakota …
Sandy Tolan was in North Dakota today as police and National Guard troops marched in to break up the protest over the proposed Dakota Access oil pipeline. He writes: “The protesters faced down the advancing forces with …
Sandy Tolan is headed back to North Dakota, where he recently covered the protests by members of the Standing Rock Sioux and their supporters against the proposed 1,172-mile Dakota Access oil pipeline. In his October 18 story in Salon.com, Sandy describes the tense …
The photo above, from a 2015 story by Bear Guerra and Ruxandra Guidi published in Americas Quarterly, has won a prestigious American Photography award. The piece, “Indigenous Residents of Lima’s Cantagallo Shantytown Confront an Uncertain Future,” describes how …
Homelands’ co-founder and senior producer Alan Weisman is spending nearly a month in Colombia and Ecuador giving talks and interviews about his two most recent books, The World Without Us and Countdown.
Since August 13, Ecuadorians from across the political spectrum have been observing a nationwide strike and marching in the streets against the policies of President Rafael Correa. Homelands’ Bear Guerra has been documenting the protests, which have received little attention in the international …
This month, as part of a special issue on the environment, VICE Magazine asked leading thinkers to weigh in with their ideas about what to do about climate change. Below is Homelands’ Alan Weisman‘s essay, based …
As politicians argue about what to do about climate change, communities around the United States are taking matters into their own hands – pledging to reduce their carbon emissions, then hustling to make good on their promises. From Ithaca, NY, an hour-long special for State of the Re:Union.
Marguerite Wells is the manager of the future Black Oak Wind Farm in Enfield, NY, just west of Ithaca. The seven-turbine, 11.9 megawatt facility will be partly owned by local investors. Wells was running a green roof plant nursery when she started volunteering on the project. Now it’s a full-time job. Photo by Jonathan Miller
The climate is going haywire, and politicians are bickering over what to do about it, or whether to do anything at all. But around the country, communities are taking matters into their own hands, publicly pledging to shrink their carbon footprints, then setting out to make good on their promises. Leading, they hope, from below.
Mike McCoy works as an installer for Taitem Engineering, an Ithaca firm that participated in the Solar Tompkins solar incentives program in 2014 and 2105. In one year, the program more than doubled the number of residential solar systems in the county. McCoy began as an apprentice and is now a full-time employee. Photo by Jonathan Miller
In this special hour for State of the Re:Union, guest producer Jonathan Miller gives us a tour of his uber-progressive but practical-minded hometown of Ithaca, New York, where citizens and civic leaders are hustling to wean themselves from fossil fuels.
Acknowledgments: Thanks to Judy Hyman for composing and performing most of the music in the program. Also thanks to Peter Bardaglio (Tompkins County Climate Protection Initiative), Gay Nicholson (Sustainable Tompkins), Ed Marx and Katie Borgella (Tompkins County Planning Department), City and Town of Ithaca Sustainability Planner Nick Goldsmith, Mike Sigler (Tompkins County Legislature), Jim Catalano, Dylan Brown, Annie and Marie Burns of The Burns Sisters, The Horse Flies, Jeff Claus, Richie Stearns, and the Cornell Glee Club.
A list of all the music heard on the program can be found here.
What if we could transform sand, salt water, sunlight, and carbon dioxide into soil, fresh water, vegetables, trees, biofuel, and electricity? That’s what an ambitious Norwegian-led initiative has been doing in the desert near Doha for the last two …
Before we say goodbye to 2014 we thought we’d give you a sneak peek at what we’re cooking up for the year to come. If you feel it’s worth supporting, far be it from us to stand …
As the U.S. Senate prepares to vote on the Keystone XL Pipeline this week, we thought we’d let you know about a terrific photo essay from the path of the proposed pipeline that recently appeared in Politico. Photographer …
In this monumental piece of reporting, Alan Weisman travels to more than 20 countries, beginning in Israel and Palestine and ending in Iran, on an urgent search for ways to restore the balance between our species’ population and our planet’s capacity to sustain us.
In his bestselling book The World Without Us, Homelands co-founder Alan Weisman considered how the Earth could heal and even refill empty niches if relieved of humanity’s constant pressures. Behind that groundbreaking thought experiment was his hope that we would be inspired to find a way to add humans back to this vision of a restored, healthy planet – only in harmony, not mortal combat, with the rest of nature.
With a million more of us every 4½ days on a planet that’s not getting any bigger, prospects for a sustainable human future seem ever more in doubt. For this long awaited follow-up book, Weisman traveled to more than 20 countries to ask what experts agreed were the probably the most important questions on Earth – and also the hardest: How many humans can the planet hold without capsizing? How robust must the Earth’s ecosystem be to assure our continued existence? Can we know which other species are essential to our survival? And, how might we actually arrive at a stable, optimum population, and design an economy to allow genuine prosperity without endless growth?
By vividly detailing the burgeoning effects of our cumulative existence, Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? reveals what may be the fastest, most acceptable, practical, and affordable way of returning our planet and our presence on it to balance. The result is a landmark work of reporting: devastating, urgent, and, ultimately, deeply hopeful.
Countdown was the winner of the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for science writing, the 2013 Paris Book Festival Prize for nonfiction, the 2014 Nautilus Gold Book Award, and the Population Institute’s 2014 Global Media Award for best book. It was a finalist for the Orion Prize and the Books for a Better Life Award.
Reviews
“[Countdown] details the burgeoning effects that human population growth has on our environment. Weisman reveals what may be the fastest, most acceptable way of balancing this impact.” – Mother Earth News
“Alan Weisman’s comprehensive and wide-ranging Countdown is the best, most important book on this vital topic in years and demands to be read by all.” – Edd Doerr, Secular Humanist
“[Countdown] takes the reader on an exploratory global tour with Weisman to see how different cultures, religions, nationalities and tribes view childbearing and population growth and how they are coping with increasing strains on cropland, water supply, biodiversity and public health… I’d recommend it to teachers, students, or anyone looking to learn more about our rapidly growing world while enjoying a page-turner with a diverse cast of characters.” – Population Education
“Please read this book. Take your time. You will weep and yet be cheered. As Alan said when he was here in Minneapolis, ‘there are saints out there’ so let’s support what they are doing and gain a little grace, each one of us.” – Louise Erdrich
“Alan Weisman’s Countdown is rich, subtle and elaborate. His magisterial work should be the first port of call for anyone interested in the relationship between population and the environment… It’s a tightly argued, fast-paced adventure that crosses the planet in search of contrasts.” – Literary Review
“His gift as a writer with a love of science is in drawing links for readers on how everything in our world is connected – in this case, population, consumption and the environment…The pleasure in reading Countdown is in the interplay of interviews with experts and with everyday working people around the world, all trying to figure out the size of family they want. Even the experts reveal themselves as a humane and committed lot.” – The Toronto Star
“Countdown is a gripping narrative by a fair-minded investigative journalist who interviewed dozens of scientists and experts in various fields in 21 countries. “ – Wall Street Journal
“Weisman makes a powerful case that the best way to manage the global population is by empowering women, through both education and access to contraception – so that they can make more informed choices about family size and the kind of lives they want for themselves and their children.” – Mother Jones
“He makes a strong case for slowing global population growth – and even for reducing overall population numbers – as a prerequisite for achieving a sustainable future…. Weisman’s emphasis on expanding access to contraception as the next-best strategy is both pragmatic and workable, as past efforts have shown. It is to be hoped that his message may be heeded sooner rather than later.” – Nature
“If, as Weisman posits, population growth is inextricably linked in today’s world with national security, what’s the solution? One answer on offer is through family planning development initiatives and women’s empowerment.” – US News and World Report
“A must read for all those who are concerned about the human prospect.” – The Huffington Post
“Spirited descriptions, a firm grasp of complex material, and a bomb defuser’s steady precision make for a riveting read…. Weisman’s cogent and forthright global inquiry, a major work, delineates how education, women’s equality, and family planning can curb poverty, thirst, hunger, and environmental destruction. Rigorous and provoking.” – Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)
“This is not a jeremiad but a realistic, vividly detailed exploration of the greatest problem facing our species.” – Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Provocative and sobering, this vividly reported book raises profound concerns about our future.” – Publishers Weekly (starred review)
In Seattle and other U.S. cities, a movement is growing to bring foraging from the margins to the mainstream as a hedge against climate change and food insecurity.
