The World Without Us

The other six were of even more mortal stuff: a huge wooden idol of Zeus plated in ivory and gold, which fell apart during an attempt to move it; a hanging garden, of which no trace remains among the ruins of its Babylonian palace 30 miles south of Baghdad; a colossal bronze statue on Rhodes that collapsed under its own weight in an earthquake and was later sold for scrap; and three marble structures—a Greek temple that crumbled in a fire, a Persian mausoleum razed by Crusaders, and a lighthouse marking Alexandria’s harbor, which was felled by earthquake as well.

What made them qualify as wonders was sometimes stirring beauty, as in the case of the Temple of Artemis in Greece, but more often it was simply massive scale. Human creation writ very large often overwhelms us into submission. Less ancient, but most imposing of all, is a construction project that spanned 2,000 years, three ruling dynasties, and 4,000 miles, resulting in a rampart so monumental that it achieved the status not just of landmark, but landform. The Great Wall of China is so staggering that it was widely, although erroneously, believed visible from outer space, serving notice even to would-be attackers from other worlds that this property was defended.

Yet, like any other ripple in the Earth’s crust, the Great Wall is not immortal, and far less so than most geologic versions. A pastiche of rammed earth, stones, fired brick, timbers, and even glutinous rice used as mortar paste, without human maintenance it is defenseless against tree roots and water—and the highly acidic rain produced by an industrializing Chinese society isn’t helping. Yet without that society, it will steadily melt away until just the stones remain.

Walling the Earth from the Yellow Sea all the way across Inner Mongolia is impressive, but for grand public works, few have matched a modern wonder whose construction began in 1903, the same year that New York inaugurated its subway. It was no less than the human race defying plate tectonics by tearing apart two continents that floated together 3 million years earlier. Nothing like the Panama Canal had ever been attempted before, and little has come close to it since.

Although the Suez Canal had already severed Africa from Asia three decades earlier, that was a comparatively simple, sea-level surgical stroke across an empty, disease-free sand desert with no hills. The French company that dug it went next to the 56-mile-wide isthmus between the Americas, smugly intending to do the same. Disastrously, they underestimated dense jungle steeped in malaria and yellow fever, rivers fed by prodigious rainfall, and a continental divide whose lowest pass was still 270 feet above the sea. Before they were one-third of the way through, they suffered not only a bankruptcy that rocked France, but also the deaths of 22,000 workers.

Nine years later, in 1898, a highly ambitious Assistant Secretary of the Navy named Theodore Roosevelt found a pretext, based on an explosion (probably due to a faulty boiler) that sank a U.S. ship in Havana Harbor, to oust Spain from the Caribbean. The Spanish-American War was intended to liberate both Cuba and Puerto Rico, but, to the great surprise of Puerto Ricans, the United States annexed their island. To Roosevelt, it was perfectly positioned as a coaling station for the still-nonexistent canal that would eliminate the need for ships sailing between the Atlantic and the Pacific to travel down the length of South America and up again.

Roosevelt chose Panama over Nicaragua, whose eponymous navigable lake, which would have saved considerable digging, lay among active volcanoes. At the time, the isthmus was part of Colombia, although Panamanians had tried three times to bolt from distant Bogota’s fitful rule. When Colombia objected to the U.S. offer of just $10 million for sovereignty over a 6-mile-wide zone bordering the proposed canal, President Roosevelt sent a gunboat to help Panamanian rebels finally succeed. A day later, he betrayed them by recognizing as Panama’s first ambassador to the United States a French engineer from France’s defunct canal-digging company, who, at considerable personal profit, immediately affirmed a treaty agreeing to U.S. terms.

That sealed the United States’ reputation in Latin America as piratical gringo imperialists, and produced—11 years and 5,000 more deaths later—the most stunning engineering feat yet in human history. More than a century has passed and it is still among the greatest of all time. Besides reconfiguring continental landmasses and communication between two oceans, the Panama Canal also significantly shifted the economic center of the world to the United States.

Something that substantial and literally earth-moving seems destined to last for the ages. But in a world without us, how long would it take nature to rejoin what man split asunder in Panama?