![]() ![]() For Weisman, this nature comes in the form of smaller-scale ecological processes like bacteria that will feed off of the fossil fuels that have burst out of rusted petroleum containers, but also in larger scales (in both time and space) where he suggests that glaciers will flatten the city like a natural bulldozer, as it has done for the past 100,000 years. A nature that will overtake the structures we have constructed for human use, since, in the first place, it gave us the material to build these objects, and will ultimately deteriorate with time. Before posing these two sides, what I felt was common to both was the central thesis in Nigel Clark’s Inhuman Nature – that there exists a nature over which we do not have dominion. This chapter struck me because it seems to give two different answers that share a vital point. A theme or concern that has come up repeatedly in this course has been reconciling the term “Anthropocene” with its inherent anthropocentrism, which in my mind partly asks that if humans were to become extinct, would the current geologic epoch still be characterized and defined by this human impact? ![]() In Chapter 3 of Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us, entitled “The City Without Us,” we are taken through a narrative of the most iconic city in the United States after human inhabitants, who populated, maintained, and once controlled it, have seized to exist in the world. ![]()
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