Melany Vorass Herrera, a forager in Seattle, with wild nettles. Photo by Joshua McNichols.
In Seattle and other U.S. cities, a movement is growing to bring foraging from the margins to the mainstream as a hedge against climate change and food insecurity.
Farmers in India say a novel way of growing rice and other crops has quadrupled yields while using less seed, water, and fertilizer. But some scientists doubt the gains are real.
Farmer Sumant Kumar reported world record rice yields on his land in Bihar using a set of techniques known as the System of Rice Intensification. Many mainstream scientists are skeptical. Photo by Sam Eaton.
Farmers in India say a novel way of growing rice and other crops has quadrupled yields while using less seed, water, and fertilizer. But some scientists doubt the gains are real.
In India, some farmers are replacing chemical fertilizers with the contents of their latrines. It’s cheaper and produces less greenhouse gas. Is it safe?
A truck in Bangalore, India, collects human waste from local latrines and spreads it on farmers’ fields. Photo by Bianca Vasquez Toness.
In India, some farmers are replacing chemical fertilizers with the contents of their latrines. It’s cheaper and produces less greenhouse gas. Is it safe?
Growing more food with less water will be one of the biggest challenges in the coming era of surging populations and increasing climate disruption. In China, scientists say they’ve developed a new irrigation method that’s twice as efficient as today’s best technology.
Irrigation agronomist Kim Ji-Seok visits an experimental farm outside Beijing. Photo by Mary Kay Magistad.
Growing more food with less water will be one of the biggest challenges in the coming era of surging populations and increasing climate disruption. In China, scientists say they’ve developed a new irrigation method that’s twice as efficient as today’s best technology.
Since announcing that it would become the world’s first carbon-neutral country, Costa Rica has been a laboratory for reducing the climate impact of agriculture.
An industrial banana processing center in Costa Rica. Photo by Sam Eaton.
Since announcing that it would become the world’s first carbon-neutral country, Costa Rica has been a laboratory for reducing the climate impact of agriculture. Both small and large farms have been looking for ways to decrease emissions.
Aquaponics is a recirculating system for raising fish and vegetables that uses less land, water, and chemicals than traditional methods. For years it has attracted hobbyists but few others. A Ugandan entrepreneur thinks its time has finally come.
Engineer and entrepreneur Charles Mulamata (left) inspects a Nile tilapia from one of his tanks. Photo by Jonathan Miller.
Aquaponics is a recirculating system for raising fish and vegetables that uses less land, water, and chemicals than traditional methods. For years it has attracted hobbyists but few others. A Ugandan entrepreneur thinks its time has finally come.
Meat consumption in China is soaring, and so are the greenhouse gas emissions that meat production causes. But there is a nascent counter-trend – a small but growing vegan movement in the country’s big cities.
Vegan activist and singer Long Kuan and a friend enjoy meatless “lamb” kabobs at a Beijing restaurant. Photo by Mary Kay Magistad.
Meat consumption in China is soaring, and so are the greenhouse gas emissions that meat production causes. But there is a nascent counter-trend – a small but growing vegan movement in the country’s big cities.
Amaranth virtually disappeared from Mexican diets after the Spanish banned it because of its use in human sacrifice rituals. Now there are efforts to bring it back for its superior nutritional qualities and its hardiness in the face of climate change.
Amaranth seedlings being grown in southern Mexico’s Tehuacan valley. The plant’s seeds are high in protein and its leaves are high in iron, vitamin C, and calcium. Photo by Sam Eaton.
Amaranth virtually disappeared from Mexican diets after the Spanish banned it because of its use in human sacrifice rituals. Now there are efforts to bring it back for its superior nutritional qualities and its hardiness in the face of climate change.
In the desert of Qatar, scientists and engineers are working to transform “what we have enough of” – sand, sunlight, sea water, and CO2 – into “what we need more of” – energy, fresh water, and food. Does their idea hold promise for the world’s driest places?
The Sahara Forest Project is intended to mimic a natural ecosystem, with the waste product of one component serving as the fuel or fertilizer for another. The project’s designers say the concept should work in any low-altitude desert area near a large source of salt water. Above, an artist’s rendering shows a full-scale commercial facility. Graphic provided by Sahara Forest Project.
In the desert of Qatar, scientists and engineers are working to transform “what we have enough of” – sand, sunlight, sea water, and CO2 – into “what we need more of” – energy, fresh water, and food. Does their idea hold promise for the world’s driest places?
As U.S. demand falls, California dairies are finding new markets in China. That may make sense for the industry, at least for now. But what about the planet?
As U.S. demand falls, California dairies are finding new markets in China. That may make sense for the industry, at least for now. But what about the planet?
This story was produced by The Center for Investigative Reporting, edited by Richard C. Paddock, and copy edited by Nikki Frick and Christine Lee. You can see photos and read more here.
Scientists in the U.S. and Uganda have developed genetically engineered cassava plants that resist two devastating viral diseases. Is it a boon for small farmers or a Trojan horse?
Ugandan farmer Eva Mugalu samples cassava from her property north of Kampala. Cassava is an important food security crop for millions of Africans, but it is susceptible to viruses. Scientists say they are nearly ready with a genetically engineered virus-resistant variety. Photo by Jonathan Miller.
For years, proponents of genetic engineering have said that gene-splicing technology can help the world’s poorest farmers – making their crops more nutritious, or more productive, or protecting them against drought and pests and diseases.
But they haven’t had much to show for those claims. Even in developing countries, most of the land area planted in GMOs is devoted to commercial crops on industrial farms. Opponents of GMOs have included that fact among their many arguments against transgenics.
Today, though, there are dozens of genetically engineered crops in the pipeline that are specifically aimed at small-scale farmers in poor countries. In many cases, they are being developed by public sector scientists who plan to make them available at little or no cost.
In this story, we travel to Uganda to meet researchers working on a genetically engineered cassava variety that resists two devastating viral diseases. The scientists say it’s the best hope for saving a critically important food security crop.
But critics question whether the new variety is really necessary and suggest that the real goal is to break down resistance to GMOs on a continent that has been wary of the technology. Are GMOs a boon for Africa, or are they a Trojan Horse?
Petroleum-rich Qatar has welcomed innovators seeking solutions to the challenges facing desert areas worldwide, from renewable energy to fresh water to food production.
Petroleum-rich Qatar has welcomed innovators seeking solutions to the challenges facing desert areas worldwide – from renewable energy to fresh water to food production.
One of the most ambitious experiments is the Sahara Forest Project, which looks to transform seawater, sunlight and carbon dioxide into fresh water, vegetables, trees, electricity, salt, biofuel, and animal feed.
The technologies it uses – concentrated solar power, evaporative cooling, thermal desalination – aren’t new. The innovation lies in the combination of so many in one integrated system. Does this kind of complex, capital-intensive, high-tech solution make sense?
Reporter: Jonathan Miller
Producer and Camera: Charlotte Buchen
Sound: Shiba Ranjan Das
Editor: Linda Peckham
Additional Editing: David Ritsher and Adithya Sambamurthy
Additional Footage: Fay Abuelgasim, Elie Khadra, Fred de Sam Lazaro
Thanks to: Qatar TV, VPRO Television, Chad Heeter
Senior Producer: Cassandra Herrman
Executive Producer: Sharon Tiller
Agriculture is the third-largest emitter of global greenhouse gas pollution. Yet roughly one-third of what we produce is never eaten. Cutting down on waste is a major challenge in China, where a grassroots “Clean Your Plate” campaign is taking aim at deeply ingrained attitudes toward leftovers.
Marketing executives Zhang Ye and Xia Xue helped organize China’s “Clean Your Plate” campaign when they saw students at a Beijing university throwing away huge amounts of food. But they say the problem extends all the way up to government officials, who are notorious for holding lavish banquets. Photo by Mary Kay Magistad.
Agriculture is the third-largest emitter of global greenhouse gas pollution. Yet roughly one-third of what we produce is never eaten. Cutting down on waste is a major challenge in China, where a grassroots “Clean Your Plate” campaign is taking aim at deeply ingrained attitudes toward leftovers.
Scientists in Costa Rica are finding that biodiversity on and around farms can increase yields, lower input needs, and provide protection against environmental stresses.
