The World Without Us

If, in the immediate aftermath of Homo sapiens petrolerus, the tanks and towers of the Texas petrochemical patch all detonated together in one spectacular roar, after the oily smoke cleared, there would remain melted roads, twisted pipe, crumpled sheathing, and crumbled concrete. White-hot incandescence would have jump-started the corrosion of scrap metals in the salt air, and the polymer chains in hydrocarbon residues would likewise have cracked into smaller, more digestible lengths, hastening biodegradation. Despite the expelled toxins, the soils would also be enriched with burnt carbon, and after a year of rains switchgrass would be growing. A few hardy wildflowers would appear. Gradually, life would resume.

Or, if the faith of Valero Energy’s Fred Newhouse in system safeguards proves warranted—or if the departing oilmen’s last loyal act is to depressurize towers and bank the fires—the disappearance of Texas’s world champion petroleum infrastructure will proceed more slowly. During the first few years, the paint that slows corrosion will go. Over the next two decades, all the storage tanks will exceed their life spans. Soil moisture, rain, salt, and Texas wind will loosen their grip until they leak. Any heavy crude will have hardened by then; weather will crack it, and bugs will eventually eat it.

What liquid fuels that haven’t already evaporated will soak into the ground. When they hit the water table, they’ll float on top because oil is lighter than water. Microbes will find them, realize that they were once only plant life, too, and gradually adapt to eat them. Armadillos will return to burrow in the cleansed soil, among the rotting remains of buried pipe.

Unattended oil drums, pumps, pipes, towers, valves, and bolts will deteriorate at the weakest points, their joints. “Flanges, rivets,” says Fred Newhouse. “There are a jillion in a refinery.” Until they go, collapsing the metal walls, pigeons that already love to nest atop refinery towers will speed the corruption of carbon steel with their guano, and rattlesnakes will nest in the vacant structures below. As beavers dam the streams that trickle into Galveston Bay, some areas will flood. Houston is generally too warm for a freeze-thaw cycle, but its deltaic clay soils undergo formidable swell-shrink bouts as rains come and go. With no more foundation repairmen to shore up the cracks, in less than a century downtown buildings will start leaning.

During that same time, the Ship Channel will have silted back into its former Buffalo Bayou self. Over the next millennium, it and the other old Brazos channels will periodically fill, flood, undermine the shopping malls, car dealerships, and entrance ramps—and, building by tall building, bring down Houston’s skyline.

As for the Brazos itself: Today, 20 miles down the coast from Texas City, just below Galveston Island and just past the venomous plumes rising from Chocolate Bayou, the Brazos de Dios (“Arms of God”) River wanders around a pair of marshy national wildlife refuges, drops an island’s worth of silt, and joins the Gulf of Mexico. For thousands of years, it has shared a delta, and sometimes a mouth, with the Colorado and the San Bernard rivers. Their channels have interbraided so often that the correct answer to which is which is temporary at best.

Much of the surrounding land, barely three feet above sea level, is dense canebrake and old bottomland forest stands of live oaks, ashes, elms, and native pecans, spared years ago by sugarcane plantations for cattle shade. “Old” here means only a century or two, because clay soils repel root penetration, so that mature trees tend to list until the next hurricane knocks them over. Hung with wild grapevines and beards of Spanish moss, these woods are seldom visited by humans, who are dissuaded by poison ivy and black snakes, and also by golden orb weaver spiders big as a human hand, which string viscous webs the size of small trampolines between tree trunks. There are enough mosquitoes to belie any notion that their survival would be threatened when evolving microbes finally bring down the world’s mountain ranges of scrap tires.

As a result, these neglected woods are inviting habitats for cuckoos, woodpeckers, and wading birds such as ibises, sandhill cranes, and roseate spoonbills. Cottontail and marsh rabbits attract barn owls and bald eagles, and each spring thousands of returning passerine birds, including scarlet and summer tanagers in fabulous breeding plumage, flop into these trees after a long gulf crossing.

The deep clays below their perches accumulated back when the Brazos flooded—back before a dozen dams and diversions and a pair of canals siphoned its water to Galveston and Texas City. But it will flood again. Un-tended dams silt up fast. Within a century without humans, the Brazos will spill over all of them, one by one.