The World Without Us

on Earth. If we’re around at least a few more decades, however, a lot of it won’t, because we’ll dig it up and burn it. But if an unlikely plan goes extremely well, one of coal power’s most problematic by-products may end up sealed away once more beneath the surface, creating yet another human legacy to the far future.

The by-product is carbon dioxide, which a burgeoning consensus of humanity agrees probably should not be stored in the atmosphere. The plan, which is attracting growing attention—especially from industry boosters of an oxymoron born of recombinant public relations: “clean coal”—is to capture CO₂ before it leaves the smokestack of coal-fired electrical plants, stuff it underground, and keep it there. Forever.

It would work like this: Pressurized CO₂ would be injected into saline aquifers that, in much of the world, lie under impermeable caprock at depths of 1,000 to 8,000 feet. There, supposedly, the CO₂ would go into solution, forming mild carbonic acid—like salty Perrier. Gradually, the carbonic acid would react with surrounding rocks, which would dissolve and slowly precipitate out as dolomite and limestone, locking the greenhouse gas in stone.

Each year since 1996, Norway’s Statoil has sequestered 1 million tons of carbon dioxide in a saline formation under the North Sea. In Alberta, CO₂ is being sequestered in abandoned gas wells. Back in the 1970s, then federal attorney David Hawkins joined in discussions with semioticians about how people 10,000 years hence might be alerted to buried nuclear wastes at what today is New Mexico’s WIPP site. Now, as director of the Climate Center of the Natural Resources Defense Council, he contemplates how to tell the future not to drill into sequestered reservoirs of invisible gases we might sweep under the rug, lest they unexpectedly burp to the surface.

Aside from the expense of drilling enough holes to capture, pressurize, and inject the CO₂ from every industrial and power plant on Earth, a big concern is that hard-to-detect leaks of even 1/10 of 1 percent would eventually add up to the amount we’re pumping into the air today—and the future wouldn’t realize it. But given the choice, Hawkins would rather try containing carbon than plutonium.

“We know that nature can engineer leak-free gas storage: there’s been methane trapped for millions of years. The question is, can humans?”

3. Archaeological Interlude

We tear down mountains, and unwittingly build hills.

Forty minutes northeast of the city of Flores on northern Guatemala’s Lake Peten Ixta, a paved tourist road arrives at the ruins of Tikal, the largest Classic Mayan site, its white temples rising 230 feet above the jungle floor.

In the opposite direction, until recent improvements halved travel time, the rutted road southwest from Flores took three miserable hours, ending at the scruffy outpost of Sayaxche, where an army machine gun placement perched atop a Mayan pyramid.

Sayaxche is on the Rio Pasion—the Passion River—which lolls through the western Peten province to the confluence of the rivers Usamacinta and Salinas, together forming Guatemala’s border with Mexico. The Pasion was once a major trade route for jade, fine pottery, quetzal feathers, and jaguar skins. More recently, commerce includes contraband mahogany and cedar logs, opium from Guatemalan highland poppies, and looted Mayan artifacts. During the early 1990s, motor-driven wooden launches on a sluggish Pasion tributary, the Riochuelo Petexbatun, also carried quantities of two modest items that in the Peten are veritable luxuries: corrugated zinc roofing and cases of Spam.

Both were destined for the base camp that Vanderbilt University’s Arthur Demarest built in a jungle clearing out of mahogany planks for one of the biggest archaeological excavations in history, to solve one of our biggest mysteries: the disappearance of Mayan civilization.

How can we even contemplate a world without us? Fantasies of space aliens with death rays are, well, fantasies. To imagine our big, overwhelming civilization really ending—and ending up forgotten under layers of dirt and earthworms—is as hard for us as picturing the edge of the universe.

The Maya, however, were real. Their world had seemed destined to thrive forever, and, at its zenith, it was far more entrenched than ours. For at least 1,600 years, about 6 million Maya lived in what in some ways resembled southern California—a flourishing megalopolis of city-states, with few breaks between overlapping suburbs across a lowland that today comprises northern Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. Their commanding architecture, and their astronomy, mathematics, and literature, would have humbled the achievements of contemporaries in Europe. Equally striking, and far less understood, is how so many could inhabit a tropical rain forest. For centuries, they raised their food and families in the same fragile environment that today is quickly being devastated by relatively few hungry squatters.

What has baffled archaeologists even more, however, is the Maya’s spectacular, sudden collapse. Beginning in the eighth century AD, within just 100 years lowland Mayan civilization vanished. In most of the Yucatan, only scattered remnants of the population remained. Northern Guatemala’s Peten province was virtually a world without people. Rainforest vegetation soon overran the ball courts and plazas, enshrouding tall pyramids. Not for 1,000 years would the world again be aware of their existence.

But the Earth holds ghosts, even of entire nations. Archaeologist Arthur Demarest, a stocky, thick- moustached Louisiana Cajun, declined a Harvard chair because Vanderbilt offered him a chance to exhume this one. During his graduate fieldwork in El Salvador, Demarest raced to salvage a bit of the ancient record from a forthcoming dam that displaced thousands, converting many of them to guerrillas. When three of his workers were accused of being terrorists, he pleaded to officials who let them go, but they were assassinated anyway.

In his first years in Guatemala, guerrillas and the army stalked each other within a few kilometers of his digs, catching in their crossfire people who still speak languages derived from the hieroglyphics his team was decoding.

“Indiana Jones swashbuckled through a mythical, generic Third World of swarthy people with threatening, incomprehensible ways, defeating them with American heroics and seizing their treasures,” he says, mopping his thick black hair. “He would have lasted five seconds here. Archaeology isn’t about glittery objects—it’s about their context. We’re part of the context. It’s our workers whose fields are burning, it’s their children who have malaria. We come to study ancient civilization, but we end up learning about now.”

By Coleman lantern, he writes through the humid night to the rumble of howler monkeys, piecing together how, over nearly two millennia, the Maya evolved a means of resolving discord between nations without destroying each other’s societies in the process. But then something went wrong. Famine, drought, epidemics, overpopulation, and environmental plunder have been blamed for the Maya’s downfall—yet for each, arguments exist against liquidation on such a massive scale. No relics reveal an alien invasion. Often extolled as an exemplary stable and peaceable people, the Maya seemed least likely to overreach and be devoured by their own greed.

However, in the steamy Peten, it appears that is exactly what happened—and that the path to their catastrophe seems familiar.

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The trek from the Riochuelo Petexbatun to Dos Pilas, the first of seven major sites that Demarest’s team uncovered, passes for hours through mosquito-rich stretches of strangler vines and palmilla thickets, then finally climbs a steep escarpment. In remaining groves still unplundered by timber poachers, giant cedars, ceibas, chicle-bearing sapodillas, mahoganies, and breadnut trees rise from the thin tropical soils capping the Peten limestone. Along the escarpment’s ragged edge, the Maya built cities that Arthur Demarest’s archaeologists have determined once formed an interlocking kingdom called Petexbatun. Today, what appear to be hills and ridges are actually pyramids and walls, built from chunks of local limestone hewn with chert adzes, now disguised by soil and a mature rain forest.

The jungle surrounding Dos Pilas, filled with clacking toucans and parrots, was so dense that after it was discovered in the 1950s, 17 years passed before anyone noticed that a nearby hill was actually a 220-foot pyramid. In fact, to the Maya, pyramids re-created mountains, and their carved monoliths, called stelae, were stone representations of trees. The dot-and-bar code glyphs carved into the stelae unearthed around Dos Pilas tell that, about AD 700, its k’uhul ajaw—divine lord—began to break the rules of restrained conflict