The World Without Us

It may not even have to wait that long. Not only is the Gulf of Mexico, whose water is even warmer than the ocean’s, creeping inland, but all along the Texas coast for the past century, the ground has been lowered to receive it. When oil, gas, or groundwater is pumped from beneath the surface, land settles into the space it occupied. Subsidence has lowered parts of Galveston 10 feet. An upscale subdivision in Baytown, north of Texas City, dropped so low that it drowned during Hurricane Alicia in 1983 and is now a wetlands nature preserve. Little of the Gulf Coast is more than three feet above sea level, and parts of Houston actually dip below it.

Lower the land, raise the seas, add hurricanes far stronger than midsize, Category 3 Alicia, and even before its dams go, the Brazos gets to do again what it did for 80,000 years: like its sister to the east, the Mississippi, it will flood its entire delta, starting up where the prairie ends. Flood the enormous city that oil built, all the way down to the coast. Swallow the San Bernard and overlap the Colorado, fanning a sheet of water across hundreds of miles of coastline. Galveston Island’s 17-foot seawall won’t be much help. Petroleum tanks along the Ship Channel will be submerged; flare towers, catalytic crackers, and fractionating columns, like downtown Houston buildings, will poke out of brackish floodwaters, their foundations rotting while they wait for the waters to recede.

Having rearranged things yet again, the Brazos will choose a new course to the sea—a shorter one, because the sea will be nearer. New bottomlands will form, higher up, and eventually new hardwoods will appear (assuming that Chinese tallow trees, whose waterproof seeds should make them permanent colonizers, share the riparian space with them). Texas City will be missing; hydrocarbons leaching out of its drowned petrochemical plants will swirl and dissipate in the currents, with a few heavy-end crude residues dumped as oil globules on the new inland shores, eventually to be eaten.

Below the surface, the oxidizing metal parts of chemical alley will provide a place for Galveston oysters to attach. Silt and oyster shells will slowly bury them, and will then be buried themselves. Within a few million years, enough layers will amass to compress shells into limestone, which will bear an odd, intermittent rusty streak flecked with sparkling traces of nickel, molybdenum, niobium, and chromium. Millions of years after that, someone or something might have the knowledge and tools to recognize the signal of stainless steel. Nothing, however, will remain to suggest that its original form once stood tall over a place called Texas, and breathed fire into the sky.

CHAPTER 11 The World Without Farms

1. The Woods

WHEN WE THINK civilization, we usually picture a city. Small wonder: we’ve gawked at buildings ever since we started raising towers and temples, like Jericho’s. As architecture soared skyward and marched outward, it was unlike anything the planet had ever known. Only beehives or ant mounds, on a far humbler scale, matched our urban density and complexity. Suddenly, we were no longer nomads cobbling ephemeral nests out of sticks and mud, like birds or beavers. We were building homes to last, which meant we were staying in one place. The word civilization itself derives from the Latin civis, meaning “town dweller.”

Yet it was the farm that begat the city. Our transcendental leap to sowing crops and herding critters—actually controlling other living things— was even more world-shaking than our consummate hunting skill. Instead of simply gathering plants or killing animals just prior to eating them, we now choreographed their existence, coaxing them to grow more reliably and far more abundantly.

Since a few farmers could feed many, and since intensified food production meant intensified people production, suddenly there were a lot of humans free to do things other than gather or grow meals. With the possible exception of Cro-Magnon cave artists, who may have been so esteemed for their talents that they were relieved of other duties, until agriculture arrived, food-finding was the only occupation for humans on this planet.

Agriculture let us settle down, and settlement led to urbanity. Yet, imposing as skylines are, farmlands have much more impact. Nearly 12 percent of the planet’s landmass is cultivated, compared to about 3 percent occupied by towns and cities. When grazing land is included, the amount of Earthly terrain dedicated to human food production is more than one-third of the world’s land surface.

If we suddenly stopped plowing, planting, fertilizing, fumigating, and harvesting; if we ceased fattening goats, sheep, cows, swine, poultry, rabbits, Andean guinea pigs, iguanas, and alligators, would those lands return to their former, pre-agro-pastoral state? Do we even know what that was?