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18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful and thought-provoking, Oct 28 2007
This is a beautifully-written and thought-provoking book. Weisman takes us all over the globe to explore what would happen to our artifacts -- buildings, cities, farms, nature preserves, etc. -- if all the humans suddenly disappeared somehow. In some places, within a couple hundred years it would be hard to tell we were ever there. In other cases, our footprint will be seen for aeons.
This book is many things: An homage to the resilience of nature; a tribute to some of the brilliant and enduring things built by humans; a caution about the irreversible harm we are causing to some parts of the planet; and a plea to protect nature by reducing our impact on it.
I found it hard to put this book down. It covers a wide range of topics, all starting from an intriguing premise ("what if the world had to continue without humans"), and presents ideas and challenges that stayed with me after finishing reading it. I highly recommend it.
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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
What Hath People Wrought?, Sep 24 2007
The World Without Us raises a novel question (What if there were no people left?) that leads to some surprising answers: The best of what we've done wouldn't survive while most of the worst of our work will. The book also serves as an environmental and social critique of human attitudes and behavior.
Mr. Weisman looked across the globe for places where humans have left to see practical examples of what remains. Newer houses and modern buildings soon collapse, leaving behind only the metal and plastic as mementos. Buildings made of stone will, however, last a long time. Manhattan's surface will sink as water floods subway tunnels while filled-in swamps are refilled. Large predators will grow in numbers while pests that depend on us and our garbage like head lice and rats will do poorly. Domestic animals and plants will soon be wiped out. Nuclear plants will soon be spewing radioactive vapor into the atmosphere while leaving behind in-ground radioactivity for tens of thousands of years. The Panama Canal will soon cease to be a barrier to animal migrations between North and South America. Huge forests will reappear.
I don't want to share too many of the answers (or you won't want to read the book), but there are some pretty powerful ironies about what the most lasting aspects of human existence will be. It's worth reading the book just to find that out.
In the process, you'll learn a lot about the mass extinction that is occurring among species that are vulnerable to human influences.
If we look at what the Earth would be like without us, I suspect we'll all change how we behave every day. It's a cautionary lesson that all should heed.
I liked the way the book was organized. Most of the observations are built from specific locales and interviews with those who best know the science involved. I came away with several ideas of places I would like to visit that would never have occurred to me otherwise.
Those who don't want to read a book about how the environment is being damaged will find this book annoying because that secondary message is deeply embedded in the primary message.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Thought-provoking, when it sticks to the subject, Sep 6 2009
I bought this book thinking it would be an interesting diversion - a sort of whimsical mind experiment. The premise of the book is that something has wiped out all of humankind, but left the earth itself (and pretty much all of the other life forms on it) intact - say for instance a virus that destroys the viability of all human sperm. What I expected to find was the author's speculation about say, what some future archeologists would find as remnants of our civilization - but of course it would all be hypothetical, impossible to verify, and easy to dismiss.
What I got instead was a lot more, and I was pleasantly surprised. Yes I got the information I expected, about what parts of my everyday world would survive the longest and why (and the answers were in some cases not what I expected!). But I also got my eyes opened in a number of other ways. Without giving too much away, I'll just mention three:
Surprise #1 - it turns out there are a number of legacies that we would leave (if we disappeared today) that I hadn't thought of (a few examples - thousands of intact nuclear warheads, millions of CFC/HCFC-containing air conditioners and refrigerators, nuclear waste).
Surprise #2 - there are in fact real situations with real data, where we can see small scale examples of what will happen. Surprisingly, one is the DMZ in Korea - which has been forcibly uninhabited by people for 50 years. Another is Chernobyl (to see what can happen if removal of human monitoring leads to a nuclear meltdown). And it turns out we can learn what will survive from our day-to-day households by seeing what has survived from the Incas, Aztecs, Mayans, etc.
Surprise #3 - this is a wide-ranging book. I was impressed by the number of questions that were raised and answered that I had never even thought of. Examples:
a) will cockroaches really inherit the earth?
b) what will happen to all the domesticated dogs and cats?
c) what will happen to underground malls, and other underground structures (like subways, or the "Chunnel" between England and France)
d) what will happen to the Panama Canal?
e) what will happen when there is no more acid rain, insecticide, or crop fertilizer?
etc.
So overall I highly recommend this book. I do have a couple of minor comments, to explain why I didn't give it a 5th star:
1. Anyone who is turned off by reading about how we are ruining the environment is not going to like whole sections of this book (especially the part about how long-lasting plastics and polymers are), and
2. I thought a couple of times the author made topical detours in the book. For instance he describes at some length how mankind is thought to have migrated from Africa and caused the extinction of many large animal speciies in the Americas (apparently there used to be quite a lot of "megafauna" like American lions, giant beavers, giant armadillos, mammoths, etc.) This, while interesting, seemed a bit off topic to me.
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