Gretchen Daily (right) of Stanford University’s Center for Conservation Biology tags a bird caught in a drift net. Daily and her colleagues have been studying the contribution of birds to pest control on Costa Rican farms. Photo by Sam Eaton.
Scientists in Costa Rica are finding that biodiversity on and around farms can increase yields, lower input needs, and provide protection against environmental stresses.
Some of the biggest players in the sustainable food movement are food service companies with the buying power to change the way millions of people eat every day.
Helene York of Bon Appétit Management Company meets Jared Auerbach of Red’s Best Seafood at the Boston Fish Pier. Auerbach buys from small- and medium-scale fishermen around New England. York says smaller suppliers play a key role in a sustainable food system. Photo by Jonathan Miller.
Some of the biggest players in the sustainable food movement are food service companies with the buying power to change the way millions of people eat every day.
A new super-efficient vertical farming system is producing greens for Singapore’s 5 million residents. Inventor Jack Ng hopes to increase local food security while helping cut down on the climate impact of food production.
With a footprint of about 65 square feet, each SkyGreens tower is ten times as efficient per unit of land than conventional farming methods. Photo by Sam Eaton.
A new super-efficient vertical farming system is producing greens for Singapore’s 5 million residents. Inventor Jack Ng hopes to increase local food security while helping cut down on the climate impact of food production.
A video version of this story aired on PBS NewsHour.
Low-emissions cooking aims to slow global warming, one plate at a time. A celebrated Baltimore chef and an expert in climate-friendly cuisine join forces on a holiday meal.
Baltimore chef and restaurant owner Spike Gjerde (left) and his colleague Ben Lambert prepare a meal based on local squash and farmed Maryland oysters. Photo by Jonathan Miller.
Low-emissions cooking aims to slow global warming one plate at a time. A celebrated Baltimore chef and an expert in climate-friendly cuisine join forces on a holiday meal.
China’s growing appetite for meat and dairy is driving big changes in everything from farming to food safety. For the country’s increasingly wary consumers, those changes can’t happen quickly enough.
Over the past three decades in China, meat consumption per capita has quadrupled. This rapid change in diets has paralleled the massive migration from the countryside to the cities. City dwellers eat twice as much meat on average as those back in the villages.
This has put a strain on the country’s land and water resources. Agricultural runoff, mostly manure from large-scale farms, is causing water pollution within the country. Because of water shortages, China imports 70 percent of its soybeans and increasing amounts of its corn from the United States, Brazil, and Argentina to feed its cows and pigs.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has set up an office in Beijing to help train hundreds of Chinese companies, government inspectors and officials in food safety.
But some say the Chinese government is relying too heavily on inspections and needs to focus more on prevention.
Chinese fed up with waiting for government action have started to find other ways to access safer food – like buying imported, processed, or organic food.
With the increasing calls for more safe, affordable and environmentally friendly food, China’s leaders will need to show creativity and balance to meet those needs.
About of one-third of all the food we produce is never eaten. In the developing world, losses tend to occur at the production end. In the U.S., it’s consumers who waste the most.
A “sharing table” at a Los Angeles-area elementary school. School officials are trying to teach students to waste less food. Photo by Adriene Hill.
We waste enormous amounts of land, water, labor, and fuel producing food that’s never eaten. How we limit the losses depends on where we live.
In this piece, Marketplace’s Adriene Hill visits a school in Southern California, where students routinely toss their unopened milk into the garbage.
This piece aired in tandem with Spilled and Spoiled in Senegal and was produced by Marketplace for the Food for 9 Billion series.
How we limit food waste and losses depends on where we live. Jori Lewis visits small-scale milk producers in Senegal.
Workers at La Laiterie du Berger in Senegal weigh and filter milk before transforming it into yogurt. The company collects milk from isolated herders who have no other way to get it to consumers. Photo by Jori Lewis.
We waste enormous amounts of land, water, labor, and fuel producing food that’s never eaten. How we limit the losses depends on where we live.
In wealthy countries, waste tends to occur at the consumer end. In poorer countries, most food is lost between the field and the market.
In this story, Jori Lewis visits small-scale milk producers in Senegal.
Americans love hamburgers. They’re tasty, filling, and cheap. But not if you consider the damage they do to the planet.
Americans love hamburgers – we each eat an average of three a week. They’re tasty, filling, and cheap. But what are the hidden costs? Learn more in this animated short.
Produced by our partner, the Center for Investigative Reporting, with editing help from Homelands’ Jonathan Miller. Art and animation are by Arthur Jones. Visit CIR‘s story page to see an annotated transcript listing the sources for the information in the video.
More than half the seafood eaten in the world today is farmed, not wild. As demand for protein soars, scientists and fish producers look to lessen the impact of factory farming.
Hung Vuong Corporation is a vertically integrated operation, controlling everything from feed production to export. Fish farming is a booming industry, and businesses and scientists are working to find ways to operate sustainably at a large scale. Photo by Sam Eaton.
More than half the seafood eaten in the world today is farmed, not wild. As demand for protein soars, scientists and fish producers look to lessen the impact of factory farming.
In Niger, farmers race to reclaim the desert and break the link between drought and famine.
Perched on the edge of the Sahara Desert, Niger is one of the poorest countries in the world. As the desert moves southward, making the land ever less fertile, even a brief period of drought can lead to famine. Several efforts have sprung up in recent years to try to break the drought-famine link. One that has proven especially effective is Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration, or FMNR, a system developed in the 1980s by an enterprising farmer in Burkina Faso, Niger’s western neighbor.
But for each step forward, population growth takes Niger two steps back.
Reporter: Fred de Sam Lazaro
Producer and camera: Cassandra Herrman
Editors: Cassandra Herrman and David Ritsher
Consulting producer: Stephen Talbot
Series producer: Cassandra Herrman
Executive producer: Sharon Tiller
In Africa, a debate is raging over the best ways to make small farms more productive. Most people agree that soil is the key. But how to boost fertility? Farmers in Ghana face tough choices.
In Africa, a debate is raging over the best ways to make small farms more productive. Most people agree that soil is the key. But how to boost fertility? Some say farmers need to increase their use of synthetic fertilizers. Others say there are better ways to build soil health. Still others suggest that the answers will vary from place to place. Farmers in Ghana are facing tough decisions.
Fast-growing India is pumping its aquifers dry. Rajendra Singh says solutions will come from the ground up.
The average person drinks two quarts of water every day, but it takes more than a thousand times that to produce a day’s worth of food. That’s a problem everywhere, but especially in India, where scientists say nearly a third of the country’s underground aquifers are already in critical condition.
Rajendra Singh has become known as “The Water Man” for his efforts to engage communities in grassroots conservation efforts. Among his accomplishments: Seven dry rivers in his home district are flowing year-round again.
Rajendra Singh at the headquarters of the organization he directs, Tarun Bharat Sangh (Indian Youth Association). Since the 1980s, the group has focused on community-based water management.
Photo: Jonathan Miller
Singh at the first water harvesting structure he built in the Alwar District of Rajasthan state.
Photo: Jonathan Miller
A cloth map shows the locations of water harvesting structures in Alwar. Singh says there are now more than 10,000 structures in the area, all built by hand by community members.
Photo: Jonathan Miller
The most common type of water harvesting structure in Alwar is a “check dam,” known locally as a johad. Different types of structures are used in other places.
Photo: Jonathan Miller
Villagers move rocks for a new johad. Water harvesting goes back hundreds of years, but was largely abandoned with the arrival of tube wells and electric pumps.
Photo: Jonathan Miller
Harshaye, 65, says he is confident that this area will be green and productive by next year.
Photo: Jonathan Miller
Singh now spends most of his time on national and regional water policy issues. He says the Indian government is beginning to see the value of grassroots water management.
Photo: Jonathan Miller
An employee of Singh’s nonprofit leads a field trip for university students from the central Indian city of Bhopal. Rainwater harvesting is enjoying a resurgence, but groundwater withdrawals still far outpace deposits.
Photo: Jonathan Miller
In Lapuria village in central Rajasthan, local leader Laxman Singh (right) listens as villager Chhotu describes his work planting trees. Singh says water conservation has revitalized the village.
Photo: Jonathan Miller
A girl draws drinking water from a well in Lapuria. The water table had dropped to more than 200 feet below the surface. Now it is 20 to 30 feet down, thanks to a range of conservation measures.
