This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "The World Without Us" by Alan Weisman. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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How do human activities affect the environment? Which is more harmful—farms or cities? What’s the Great Pacific Garbage Patch?
The human race has left a mark on our planet, sometimes through carelessness and sometimes by design. In The World Without Us, science journalist Alan Weisman outlines several ways that humanity impacts the environment: agriculture, cities, power, waste, and pollution.
Keep reading to learn about the human ecological footprint.
How Human Activities Affect the Environment
How do human activities affect the environment? Weisman discusses the human ecological footprint as we’ve restructured the natural landscape to suit our own needs. Among these are how we’ve turned vast swaths of forest into farmland, how we’ve crisscrossed the world with cities and infrastructure to support our growing population, and how we’ve dealt (responsibly or otherwise) with the never-ending supply of waste that industrial civilization generates.
Agriculture
We truly began to reshape the world when we first learned how to farm. Soil samples taken in Africa recount a history of agricultural deforestation reaching as far back as the Stone Age. Over 4,000 years ago, the forests of Europe were dealt a blow by farming, while 1,000 years ago the forests of central North America were cleared by the Mississippian culture to make way for the maize crops that supported their cities.
In the 1800s, farmers discovered that adding nitrogen and phosphate to the soil makes plants grow faster and larger. Unfortunately, it also reduces biodiversity. In the 20th century, farmers began using pesticides and added zinc and copper. The result is an increase in man-made chemicals that drain from farms into streams, ponds, and rivers. Once there, the fertilizers let weeds and algae bloom out of control, removing oxygen from the water so that fish and other species die out.
Some GMO crops can be highly invasive if their pollen and seeds get loose in the wild. Other GMO crops, if left untended, can die out and leave behind barren plots of soil that can take decades to recover.
Cities & Power
In most large cities, what greenery exists is largely in the form of invasive ornamental plants that don’t feed what native ecosystem is left. Instead, the city’s new ecosystem is dominated by species that rely on us (and our trash) to survive—rats, cockroaches, and the like.
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Here's what you'll find in our full The World Without Us summary:
- What would happen to Earth if the human race disappeared
- How the planet would benefit from a human extinction
- What the immediate vs. long-term effects would look like
