Alan Weisman

A generation ago, humans eluded nuclear annihilation; with luck, we’ll continue to dodge that and other mass terrors. But now we often find ourselves asking whether inadvertently we’ve poisoned or parboiled the planet, ourselves included. We’ve also used and abused water and soil so that there’s a lot less of each, and trampled thousands of species that probably aren’t coming back. Our world, some respected voices warn, could one day degenerate into something resembling a vacant lot, where crows and rats scuttle among weeds, preying on each other. If it comes to that, at what point would things have gone so far that, for all our vaunted superior intelligence, we’re not among the hardy survivors?

Until only recently, it was known as the Hemlock Forest for its shady stands of that graceful conifer, but almost every hemlock here is now dead, slain by a Japanese insect smaller than the period at the end of this

The Crown brought divisions from England and bombed the Aberdares and Mount Kenya. Thousands of Kenyans were killed or hung.

The nomads economized by eating meat sparingly, learning to live on their flocks’ milk and blood, which they drew by carefully tapping and staunching their cattle’s jugular veins. Only when drought reduced fodder for their herds did they fall back on hunting, or trade with bushmen tribes that still lived off game

Each billboard touting Northern Cyprus’s sunny new dream homes includes, near the bottom, notification of the construction guarantee: 10 years. Given rumors of developers not bothering to wash the sea salt from the beach sand they mine for concrete, 10 years may be all they get.

The difference may have to do with what happens outside landfills, where a newspaper gets shredded by wind, cracks in sunlight, and dissolves in rain—if it doesn’t burn first.

What happens to plastic, however, is seen most vividly where trash is never collected. Humans have continuously inhabited the Hopi Indian Reservation in northern Arizona since AD 1000—longer than any other site in today’s United States. The principal Hopi villages sit atop three mesas with 360° views of the surrounding desert. For centuries, the Hopis simply threw their garbage, consisting of food scraps and broken ceramic, over the sides of the mesas. Coyotes and vultures took care of the food wastes, and the pottery sherds blended back into the ground they came from.

That worked fine until the mid-20th century. Then, the garbage tossed over the side stopped going away. The Hopis were visibly surrounded by a rising pile of a new, nature-proof kind of trash. The only way it disappeared was by being blown across the desert. But it was still there, stuck to sage and mesquite branches, impaled on cactus spines.

will have been