Bangladesh has made dramatic progress in feeding its people. Can it stop a changing climate from erasing the gains?
Muhammad Salauddin helps his father, Muhammad Sekendar, shore up the earthen platform that elevates their new house in southeast Bangladesh. Their old house was wiped away by a cyclone, and their land was saturated with salt. Photo by Jonathan Miller.
Bangladesh has made dramatic progress in feeding its people. Can it stop a changing climate from erasing the gains?
Once a leading rice producer, the Philippines can no longer feed itself. That leaves two options: increase supply or try to do something about demand.
In the 1960s, the Philippines was one of the world’s leading rice producers. Since then its population has more than doubled and the country can no longer feed itself. Not only has demand for food shot up, but farmland has been lost to development. This has put pressure on all the country’s basic life-support systems. It is felt most acutely by the poorest families.
While most of the countries in Southeast Asia have taken decisive action to slow population growth, the Catholic Church in the Philippines has resisted any form of population control. But some politicians are responding to a clamor among their constituents for family planning services.
The Philippines has one of the highest population growth rates in all of Southeast Asia. Its population, today just shy of 100 million, is expected to double by the end of the century.
Photo: Sam Eaton
Government warehouses, like this one, store imported rice. The Philippines imports more rice than any other nation on the planet in order to feed its growing population.
Photo: Sam Eaton
Scientists at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines are scrambling to introduce higher-yielding rice varieties.
Photo: Sam Eaton
Many farmers in the Philippines are poor -- with few tools at their disposal to boost rice yields.
Photo: Sam Eaton
Rice is the staple food of the Philippines.
Photo: Sam Eaton
The maternity ward at the Dr. Jose Fabella Memorial Hospital in Manila is packed beyond capacity with new mothers who have no choice but to share the limited number of beds. More than 2 million babies are born every year in the Philippines.
Photo: Sam Eaton
Population growth among the poor in the Philippines, where birth control remains largely out of reach, is about four times higher than the rest of the country.
Photo: Sam Eaton
The price of rice remains high, with poor Filipinos spending as much as 70 percent of their income on food.
When Filipino fishing families got access to birth control, the effects were dramatic: more food, kids in school, and a new will to defend their reefs.
The Philippines’ swelling population is causing fishing villages to embrace birth control for the first time, and not just as a means to plan their families. They also see it as a path to long-term food security, ensuring that future generations enjoy the same abundance of fish.
Reporter/Producer: Sam Eaton
Camera: Sam Eaton
Editor: Charlotte Buchen
Local fixer: Carlos Conde
Additional field translation: Mercy Butawan
Consulting producer: Stephen Talbot
Series producer: Cassandra Herrman
Executive producer: Sharon Tiller
Nearly every prescription for feeding the world says we need to invest more money in science. What’s that money going to get us?
The sorting room at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in Mexico. The center ships experimental grain to plant breeders around the world at no cost. Photo by Jonathan Miller.
Nearly every prescription for feeding the world says we need to invest more money in science. What’s that money going to get us?
In this story we travel to Mexico, birthplace of the Green Revolution, where international scientists are working on a wide range of interventions, from hardier crop varieties to better ways to manage the soil. And we go into the field with a Mexican scientist whose grassroots work aims to put the knowledge of millions of farmers to work on improving yields.
With the Newfoundland fishing industry in the tank, Whyman Richards says he’ll give anything a try. So he steers his homemade boat toward the dreaded mountains of ice that break off the Greenland ice sheet every summer.
Whyman Richards says he’ll give anything a try.
A fisherman from a tiny town in northern Newfoundland, he has struggled to make ends meet since the cod fishery collapsed in the early 1990s. So when a local businessman asked him if he’d be willing to steer his homemade boat toward the fearsome mountains of ice that break off the Greenland ice sheet every summer, he said why not.
Whyman and his brother Dale snag chunks of ice with a giant net, haul them on board with a hydraulic lift, and chop them up with axes. Hours later the water is in plastic bottles, heading for Texas.
Blair Ghent left a good job in Toronto to return home to rural Newfoundland. But work is hard to come by on the island, and soon he found himself joining thousands of unemployed Newfoundlanders commuting 3,000 miles to the oil sands fields of Alberta.
Pam Pardy and Blair Ghent left good jobs in Toronto to return home to rural Newfoundland. They thought the quality of life would be better there for their son Brody.
But work is hard to come by on the island, and soon Blair found himself joining thousands of unemployed Newfoundlanders commuting 3,000 miles to the oil sands fields of Alberta.
The fields raise big questions about the planet’s energy future. But for Blair and Pam, they raise more immediate questions – like who will help Brody with his homework, and whether their marriage will survive the time apart.
How would the Earth respond if humans were suddenly to disappear? How quickly would our cities, our objects, our waste, and the myriad other changes we have wrought disappear – or would they disappear at all? Most urgently, asks this New York Times bestseller, what can we do to lessen the damage we’re inflicting on the only planet we have?
In The World Without Us, Alan Weisman offers an utterly original approach to questions of humanity’s impact on the planet: he asks us to envision our Earth, without us.
In this far-reaching narrative, now translated into 34 languages, Weisman explains how our massive infrastructure would collapse and finally vanish without human presence; what of our everyday stuff may become immortalized as fossils; how copper pipes and wiring would be crushed into mere seams of reddish rock; why some of our earliest buildings might be the last architecture left; and how plastic, bronze sculpture, radio waves, and some man-made molecules may be our most lasting gifts to the universe.
The World Without Us (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2007) reveals how, just days after humans disappear, floods in New York’s subways would start eroding the city’s foundations, and how, as the world’s cities crumble, asphalt jungles give way to real ones. It describes the distinct ways that organic and chemically-treated farms would revert to wild, how billions more birds would flourish, and how cockroaches in unheated cities would perish without us.
Drawing on the expertise of engineers, atmospheric scientists, art conservators, zoologists, oil refiners, marine biologists, astrophysicists, religious leaders from rabbis to the Dalai Lama, and paleontologists – who describe a pre-human world inhabited by megafauna like giant sloths that stood taller than mammoths – Weisman illustrates what the planet might be like today, if not for us.
From places already devoid of humans (a last fragment of primeval European forest; the Korean DMZ; Chernobyl), Weisman reveals Earth’s tremendous capacity for self-healing. As he shows which human devastations are indelible, and which examples of our highest art and culture would endure longest, Weisman’s narrative ultimately drives toward a radical but persuasive solution that doesn’t depend on our demise.
A New York Times bestseller, The World Without Us was rated the number one nonfiction book of 2007 by Time and Entertainment Weekly. It was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award, winner of a Salon Book Award, and was listed among the best books of the year by Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kansas City Star, Mother Jones, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Hudson’s, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the St. Paul Pioneer Press.
Reviews
“It makes for obsessive reading. This is perhaps my favorite book this year. At once the most harrowing and, oddly, comforting book on the environment that I’ve read in many years.” – Louise Erdrich, author of Love Medicine and of National Book Award finalist The Birchbark House
“Prodigious and impressive.” – Janet Maslin, The New York Times
“One of the most satisfying environmental books of recent memory, one devoid of self-righteousness, alarmism or tiresome doomsaying ” – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“I don’t think I’ve read a better non-fiction book this year.” – Lev Grossman, TIME
“This is one of the grandest thought experiments of our time, a tremendous feat of imaginative reporting!” – Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature and Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and The Durable Future
“The imaginative power of The World Without Us is compulsive and nearly hypnotic–make sure you have time to be kidnapped into Alan Weisman’s alternative world before you sit down with the book, because you won’t soon return. This is a text that has a chance to change people, and so make a real difference for the planet.” —Charles Wohlforth, author of L.A. Times Book Prize-winning The Whale and the Supercomputer
“A refreshing, and oddly hopeful, look at the fate of the environment.” —BusinessWeek
“Alan Weisman offers us a sketch of where we stand as a species that is both illuminating and terrifying. His tone is conversational and his affection for both Earth and humanity transparent.” – Barry Lopez, author of Arctic Dreams
“Brilliantly creative. An audacious intellectual adventure. His thought experiment is so intellectually fascinating, so oddly playful, that it escapes categorizing and clichés… It’s a trumpet call that sounds from the other end of the universe and from inside us all.” – Salon
“Extraordinarily farsighted. A beautiful and passionate jeremiad against deforestation, climate change, and pollution.” – Boston Globe
“The scope is breathtaking… the clarity and lyricism of the writing itself left me with repeated gasps of recognition about the human condition. I believe it will be a classic.” – Dennis Covington, author of National Book Award finalist Salvation on Sand Mountain
“Grandly entertaining.” – TIME
“Alan Weisman has produced, if not a bible, at least a Book of Revelation.” – Newsweek
“One of the most ambitious ‘thought experiments’ ever.” – The Cincinnati Enquirer
“The book boasts an amazingly imaginative conceit that manages to tap into underlying fears and subtly inspire us to consider our interaction with the planet.” – The Washington Post
“Fascinating, mordant, deeply intelligent, and beautifully written… This is a very important book for a species playing games with its own destiny.” – James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency
Pedro Córdoba’s says his job in a giant Peruvian smelter has made him seriously ill. And he’s not going to take it lying down.
