Customer Reviews

The World Without Us

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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"Picture a world from which we [humans] all suddenly vanished. Tomorrow...Leave [everything on the Earth's surface] all in place, but extract [all] the human beings...

How would the rest of nature respond if it were suddenly relieved of the relentless pressures we heap on it and our fellow organisms? How soon would, or could, the climate return to where it was before we fired up all our engines?

How long would it take to recover lost ground and restore Eden to the way it must have gleamed and smelled the day before Adam, or [humans], appeared?

Could nature ever obliterate all our traces? How would it undo our monumental cities and public works, and reduce our myriad plastics and toxic synthetics back to benign, basic elements? ...

And what of our finest creations--our architecture, our art, our many manifestations of spirit? Are any truly timeless, at least enough so to last until the sun expands and roasts our Earth to a cinder?

And even after THAT, might we have left some faint, enduring mark on the universe...of Earthly humanity; some interplanetary sign that once we were here? ...

Is it possible that, instead of heaving a huge biological sigh of relief, the world without us would miss us?"

The above premise and numerous questions are found in the introduction to this fascinating, unique, extremely well-written book by award-winning journalist and author Alan Weisman.

WARNING! This is not a book of fiction but of rational scientific speculation. In fact, the magazine article on which this book is based and expands, was selected for "Best American Science Writing 2006."

Weisman obtains all the answers to the questions posed above by "drawing on the expertise of [such people as] engineers, atmospheric scientists, art conservators, astrophysicists, religious leaders...and paleontologists."

The author goes beyond scientific speculation to observation by taking us to present day, forgotten places where there are no human beings (such as Chernobyl). He makes some enlightening discoveries in these places.

All the chapters are extremely interesting but here are my personal favorites:

(1) The city without us
(2) What falls apart
(3) What lasts
(4) Polymers are forever
(5) The world without farms
(6) The world without war
(7) Hot legacy (deals with things nuclear)
(8) Art beyond us

Finally, throughout there are black & white pictures and illustrations. I found many of these interesting. Note that the cover of this book (displayed above by Amazon) is especially interesting showing a city skyline reflected in the water as the way it possibly was before humans came along.

In conclusion, this is truly a unique book destined, in my opinion, to become a classic!!

(first published 2007; prelude; 4 parts or 19 chapters; coda; main narrative 275 pages; acknowledgments; bibliography; index)

<<Stephen Pletko, London, Ontario, Canada>>

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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.

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.

Although the author does discuss what would happen to buildings, roads and a variety of other man-made structures - ancient as well as recent - if humans suddenly ceased to exist, the main bulk of this book concerns the environment, ecosystems, various animal species and their habitats, trees, plants and nature as a whole. The focus is mainly on the harm that humans have done to the above, and are still doing now, through i) planned activities, e.g., building cities, agriculture, ii) accidents, e.g., the Chernobyl nuclear reactor explosion, and iii) human lifestyle, e.g., the spread of various types of pollution due to human activity. Comments are made on nature's recuperative abilities should there suddenly be no more humans on earth. The writing style is friendly, clear and engaging. A very extensive set of references is also included. Although this book could easily be enjoyed by general readers, it may be most appreciated by biologists, environmentalists, naturalists, ecologists and conservationists.

According to some biologists, the Earth is suffering an "infestation". The afflicting organism, "Homo sapiens" has overrun the planet. The infection is recent, several thousand years old in its most virulent phase. During that brief period, however, the surface of the planet has been seriously transformed. Alan Weisman has confronted the impact of our infection of the biosphere with an entirely fresh approach. Relying little on speculation, excepting only what might make the human species disappear, he points up our environmental foot print describing how the planet would recover from what our presence has effected. A captivating read, this book is at once an indictment and a challenge to our intellect and our values.

The great metropolis of New York City is one focal point in this account. Once traversed by 40 meandering streams feeding the ocean and river, the island, but for its striking Central Park, is now "tamed". Massive buildings line its many kilometres of pavement, and the storm sewer systems have replaced Nature's waterways. Yet, those rivulets persist, demanding flow rights. The loss of humanity would shut down the 753 pumps that keep the subway tunnels relatively dry. The streams, assisted by the bordering river and ocean would quickly inundate them. The bridges' streams of vehicles haven't stopped the return of wildlife to the city, and human abandonment would accelerate the process. Botany's realm, however, may never recover its original domain. Too many human-introduced species have an irresistible foothold. Those tall buildings bracketing the asphalt ribbons would also ultimately break down, providing havens for birds and small mammals before succumbing. The one species we've all been taught to be the ultimate survivor - the kitchen cockroach - would disappear with the first harsh winter.

