The way humans are going, someday, maybe as much as a million or more years from now (if we're lucky), we too will become extinct.

Alan Weisman has written a book called "The World without Us." He gave a book reading not long ago on C-Span.

What will we leave when we're gone? Most likely, our tombstones, our ceramic tiles, our stainless steel ware, they will last the longest.

But within 500 years give or take after we're gone, our major cities will be almost deteriorated by nature as it has its final say. In New York City, our subways will fall apart, the roads will collapse and then the buildings. The rivers, creeks and streams that were buried to make the city will come back to rule like they did before we Europeans changed the land.

Every city will go in much the same way. Our buildings aren't built to last into the thousands of years, and remember, there will be no maintenance teams keeping them up. Seeds will blow into cracks in the pavement and sidewalks, trees will grow and mature, eventually ripping up both to expose the pure land.

Can you imagine the kudzu, the poison ivy and honey suckle growing unimpeded, taking over houses, monuments, etc.?

We humans will leave some huge footprints on our planet with our nuclear power plants and weapons. For example, Weisman says that if humans were to disappear (let's say overnight), our  nuclear power plants, if they didn't have folks to keep the cooling going on, usually with diesel fuel, they would either blow up or melt down, spreading radioactivity all over.

This most likely would harm all of life, animal and flora. This incident would give very short lifespans to most of life. Yes, over millions of years, nature again would eventually triumph. But this shows that we humans are dealing with some dangerous stuff.

Our plastics, made with fossil fuels, will also be around much longer than most of us would imagine. It decays very slowly. Our huge landfills, Weisman claims, would turn eventually into some type of red metal.

Mr. Weisman proposes that maybe we can continue to populate this earth longer if we will shrink our footprint, if we can learn to just get along with nature, cooperate with it instead of trying to control and manage it.

What do you think? Will you leave a good planet for those who come after you? I'm sure going to try myself for my grand kids' sakes.

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