Photo by Santiago Mujica Bustamante.
Almost everyone in La Oroya, Peru, depends on the giant multi-metal smelter and refinery that sprawls across the valley floor. It doesn’t just dominate the city visually, aurally, and olfactorily, but also economically, politically, and psychologically.
That makes most townspeople tolerant of conditions that elsewhere might lead to open rebellion.
Not so Pedro Córdoba Valdivieso, a mechanic who works in the smelter. He is suffering from an incurable lung disease caused by years of inhaling rock dust. And he’s determined to make the company pay.
On the tangled braids of earth and marsh that form the Mississippi Delta, the Houma Indians have lived for centuries, isolated by water. But now the land is dissolving beneath their feet, and many Houma fear that their unique culture will dissolve along with it.
“If we get a major hurricane, this place could be wiped out tomorrow. It’s not a question of if we get hurricanes. We know we get hurricanes. It’s just a question of when.”
– Louisiana wetlands activist Kerry St. Pe, February 2005
In early 2005, I took a trip to the bayous of southern Louisiana to report on how the United Houma Nation is confronting an environmental and cultural crisis: the loss of their traditional lands to coastal erosion, and the resulting threat to their viability as a people. A story that felt urgent and compelling at the time has, since the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, taken on an almost symbolic importance for me. The voices, which seemed then to be pleading for an audience, have become eerily prescient echoes in my head.
For 200 years, the isolation of the bayou has been a blessing for the Houma, helping them to maintain strong ties to each other and to pursue their traditional livelihoods as shrimpers and oystermen. But dams and levees along the Mississippi River have deprived the delta of silt from natural flooding, and the Barataria Terrebonne region, southwest of New Orleans, is now the fastest eroding land mass on earth. The loss of wetlands has left the coast increasingly vulnerable to hurricanes and flooding. In recent decades, vast expanses of the Houma’s traditional territory have disappeared under water. And one by one, Houma families have been forced from their homes.
Houma leaders fear that this gradual dispersal will soon undermine tribal identity. As Vice Principal Chief Michael Dardar, puts it: “Native American existence is about a people and a place, a community and its relationship to each other and its relationship to the land it belongs to. So if you lose that, you’re still individually Houma, but you lose that sense of nationhood. And you lose what we’ve struggled to maintain for 200 years.”
Like dozens of other Native American tribes, the Houma are not recognized by the federal government, which means they don’t have the protection of a permanent reservation. Michael Dardar and other leaders have been looking for ways to purchase a plot of land where the entire community can relocate – where tribal traditions can be kept alive for future generations. But not everyone is on board. The proposal, like the flooding, has divided the tribe. Many Houma can’t bear the idea of abandoning the lands they have occupied for centuries, and have vowed to hold on for as long as they can.
Postscript:
My reporting was completed before Hurricane Katrina and Tropical Storm Rita devastated much of coastal Louisiana in August and September, 2005. The community of Isle a Jean Charles, which is featured in my story – the ancestral home of Curtis Hendon, Virgil Dardar and Chris Brunet – was spared the worst of the storms’ damage. But many other Houma, spread throughout the Gulf Coast region, suffered terribly.
The Zápara once ranged far across the western Amazon. By the 1970s, anthropologists concluded that their culture was extinct. But a handful of native speakers survived. Now they’re trying to resuscitate their language and culture. But a new danger looms.
Bartolo Ushigua, leader of Ecuador’s Zápara Indians, was terrified. Not of New York’s massive buildings that towered far beyond the tallest tree in his native Amazon, not of the oily urban stench and stupendous traffic, not of the Babel of people constantly snapping his picture as though he were some exotic zoo mammal. What shook him so deeply was that for the first time ever, he couldn’t dream.
To the Zápara, a dream is a rendezvous with guiding spirits. It was in a dream that Bartolo’s shaman father saw that his people, down to just a few dozen, weren’t supposed to vanish after all, as prophecy had foretold. It was in dreams that this same father, now dead, kept returning to instruct Bartolo how to lead. Bartolo Ushigua was barely twenty when he assumed his indigenous nation’s helm; within three years he had brought the Zápara practically from extinction to designation by UNESCO as a world cultural treasure.
The path to recognition had been treacherous, filled not just with old enemies but also new friends whose helpful intentions portended to be equally deadly, should the Zápara come to depend on them too much. Mostly, though, the path was strewn with cash – not a lot, but enough to be tempting and disruptive.
After a dreamless week at the UN, one afternoon an exhausted Bartolo Ushigua napped. Suddenly images formed in his sleeping mind. “In my dream,” he recalled, “there was a man with two faces, one bloody, one smiling. When the smile showed, people became happy. When the blood showed, their strength waned. Then the face said something intriguing: In time, money could gain a soul.”
When we met Bartolo, he admitted that he didn’t entirely understand this dream. From our perspective, with the hunter-gatherer Zápara paradoxically now needing money to defend a way of life in which money had never been necessary, it was easy to attribute the dream to wishful thinking.
After all, we were in Ecuador to document a community facing seemingly impossible odds. The Zápara, once the most numerous people of Ecuador’s Amazon region, had been all but wiped out. Then, in 1998, a 60-year border war ended, and a few Zápara were discovered living in Peru. All had lost their language, but one was a shaman. On the Ecuadoran side, the last shaman had recently died, but a handful of elderly native speakers remained. Each group had what the other lacked, yet could so few people possibly resuscitate a culture? Especially with a new threat hanging over their heads?
That new threat is oil. The surviving Zápara owe their existence in no small part to the fact that theirs was, until recently, the last sector of Ecuador’s jungle without an oil concession. Bartolo and his siblings and cousins, now responsible for their people’s future, told us that they have just a few years to learn to defend themselves before the road and the drilling rigs arrive.
It seems impossible – until you meet them. We came away from the Zápara recalling that there’s a name for those people who occasionally confound probability and accomplish the impossible.
On the trail of an elusive cat that used to prowl the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico.
Jaguars, native to the tropical jungles of South America, used to be found in the southwest deserts of Arizona and New Mexico. Though jaguars no longer live in the United States, occasionally one will travel across the border from Mexico.
During the past few years, several jaguars have been seen in Arizona. Mexican researchers are taking advantage of Arizonans’ interest in the cats to bolster their own efforts to preserve the species in Sonora.
In the late 1990s, the government of Malaysia uprooted 15,000 indigenous people to make way for the giant Bakun dam. Most were resettled in “model” towns, where unemployment, drugs and crime took root. About 400 members of the Kenyah tribe decided to build their own resettlement center instead.
In the late 1990s, the government of Malaysia uprooted 15,000 indigenous people to make way for the giant Bakun dam. Most were resettled in “model” towns, where unemployment, drugs and crime took root. About 400 members of the Kenyah tribe decided to build their own resettlement center instead. Why does this model community work better than the official ones?
Peasant farmers in Peru’s central highlands grow hundreds of varieties of potatoes. Now they’re being encouraged to sell them to high-end consumers. But potatoes are more than just food in the Andes – they’re part of a complex spiritual, biological, and cultural universe. Will the market change that?
The anthropologist Richard Chase Smith describes indigenous culture in the Americas as “a tapestry woven from the vicissitudes of history, place, and daily life.” In the Andes, where daily life sometimes seems like it has been stripped to its bare essentials, that tapestry is far more intricate – and far stronger – than it may first appear.
