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52 pages 1 hour read

Alan Weisman

The World Without Us

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2007

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Part 2, Chapters 7-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 2, Chapter 7 Summary: “What Falls Apart”

The town of Varosha, on the Greek end of the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, was built in the early 1970s as a high-end resort—“Cyprus’s Riviera.” After the civil war between Greek and Turkish Cypriots in 1974, Varosha ended up under Turkish control, and the hotels were all hastily abandoned. The town was temporarily fenced off to keep squatters out, but the Greek-Turkish conflict was never resolved, and Varosha was never reclaimed. Allen Cavinder, a British electrical engineer who inspected the area two years later, was surprised to find not just weeds but entire trees already sprouting in the cracked pavement. Rats and pigeons had colonized the empty, windowless hotels. By 1980, “shredded laundry [was] still hanging from clotheslines,” but “roofs had collapsed and trees were growing straight out of houses,” and “entire slabs of cement” had been heaved aside by flowers germinating in cracks (96). Twenty years later, Varosha was completely overgrown, the buildings entirely unsalvageable.

At a museum in the port city of Kyrenia, a salvaged 2,300-year-old Greek merchant ship is, by contrast, in remarkably good condition. The wooden hull is intact, having been protected from oxygen by being underwater; the copper nails are not rusted, and lead fishing weights and ceramic urns are preserved. Meanwhile, the northern coast of Cyprus is being rapidly developed for retirement communities, but the construction is of extremely low quality, guaranteed to last for only 10 years. On the other hand, ancient and defunct Greek churches, made of stone, would far outlast modern buildings in a world without humans. The most enduring of all human structures would be the caves carved into limestone hills by humanity’s Stone Age ancestors at the tip of the Karpaz Peninsula: “Long after all our buildings […] are reduced to sand and soil, caves where we took shelter and first learned the notion of walls […] will remain” (101).

Part 2, Chapter 8 Summary: “What Lasts”

In Istanbul, civil engineer Mete Sözen expects ancient stone edifices like the Hagia Sophia church to last “well into future geologic time” (102), potentially even surviving earthquakes. Not so the more than 1 million multistory apartment buildings jammed into narrow streets throughout Istanbul, hastily constructed from low-quality reinforced concrete to accommodate explosive population growth in the post-World War II decades. Often five or six floors have been stacked on top of ground floor spaces that lack internal columns or load-bearing walls because they were not originally intended as multistory structures. In 2005 Sözen and colleagues warned the Turkish government that the North Anatolian Fault just east of the city was likely to slip within the next 30 years and that at least 50,000 of these buildings would promptly collapse in that event.

In a posthuman world, underground spaces like Ankara’s massive underground shopping center—or the Moscow metro—would outlast anything on the surface. So would the remarkable underground cities carved 10,000 years ago into the tuff hills at Cappadocia, which were probably dug to provide winter shelter but subsequently used and expanded for defense. Some feature underground wells and drains, vertical communication shafts, horse stables, wineries and breweries, or miles-long tunnels connecting to neighboring cities. One partially excavated city descends at least 280 feet below the surface and has space for 30,000 residents. After we are gone, these underground cities “will defend humanity’s memory, bearing final—albeit hidden—witness to the fact that, once, we were here” (111).

Part 2, Chapters 7-8 Analysis

Chapters 7 and 8 both highlight the impermanence of cheaply built modern architecture and, by extension, the imprudence and shortsightedness that Weisman implies characterize many human endeavors. In Chapter 7, Varosha offers a preview in miniature of a posthuman world, and it is a world in which nature overtakes the constructed environment with startling rapidity and thoroughness. For Allen Cavinder, who spent two years scavenging appliances from abandoned resorts, the absence of humans felt not Edenic but oppressive and tomblike: The “silence pounded at him” and “actually hurt his ears” (95), Weisman relates. The United Nations (UN) Peacekeepers patrolling Cyprus’s Green line are portrayed as similarly lifeless and frozen in time, “occasionally waxing a pair of still-impounded, still-new 1974 Toyotas” (96). Nevertheless, Weisman clearly frames humans as the villains in this story; Varosha’s tomblike silence is the result of civil war and the “murderous, mutual loathing” of the Greek and Turkish Cypriots (98).

When Turkish journalist Metin Münir visits Varosha four years later, in contrast, he is struck by Reverence for the Earth and Life—“not the absence of life but its vibrant presence” (96). Weisman describes the rewilding of Varosha with vivid images and active verbs that evoke the ebullience of life: “Feral geraniums and philodendrons emerge from missing roofs and pour down exterior walls. […] Houses disappear under magenta mounds of bougainvillaea” (97). Münir tells Weisman, “You understand […] just what the Taoists mean when they say that soft is stronger than hard” (96)—in the long run, that is, flowers prevail over concrete. When Münir returns to Cyprus in 1995 after a massive wildfire has decimated the forests, he is amazed to find burned hillsides covered with poppies and learns that poppy seeds can sometimes survive for 1,000 years or more, blooming once fire has cleared an area of trees. The implication is that nature’s life force ultimately prevails over the human death drive.

Yet Weisman does not gloss over the latter. Even when humans are not waging war, he suggests, they are doing foolish things like building high-rise hotels so close to the ocean’s edge that they block the sun on the beach, or they are developing real estate at a frantic pace in places that have already exceeded their carrying capacities. Weisman notes that water is now imported to Cyprus from Turkey in giant vinyl bags and sewage dumped into the ocean untreated. Weisman depicts the tacky new developments with frank disgust—“unlovely infestations of casino hotels” (99), a phrase that calls to mind rats or cockroaches—and likens them to a hostile “foreign incursion”:

Suddenly, bulldozers were scattering 500-year-old olive trees to scrape roads across hillsides. Waves of red-tiled roofs soon oscillated across the landscape, atop floor plans cloned repeatedly in poured concrete. […] Each month more steam shovels gobble coastline like famished brontosaurs. […] The English language marches down the shore, dragging embarrassing architecture with it (99-100).

When the end of the chapter notes that simple Stone Age caves carved into a limestone hill will far outlast modern concrete constructions, Weisman presents this fact as a relief.

In Chapter 8, Weisman extends his critique to Istanbul’s cheap postwar apartment buildings. These are especially precarious because of the nearby fault line, but mushrooming cities in every poor country on the planet feature similarly flimsy constructions. Their precarity is contrasted with the durability of underground structures such as Istanbul’s subway and the ancient subterranean cities of Cappodacia, which the Turkish government has even considered using as bomb shelters. Weisman makes a prediction: “Should the Earth’s poles shift and sheet glaciers one day muscle their way across central Turkey, flattening whatever man-made structures still stand in their way, here they will only scratch our surface” (108).

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