I prefer my earth with people

...but maybe just a little less of them, or somewhat less damaging to the environment.

This article courtesy of NewScientist.com asks us to Imagine Earth without people. A bit spooky to read, all in all.

The best illustration of this is the city of Pripyat near Chernobyl in Ukraine, which was abandoned after the nuclear disaster 20 years ago and remains deserted. "From a distance, you would still believe that Pripyat is a living city, but the buildings are slowly decaying," says Ronald Chesser, an environmental biologist at Texas Tech University in Lubbock who has worked extensively in the exclusion zone around Chernobyl. "The most pervasive thing you see are plants whose root systems get into the concrete and behind the bricks and into doorframes and so forth, and are rapidly breaking up the structure. You wouldn't think, as you walk around your house every day, that we have a big impact on keeping that from happening, but clearly we do. It's really sobering to see how the plant community invades every nook and cranny of a city."

Pripyat has its own website. It's also chronicled in a site that's been around for a while, done by a woman on a motorbike called "Kid of Speed" - which some suggested was a hoax. Hoax or not, the photos are quite something.

The descriptions in this article remind me right away of a book that's coming up 10 years old now, which I read last year and thoroughly enjoyed, Ronald Wright's "A Scientific Romance." A good review of that book can be found at the New York Times website. Wright was also the author of the Massey lecture a few years ago, called a Short History of Progress. I also had the pleasure of reading that book.

Which brings me to my final point, the Massey Lectures are currently on CBC Radio 1 this week on Ideas, which I'd link to, but their site is still hosed. Margaret Sommerville's lecture (and book) is entitled, "The Ethical Imagination."

Speaking of Connections, was this anyone else's favourite TV show? It was hypertext before the web, presented on television.

Brilliant!

And you can find them on DVD these days.