Andean culture is a dense weave of the ancient and modern, the mystical and scientific. When planting or harvesting, farmers pay close attention not just to the weather, but also to the moon and stars. They say prayers to Catholic saints and make offerings to Pachamama, the earth mother. They consult with wise persons qualified to read the signs of nature. They listen to visitors: travelers, aid workers, scientists, pesticide salesmen. They watch to see what farmers in other communities are doing.
And before they make any major decisions, they meet with their neighbors and talk.
The system is extraordinary both for its complexity and its stability – and biodiversity is at its heart. Farmers in the Andes grow as many as 3,000 different kinds of potatoes, and hundreds of types of other crops. Diversity is not just a source of variety, or testimony to the staggering range of microclimates and ecological zones – it’s also a proven tool against diseases, pests, and other scourges.
Indeed a major reason for the great famine in Ireland in the 19th century was the fact that farmers there planted only one potato variety, which offered no resistance to phytophthera infestans, the “late blight” pathogen. The Irish disaster remains a powerful metaphor for the dangers of monoculture, both biological and human.
Lately the world has come to appreciate the value of agricultural biodiversity, as well as of the traditional knowledge of those who maintain it. Not surprisingly, there has been much talk within development circles about how to convert those assets into cash. But many farmers in the Andes are wary.
“They fear the possibility of losing their portfolio of native varieties,” explains Peruvian economist Manuel Glave. “Because they feel – and they know it is a fact – that the market does not demand 50 varieties. The market tends to demand a more homogeneous product.”
The market can also be fickle. For decades, Andean farmers were advised to replace their native potatoes with more marketable “improved” or “modern” varieties, particularly at lower altitudes. Tens of thousands did as they were told, then watched the prices fall so low that some years they can’t afford to harvest what they’ve sown.
But peasant farmers know that standing still is not an option. Even the most isolated Andean communities are fast becoming incorporated into the cash economy. How they manage the transition may determine whether their ancient tapestry will be torn to shreds, or made even more resilient and lovely.
The explosive growth in Ciudad Juárez has put unprecedented pressure on the region’s water resources. Residents and officials search for solutions as the aquifer drains. In Spanish.
The explosive growth in Ciudad Juárez has put unprecedented pressure on the region’s water resources. Residents and officials search for solutions as the aquifer drains.
This Spanish-language version of “High and Dry in Juárez” was reported and written by Sandy Tolan and narrated by Marco Vinicio Gonzalez.
The island of Chiloé, off the coast of Chile, is known for its misty beauty, quaint architecture, and distinctive cuisine. Now Chile’s government is proposing to build the longest bridge in Latin America to connect Chiloé to the mainland. Islanders aren’t sure they want to be connected.
Few human constructs are as innately graceful and pleasing as bridges. Literally and metaphorically, they connect us. Yet natives of Chiloé, an island the size of Puerto Rico off the coast of southern Chile, wonder lately if there may be such a thing as too much connection.
Isolated from the mainland by a turbulent channel, Chiloé developed its own proud culture, whose music, myths, and charming architecture today entice thousands of tourists each summer. However, Chile’s government now wants to celebrate its 2010 bicentennial by building the longest bridge in Latin America, joining Chiloé to the continent. Many islanders fear this would replace the romantic sea change that visitors undergo during the twenty-minute ferry passage with a non-eventful, three-minute car ride.
Worse, they claim, it would also end their uniqueness. They reject the rationale that a bridge means they’ll now have quicker access to emergency medical services on the mainland, arguing that it would be far cheaper simply to build Chiloé a decent hospital. The real reason for turning their island into a peninsula, they say, is development: The government has proclaimed that the bridge will make Chiloé the gateway to vast, hitherto inaccessible stretches of southern Chile, to extract lumber – and, especially, to cultivate an exotic fish.
Chile, which has no native salmon, is now the world’s second biggest salmon producer; with this bridge it could become number one. Marine biologists, already worried over the environmental strains of intensive fish farming, have further doubts about turning Chile’s entire southern coast into a giant salmon factory. Local stocks of sardines, mackerel, and anchovies used to make feed for farmed salmon, they warn, are already dangerously overdrawn. What, they ask, is the sense of building more fish farms, if there’s nothing left to feed them?
Chilean President Ricardo Lagos has promised that no public funds will be spent on the bridge. Instead, the first forty years’ toll revenues will go to the bridge’s private financiers. Industry projections, however, suggest that tolls could take more than a century to recoup construction costs, so no one is yet willing to undertake the $300 million project without guaranteed government subsidies. In turn, President Lagos, a former Minister of Public Works who won’t abandon the dream for this grand national monument, keeps postponing the construction bidding until a financing plan emerges.
Opponents say that a bridge makes no cultural, fiscal, or ecological sense—that it no longer symbolizes connection, but a profound disconnect between human pride and human wisdom. Yet many fear the president will renege on his promise not to subsidize, and build it anyway. Chiloé lore tells how local mythic spirits have dealt with hubris in the past: vanquishing the perpetrators with the likes of floods and earthquakes. In such an act of revenge, a legendary sea serpent named Quaiquaí originally separated Chiloé from the mainland. Since the bridge, if built, will be anchored to a notoriously unstable sea bottom, a question heard on Chiloé these days is: Might Quaiquaí strike again?
For the native peoples of the Amazon, petroleum development has often been an environmental and cultural nightmare. But in Camisea, a huge natural gas deposit in eastern Peru, the oil companies say they’re committed to getting it right. The Machiguenga people aren’t yet convinced.
Long ago, in the hot, moist folds of the Amazon, a people walked and walked to keep the sun from setting. According to Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, the Machiguenga believed if they ever stopped walking, the sun would fall from the sky. Then the missionaries came with new beliefs. Soon after, settlers arrived from the coast and the highlands. And now another wave, this time of businessmen who tell of a new kind of sun, below the ground, waiting to be transformed into light and money.
For a consortium of seven energy companies, including Hunt Oil of Texas, the vast natural gas deposit at Camisea represents potentially large profits through exports to the U.S., where demand is rising, and the conversion of vehicles and factories in Peru to natural gas. Officials in Peru say the Camisea field, one of the largest in the Americas, could mean energy independence for the nation. For the 10,000 Machiguenga navigating their way along the “River of the Moon,” the Camisea gas project means change, and the unknown.
Environmentalists and human rights organizations warn of irreparable damage to the Amazon and its people if the project moves forward as planned. They cite previous petroleum projects in Peru and Ecuador as reason to proceed with extreme caution, if at all, in Camisea. The energy companies respond that they have learned from the mistakes of the past, and that Camisea can be a model of how to do things right. It’s a debate that could affect the future of rainforest oil development around the world. And the Machiguenga are caught in the middle.
A Mexican immigrant organizes the residents of his slum on the Texas side of the Mexican border.
The misery of Mexican slum colonias has long been visible just across from many U.S. border towns. Over the past decade, however, despite the economic promise of NAFTA, the phenomenon has spread to the U.S. side.
Today, a half-million Texans live in more than 1,500 colonias that lack running water and sewage treatment. We follow Mexican immigrant Oscar Solís of Panorama, Texas, as he organizes his community to fight for changes.
Bringing ecological living to an urban slum neighborhood and a Mexican-American barrio, complete with electric low-riders and solar-powered rap recording studios.
The term “ecovillage” evokes pastoral visions of earthen homes and glistening solar panels. But in cosmopolitan Los Angeles, the idea of ecological alternative living gets stretched to include an urban slum neighborhood and a Mexican-American barrio, complete with electric low-riders and solar-powered rap recording studios.
The explosive growth in Ciudad Juárez has put unprecedented pressure on the region’s water resources. Residents and officials race to find solutions as the aquifer drains.
The explosive growth in Ciudad Juárez has put unprecedented pressure on the region’s water resources. Residents and officials race to find solutions as the aquifer drains.
In the highland jungle of Peru, two men rush to preserve the geography, history, music, and myths of a now-scattered people using digital mapping technology and collective memory. The story served as a pilot for the “Worlds of Difference” series.
In the highland jungle of Peru, two men are trying to preserve a culture that’s been forced to scatter by encroaching development. One is an indigenous keeper of the region’s lore. The other is an anthropologist who uses satellite mapping and the latest digital information technologies.
This story served as a pilot for the “Worlds of Difference” project, and was broadcast on NPR as “The Anthropologist and the Tribesman.”
A rising star in the U.S. Forest Service runs afoul of monied interests – and her own agency – as she tries to protect public lands from depredation.