Weisman doesn't limit his account for his native land's reading audience, however. The entire planet becomes his information hunting ground. An ancient patch of forest in Eastern Europe has been protected for centuries by hunting noblemen. While the deletion of humans would allow the forest to expand, it's likely the confined herd of European bison would enjoy the same recovery. In our original homeland, the natural predator-prey balance would be briefly offset by the ready meals our domesticated animals would provide. Herds of cattle, goats and sheep in Africa, untutored by natural selection to avoid lions and cheetahs, would fill feline bellies. Where the big cats would rule undeterred for a time, many microbes would be forced to make some spectacular adjustments. Oil dumps and nuclear stations, slowly breaking down would flood the landscape with hydrocarbons and radiation. Some microbes are already resistant to radioactive elements while some can "eat" oil. Others would have to expand their range of comestibles by adapting to them over millennia. Whether similar adjustments might be made for the mass of plastics we've dumped into the world remains an open question, Weisman says.

Although his original premise may be fantasy, the crux of his discussion is based on solid science. His interviews are with people who are in a position to gauge how we affect the world. Some of them are in place to prevent the recursion of nature into the habitat we've created for our species' benefit. One, archaeologist Arthur Demarest, is investigating a small segment of "the world without us", the site of the Maya realm. The 1600-year-long reign of those Central American people must have seemed "destined to thrive forever". The "spectacular, sudden collapse" took only a century. The return of the rainforest hides their existence from European invaders' eyes for another millennium.

Although Weisman's view of a dehumanised planet is compelling, almost desirable, he knows neither he nor his readership would be pleased by our extinction. We want to go on existing. Yet, he notes, "every four days, the world population rises by four million" - a clearly unsustainable rate of growth. Weisman has a scenario for survival, but its application would have to be nearly as instantaneous as his scenario of disappearance. His aim is curtailment of the human infestation - by the "draconian measure" of universal birth control. He argues that every human female must be limited to producing but one offspring. A challenging scenario, obviously, but one which he argues would reduce the planet's infesting species to a total of 1.6 billion by the end of this century. The number's validity may be disputed, but the goal is admirable. Could such a scenario possibly be envisioned, let alone implemented? It's that, he says, or a new wave of human colonisation - on other planets. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

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.

This is one of the most thorough and detailed books I have ever read, on any topic. I am by no means an environmental enthusiast, but this book looks critically at our effect on the planet we inhabit and explains which human activities truly need to be altered, not for the planet's sake, but for our own. Weisman details human innovation through time and explains, without preaching or sounding like a propaganda machine, what legacy we will leave on this planet, and what will disappear with us.

The important lesson to learn from this book is that whether the changes in our environment (ex:global warming) are real or not, or will outlast us or not, this is still the only ecosystem we have and we need to maintain it as best as we can for as long as we can.

Alan Weisman's THE WORLD WITHOUT US is a sobering look at a possible future, where humans are no longer part of the equation but the Earth, as they say, abides. The book brings to mind those apocalyptic, end-of-the-world stories science fiction authors like to scare us with...but Mr. Weisman's approach to the subject is down to earth, the tone of matter-of-factness he employs throughout is downright chilling at times. A terrific companion piece to the book is a wonderful documentary put together by the History Channel called "Life After People". [...]

The most striking feature is the focus is not on controversial, grand issues like global warming or polution per se. It's everyday things we take for granted that are shocking, like how close subways are to flooding, streets to collapsing; what happens to the world garbage; the pastics that find their ways into living tissues, and so on.

At times, the description is hopeful, such as animals returning to radioactively contaminated land. But at its most hopeful, it is equally sad, perhaps even more so. Like watching someone take their first steps from the hospital after a horrendous car accident that had killed everyone else.

Some of our work on the face of the planet is decades from being swept away by the earth, some polution is hundreds of years from being cleaned. But I was struck speechless by dates that extended into thousands or millions of years. The chapter on plastics as well as nuclear waste is still in my mind. As well as fantastic measures considered to warn future generations or other intelligent life forms after us to what we've put in the earth.

The message for me was: it can and will get better, but it will never be the way it was. Ever.

The author provides a very important supplement to the growing pro-environmental movement. What I particularly enjoyed about this book was its pitch. The book starts off with a light 'what if' science fiction-like situation of all humans being magically spirited away from earth, and proceeds from there. His vast message seems to be that even with a human-free world nature will recover and fill in the gaps very quickly. "The World Without Us" is a fast, easy read with the logic that something needs change within our actions.
Also recommended "Understanding: Train of Thought".