I wonder if anyone still lives on Earth after Poul Anderson's Terran Empire has fallen and, if so, what shape they are in. Their urbanized planet would not have retained country roads in Cumbria - unless Britian was a noble's estate.
SM Stirling tells us what happens to a road after the Change:
a decade of neglect;
subsidence;
rushing water;
blocked culverts;
overflowing ditches;
vines;
silt;
saplings sprouting in potholes and cracks;
roots working at the road's foundations;
in a few human lifetimes (that long?), water and trees would make the road "...a memory and a faint trace through forest..." (A Meeting At Corvallis, Chapter Nine, p. 237)
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I have read, however, that first class Roman roads were so well and solidly made that they could last for generatiions, even after the Western Empire fell. A big problem however, was that many roads were wrecked from them being QUARRIED for the cut stone used for making them.
We get a hint of what Terra might have turned out after the Empire fell from the description of Old Tranor in Chapter 22 of Asimov's FOUNDATION AND EMPIRE. Billions, alas, would die on Terra once society collapsed (whether or not there was a Great Sack of Archopolis). Later, people from other planets might come to mine the ruins of Archopolis for useful metals.
While I agree Terra, during both the Solar Commonwealth and the Empire, was heavily urbanized, this should not be exaggerated. From the example of Zolotoy in "The High Ones," from 20 to 25 percent of Terra might have been built over. And I've argued that besides the estates of wealthy nobles, it might have been required by law for large parts of Terra to remain suitable for agricultural purposes.
So, yes, I would expect the Mayor Palatine of Britain and other Imperial aristocrats to have "rural" estates. And other parts of Britain would be used for farming.
Sean
There are some real life examples of nature returning.
One of the most famous is the area around Chernobyl. See the book "Wormword Forest" for how to a large extent wildlife benefited from the removal of humans from the area far more that it was harmed by the radioactivity. My impression is that harm is detectable only in the most highly radioactive areas such as the "Red Forest".
In the book "Feral" George Monbiot documents 'rewilding' where for one reason or another humans have abandoned an area, often due to political disasters like ethnic Germans being expelled from an area post WWII and no one else moving in, or everyone being excluded from a thin region along the border between the Soviet bloc & western Europe. He also writes about how an area might be rewilded without such human suffering.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_(book)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rewilding_(conservation_biology)
Kaor, Jim!
And Chernobyl itself is a real world example of an abandoned "ghost city."
Ad astra! Sean
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