“A world without rodents would be a very different world. It is less likely to come to pass than a world dominated by rodents and free of people. If nuclear war destroys humanity and most of the rest of life, a good bet for survival in the short term, and for evolutionary ancestry in the long term, is rats. I have a post-Armageddon vision. We and all other large animals are gone. Rodents emerge as the ultimate post-human scavengers. They gnaw their way through New York, London and Tokyo, digesting spilled larders, ghost supermarkets and human corpses and turning them into new generations of rats and mice, whose racing populations explode out of the cities and into the countryside. When all the relics of human profligacy are eaten, populations crash again, and the rodents turn on each other, and on the cockroaches scavenging with them. In a period of intense competition, short generations perhaps with radioactivity enhanced mutation-rates boost rapid evolution. With human ships and planes gone, islands become islands again, with local populations isolated save for occasional lucky raftings: ideal conditions for evolutionary divergence. Within 5 million years, a whole range of new species replace the ones we know. Herds of giant grazing rats are stalked by sabre-toothed predatory rats.* Given enough time, will a species of intelligent, cultivated rats emerge? Will rodent historians and scientists eventually organise careful archaeological digs (gnaws?) through the strata of our long-compacted cities, and reconstruct the peculiar and temporarily tragic circumstances that gave ratkind its big break?”
I love this passage, by Richard Dawkins, on a post-human rodent world. I’m currently living in India and there feels – in the hot rapid development of a nation striving for power, wealth and growth – a certain lacking regard for the environmental strain that economic expansion causes. There feels (behind the veneer of money and IT) , not necessarily an Armageddon, but that the equilibrium of life and resource is becoming strained, unbalanced and that in the near future there could be a collapse, of-sorts. Natural resources being lost to rivers of plastic waste, becoming stagnant and lifeless, the land becoming dry and arid because of falling aquifers, concrete shells of buildings left baking in the piercing sun, rusty air-conditioning units unable to cool the dense heat.
When I let my mind wander, with the above passage in mind, I can just about see the end of a civilisation of people, where only the rats survive, scavenging within the wasteland and surviving on gnawed carcasses, nondescript in the savage of the barren environment. Could it happen… would India be the first to go? maybe. I hope not though, I like it here!
Thoughts, Therefore... 