Gloria Flora was a rising star in the U.S. Forest Service, one whom many thought might become the first woman to head the agency. But her promotion to head a national forest in Nevada ended up scuttling her career. The story of Flora’s downfall demonstrates the widening war between local citizens and federal natural resource managers over who should determine the fate of public lands.
Developing solar energy is part of the Israeli-Jordanian peace agreement, but the modest plans may be overwhelmed by market forces.
Legend has it in the third century BC, the Greek scientist Archimedes devised a spectacular weapon to save the ancient city of Syracuse – a giant concave mirror that bounced concentrated sunbeams onto the sails of invading roman ships. The sails caught fire, the ships sank, and Syracuse was saved. This may have been the only time the sun was harnessed to wage war.
But now, in the heart of the Middle East, the sun is a player in the peace treaty between Israel and Jordan. Some say the sun will soon be harnessed in the service of peace. Others wonder if the peace process itself will undermine the prospects for developing clean solar power at a time when developing renewable energy is becoming more and more critical.
Although scientists and engineers have shown that hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, is a clean substitute for fossil fuels, politicians and big business may never be ready to switch.
During the next 25 years, as developing nations like China and India industrialize, world energy consumption is expected to double. With oil and gas supplies diminishing even faster, many scientists believe that hydrogen – the most abundant element, comprising three-fourths of the mass of the universe – will be the energy carrier for the future.
Although scientists and engineers have shown that hydrogen is a clean substitute for fossil fuels, politicians and big business may never be ready to switch.
City officials from throughout Latin America come to Curitiba, Brazil, to learn about low-cost, environmentally sound planning from urban planner Jaime Lerner.
The southern Brazilian city of Curitiba has the reputation for being the livable place in Latin America. With a population of a million and a half, Curitiba is known for its extensive parks, its efficient public transport system, an a highly successful recycling program.
The man largely responsible for Curitiba’s success is Jaime Lerner, the city’s three-time mayor and a pioneer of environmentally sound urban planning. Now, Lerner and his colleagues have set up a training center – the Jaime Lerner Institute – where Brazilian and other Latin American mayors and city officials can learn how Curitiba solved its problems, and how their cities might do the same.
In Israel, where developing alternative energy was always seen as a matter of survival, solar technology is pointing a way out of dependence on fossil fuels. Story produced in 1995.
Nearly everyone agrees that fossil fuels will run out someday – some say we’ll start feeling the pinch within 30 years.
Predictions of disastrous floods that global warming could bring to island nations like Japan, and to coastal areas of Europe and the United States, may force us to phase out petroleum-based fuels even faster.
If so, are clean, renewable alternatives really viable? And can they be developed in time?
In Israel, a Middle Eastern country with no oil or coal reserves, scientists have studied one option, solar energy, longer than anyone.
Have human beings always had the potential to destroy their own society, or is this a more recent, industrial phenomenon? Can anything be learned from the environmental missteps of our ancestors?
Have human beings always had the potential to destroy their own society, or is this a more recent, industrial phenomenon? Can anything be learned from the environmental missteps of our ancestors?
In India, where signs of faith are everywhere, a deeply spiritual farmer has found a way to grow abundant supplies of rice without the use of harmful chemicals.
In India, where signs of faith are everywhere, a deeply spiritual farmer has found a way to grow abundant supplies of rice without the use of harmful chemicals.
A group of Colombian visionaries has created a sustainable community in one of their country’s most inhospitable and dangerous places. This piece formed the basis of Alan’s award-winning book “Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World.”
In the early 1970s, a group of South American visionaries realized that the coming population crisis would one day require people to live in places formerly considered unsuitable for human habitation. They decided that this was an opportunity to try to design a workable future, by and for the Third World, from limited resources.
The place they chose was on the desolate, barren plains of eastern Colombia, a country too often thought of as producing only coffee, cocaine, and bloodshed. The village they founded, called Gaviotas, has become a bright example of how to fashion an ideal tropical society.
Many of the ingenious, affordable technologies they’ve created have spread to other developing nations, and may have much to offer the developed world as well.
While German automakers race to produce the world’s first pollution-free, hydrogen-powered car, the world’s largest consumer market for automobiles, the U.S. remains stuck in a Faustian bargain with fossil fuels. From 1994.
The automobile is one of the miracles of the 20th century, giving us unprecedented freedom and power over time and space. But like the legendary Dr. Faustus, this power could one day turn on us, as the poisonous curses of pollution and global warming undermine the society that cars have made possible.
In Germany, where haze straight from hell or Los Angeles often chokes the Rhine valley and the autobahns, scientists and automakers have been racing to save us from this dilemma by designing a car that would run on pollution-free hydrogen.
Outside Bogotá, some of Latin America’s best soils have been covered with a sea of greenhouses for growing flowers for export.
During the 1980s, carnations, roses, and chrysanthemums became more abundant and cheaper than ever on street corners and in supermarkets throughout North America.
Most are grown in a sea of greenhouses surrounding Bogotá, Colombia. For Colombia, flowers now rank with coffee as a major source of employment and foreign exchange.
But they also convert some of Latin America’s best soils from the production of food to luxury crops. And the chemicals required to produced perfect flowers endanger the environment and the health of the workers.
Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.
In Brazil, a peasant cooperative has planted native crops using methods designed to preserve the delicate forest soils. But the farmers have little formal education, and even less experience managing a business.
Since the 1970s, hundreds of thousands of poor peasants have streamed into the Brazilian Amazon in a desperate search for farmland.
Many of them arrive only to find that rainforest soils cannot sustain the kinds of crops they knew back home. So they end up in a vicious cycle – slashing and burning new areas of forest year after year.
Now, a small group of farmers living in the most devastated region of the Amazon is trying an alternative. Some say it may become a model to stop the destruction of the jungle.
Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.
Deep in the Brazilian Amazon, seasonal rubber tappers harvest Brazil nuts to sell to Ben & Jerry’s. But the tappers aren’t happy, and the relationship with their NGO sponsor has frayed.
Rainforest Crunch, the candy and popular ice cream made with Brazil nuts, is an example of a new merchandising strategy known as green marketing.
Shoppers today, the theory goes, want products whose consumption somehow helps save the planet.
Developed by Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream and the Boston-based organization Cultural Survival, the Rainforest Crunch scheme is intended to prove that it’s more profitable to keep the Amazon intact than to convert it to cattle ranches.
The plan is to give thousands of people who live and work in the forest a stake in preserving it. But some question whether this really is responsible development.
Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.
The world’s southernmost population, in Chile’s Magallanes province, finds itself on the brink of a deepening danger that may one day force them from their beautiful homeland – and eventually imperil us all.
The world’s southernmost population, in Chile’s Magallanes province, finds itself on the brink of a deepening danger that may one day force it from its beautiful homeland – and eventually imperil us all.
Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.
A giant dam project on the border of Paraguay and Argentina raises questions about the social and environmental impact of major infrastructure projects.
Dozens of dams were built in South America between the 1960s and early 1990s. Many were financed by the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, to bring progress to the continent by harnessing its powerful rivers for industry and growing urban populations.
The largest of these dams was Yacyretá, on the border between Paraguay and Argentina. Yacyretá was to produce thousands of megawatts of energy. But it was also to flood the biologically richest area of both countries, and force the largest urban displacement by a development project in history.
In the latter half of the 1980s, the banks held up loans to Yacyretá, pending plans to address environmental and social concerns. Then, despite protests that people and endangered animals would be left homeless, the banks began preparing to restart the loans, raising questions about the policy of international lenders to leave environmental protection and resettlement to the borrowing countries.
Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.
Part 2 of a two-part report from Honduras examines attempts by foreign and private relief agencies to regenerate the soil and help farmers stay on their lands.
For decades, inequitable land distribution, slash-and-burn farming, and uncontrolled erosion have turned entire regions in Latin America into desert, and forced hundreds of thousands of farmers into towns and cities.
This has created a new kind of migrant: the environmental refugee.
But two programs in southern Honduras are looking at ways to help restore the damaged soils, and keep farmers on their lands.
One is a grassroots effort that could serve as a model for small-scale development projects. The other is a U.S.-funded plan that is trying to change the way people farm across the entire country.
Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.
Part One of a two-part feature about the effects of deforestation and desertification follows poor farmers in Honduras who are fleeing their damaged lands to an uncertain life in Tegucigalpa.
