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The World Without Us

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0312347294

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Recommended By

Rebecca Adler.

Planning on Reading

Dale Brayden.

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Book Details

Written by Alan Weisman.
Buy this on Amazon ($24.95)

Editorial Review (from Amazon.com)

A penetrating, page-turning tour of a post-human Earth
 
In The World Without Us, Alan Weisman offers an utterly original approach to questions of humanity’s impact on the planet: he asks us to envision our Earth, without us.
In this far-reaching narrative, Weisman explains how our massive infrastructure would collapse and finally vanish without human presence; which everyday items may become immortalized as fossils; how copper pipes and wiring would be crushed into mere seams of reddish rock; why some of our earliest buildings might be the last architecture left; and how plastic, bronze sculpture, radio waves, and some man-made molecules may be our most lasting gifts to the universe.
The World Without Us reveals how, just days after humans disappear, floods in New York’s subways would start eroding the city’s foundations, and how, as the world’s cities crumble, asphalt jungles would give way to real ones. It describes the distinct ways that organic and chemically treated farms would revert to wild, how billions more birds would flourish, and how cockroaches in unheated cities would perish without us. Drawing on the expertise of engineers, atmospheric scientists, art conservators, zoologists, oil refiners, marine biologists, astrophysicists, religious leaders from rabbis to the Dali Lama, and paleontologists---who describe a prehuman world inhabited by megafauna like giant sloths that stood taller than mammoths---Weisman illustrates what the planet might be like today, if not for us.
From places already devoid of humans (a last fragment of primeval European forest; the Korean DMZ; Chernobyl), Weisman reveals Earth’s tremendous capacity for self-healing. As he shows which human devastations are indelible, and which examples of our highest art and culture would endure longest, Weisman’s narrative ultimately drives toward a radical but persuasive solution that needn't depend on our demise. It is narrative nonfiction at its finest, and in posing an irresistible concept with both gravity and a highly readable touch, it looks deeply at our effects on the planet in a way that no other book has.

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Rebecca Adler thinks this book is Good.

If humans were to go extinct in the next few years, it's safe to say that mother nature will fully recover. There are some things she will likely not be able to fix, nuclear waste being top of the list, but evolution will help her to take care of a lot of the other problems humans have created, at least according to "The World Without Us" by Alan Weisman.

Luckily Weisman didn't just focus on one city and tell us how it would be destroyed and returned to its natural state, which was what I feared when I began reading the book. The first chapter focuses on New York City, the penultimate city to most Americans, but he quickly moves on to other things. Weisman talks to bridge workers to find out how quickly bridges would corrode and crumble depending on climate. He also looks into how buildings deteriorate, how roads crack and give way to trees and plants, and how other species would be effected by the loss of humans.

The chapters about deterioration of man-made buildings were difficult for me to read as I don't have a very scientific mind. I had to really focus on each paragraph to be sure I was really understanding, which made this a long book for me. I found the chapters about case studies (Chernobyl, the DMZ between the Koreas, etc.), and those about other species, to be the most fascinating. As a crazy environmentalist I find myself always thinking everything would be better off without humans, but this just isn't the case. There are several species that would likely become extinct themselves as a result of human extinction, many of those being the animals we have painstakingly domesticated and bred for our own use.

Other chapters that took turns I didn't expect were the chapter on war, in which Weisman argues that war is actually good for the environment despite horrible examples of it causing destruction, and the section about birds, in which we learn that birds are the least effected by humans because they don't have to spend all their time on Earth with us but they are still killed in the hundreds each year because of human interaction.

Overall, I found this book to be really interesting and I appreciated the illustrations that helped to explain some of the more difficult issues and managed to break up the dense text for me. The book is well researched and well written, giving a very full picture of what would happen if humans disappeared without destroying the Earth in the process.

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