In many parts of Latin America, the ecological crisis of deforestation and soil erosion has become so severe that hundreds of thousands of farmers and their families have been forced to abandon their lands and flee to the cities.
In southern Honduras, a generation of poor land distribution and slash-and-burn farming has turned once-fertile lands into useless patches of rock.
Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.
Backed by U.S. government funds, salt flats along the southern Honduran coast have been converted into giant shrimp farms where lax enforcement of environmental, social, and labor laws are the norm.
Throughout the Americas, the U.S. government and international lenders are implementing a vast new policy designed to turn the hemisphere into one big common market.
The plan first calls for a North American Free Trade Agreement. Then, all of North and South American would be linked under the so-called “Enterprise for the Americas.”
Under this strategy, member countries would privatize national industries, implement austerity programs, and convert their economies to produce exports for the United States.
In many nations, this new policy is already in place. In this story, we travel to Honduras, where U.S. and World Bank loans have helped build prosperous shrimp farms along the country’s southern coast. But some critics warn of serious environmental and social costs.
Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.
During the 16th century, the hills of southern Ecuador were a center of gold production for the Spanish. Today the region booms anew, its mines worked by thousands of desperate peasants.
One November day in 1532, Spanish general Francisco Pizarro began the conquest of the Incan empire in South America. In the first attack, thousands of Indians were slaughtered, and their king, Atahualpa, was captured.
To spare his life, Atahualpa proposed a ransom: an entire room filled with gold.
Soon, fine gold vases and figurines began appearing, brought by his subjects throughout the Andes. To make room for more gold, the Spaniards smashed the objects into small pieces. When the room was full, they melted down the gold, shipped it to Spain, and killed Atahualpa.
Today, centuries after the quest for El Dorado, poor peasants, struggling to survive, have taken up the search for gold. They fill the pit mines of Brazil, the rivers of Peru, the hills of Bolivia.
In Ecuador, thousands of people have rediscovered old mines of the Spanish crown. Armed with picks, dynamite, and mercury, they revisit a legacy that began with the death of King Atahualpa.
Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.
The construction of a road and hydroelectric dam in eastern Panama has threatened the survival of Guna Indians who live in the area.
In the early 1970s, many Latin American nations looked to the untapped resources of their jungles as the key to prosperity and modernization.
Huge development projects – dams, coal and gold mines, oil exploration projects, colonization and road-building programs, cattle and cash crop export strategies – were funded by international development banks.
In Panama, the World Bank loaned the government nearly $70 million for its master plan for the jungle. First, a dam would be built, to help generate new industry, and wean Panama from its dependence on the U.S. and the canals.
Second, to promote land reform and new settlement, a road would be carved into new lands in the jungle.
The dam flooded the homelands of the 1,500 Guna (also known as Kuna) Indians, who were relocated to villages along the highway. Now, nearly 20 years later, tens of thousands of landless peasants have streamed down the new road, and have come face to face with the Gunas.
This is a story of two cultures colliding on the fragile soils of a new frontier.
Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.
In the Amazon of Ecuador, two native villages have radically different attitudes toward oil development.
Government officials, industrialists, and Indian activists are staking out turf in a battle over the future of Ecuador’s Amazon.
In this story, Sandy Tolan and Nancy Postero visit two Quichua Indian towns with radically different attitudes toward oil development. At the center of the dispute is an ARCO oil rig in the heart of the jungle.
Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.
Faced with crushing debt and pressure from lenders, Ecuador is rushing to open its section of the Amazon to oil development. But spills and dumping threaten settlers, indigenous people, and the land itself.
In the 1970s, large deposits of oil were discovered in Ecuador’s Amazon. The country’s leaders turned to Texaco to build an oil industry in the jungle and help pull the country out of poverty.
Now oil provides for more than half of the country’s national budget and foreign debt payments. But the ecological costs have been huge. And now many Ecuadoreans are beginning to question whether the benefits of the industry have been worth the price.
Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.
Once the largest tribe in South America, the Guaraní have nearly all left their native forests. But one last band is holding out.
The Guaraní Indians were the once the largest tribe in South America. Their home was a forest that stretched from the Argentine pampas to the Brazilian Amazon.
Four centuries ago, Jesuit priests arrived in Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil to evangelize the Guaraní, a story told in the 1985 movie “The Mission.” The Jesuits coaxed the nomadic, hunter-and-gatherer Guaraní to live in Catholic missions called reductions.
Some Guaraní, however, never accepted the church, and remained hidden in the forest. Today, their descendants confront a world in which paper mills, dams, settlers, and tourism development have so diminished their habitat that, increasingly, the forest’s edge is all that’s left.
In 1992, when this story was reported, the government of Argentina was planning to relocate the last of that country’s Guaraní onto small plots of farmland. Yet one small band of Indians, in northern Argentina’s Misiones Province, was still holding out.
Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.
The story of Bolivia’s nomadic Yuqui Indians and the American Evangelical Christians who coaxed them out of the jungle. The first story in the Vanishing Homelands series.
On Friday, October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus wrote in his journal: “At dawn we saw naked people.”
It was the day Columbus and his men walked upon a new world for the first time. They planted flags with crosses on a small island in the Bahamas. He gave the natives red hats and glass beads. These Indians, he wrote, “ought to make good and skilled servants… They can easily be made into Christians.”
Today, just as in the time of Columbus, Christian missionaries bearing gifts and promises of salvation venture into the last of these hidden outposts to try to save the lost souls of the jungle.
Sandy Tolan and Nancy Postero bring us the story of the Yuqui Indians, 130 forest-dwelling nomads in Bolivia, and the Evangelical Christians who coaxed them out of the jungle.
Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.
In Colombia, the Paez Indians have resorted to guerrilla insurrection to reclaim their ancestral territory from the great landed families of Spanish descent.
Five hundred years after Columbus arrived in the Americas, some of the people displaced in the aftermath are recovering what they lost in the country named after the explorer himself.
One of the big surprises to emerge from a recent constitutional convention in Colombia was the victory won by the country’s 84 Indian tribes. Henceforth, Colombia will be considered a multi-ethnic nation, with autonomous Indian regions and native tongues recognized as official languages.
Much credit for inducing Colombia’s central government to acknowledge India rights has gone to the Paez Indians, who live today in Cauca Province in Colombia’s southwest.
The Paez once lived on fertile plains bordering the Andes, until Spanish conquistadors drove them into the mountains. But over the past few years, the Indians have begun to reverse that conquest, repossessing their ancestral lands from some of the oldest European families in the Americas.
Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.
A U.S. oil company has a controversial plan to build a new road and oil pipeline into some of the most remote Indian lands in the Amazon.
Deep in the Amazon jungle of Ecuador, across the Andes from the Pacific Coast, an American oil company has discovered billions of gallons of oil.
The oil lies beneath an Indian reserve and a national park in one of the richest areas of biological diversity in all of the Amazon. The government of Ecuador, poor and deeply in debt, says the oil must be developed.
Recently, government officials granted a concession to Conoco to build a road an pipeline to extract the vast new deposits.
Conoco promised to take extraordinary precautions to protect the environment, saying this would be a model for rainforest development. Opponents of the plan point to the legacy of 25 years of oil development in Ecuador: Scores of poisoned rivers and epidemic disease for the Indians living in the country’s Amazon.
Rainforest activists in the U.S. threatened a boycott of the Dupont Corporation, which owns Conoco, if the oil company went forward with the plan.
In this report, Sandy Tolan and Nancy Postero go on a journey through the oil and Indian country of Ecuador to see what oil development has meant, and what this new plan might hold, for the people who liver there. The story begins at the edge of the jungle, near the headwaters of the Amazon.
Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.
Whyman Richards says he’ll give anything a try.
Pam Pardy and Blair Ghent left good jobs in Toronto to return home to rural Newfoundland. They thought the quality of life would be better there for their son Brody.
The term “ecovillage” evokes pastoral visions of earthen homes and glistening solar panels. But in cosmopolitan Los Angeles, the idea of ecological alternative living gets stretched to include an urban slum neighborhood and a Mexican-American barrio, complete with electric low-riders and solar-powered rap recording studios.
A story of the birth of a sustainable housing movement in Sonora, in northern Mexico.
The birth of a sustainable housing movement in Sonora, in northern Mexico. A 