The World Without Us - Hardcover

Weisman, Alan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312347294 ISBN 13: 9780312347291

Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books, 2007

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Alan Weisman is an award-winning journalist whose reports have appeared in Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Discover, and on NPR, among others. A former contributing editor to The Los Angeles Times Magazine, he is a senior radio producer for Homelands Productions and teaches international journalism at the University of Arizona. His essay "Earth Without People" (Discover magazine, February 2005), on which The World Without Us expands, was selected for Best American Science Writing 2006.

From the Inside Flap

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.

"This is one of the grandest thought experiments of our time, a tremendous feat of imaginative reporting!"--Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature and Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and The Durable Future

"The imaginative power of The World Without Us is compulsive and nearly hypnotic--make sure you have time to be kidnapped into Alan Weisman's alternative world before you sit down with the book, because you won't soon return. This is a text that has a chance to change people, and so make a real difference for the planet."--Charles Wohlforth, author of L.A. Times Book Prize-winning The Whale and the Supercomputer

"Alan Weisman offers us a sketch of where we stand as a species that is both illuminating and terrifying. His tone is conversational and his affection for both Earth and humanity transparent."--Barry Lopez, author of Arctic Dreams

"An exacting account of the processes by which things fall apart. The scope is breathtaking...the clarity and lyricism of the writing itself left me with repeated gasps of recognition about the human condition. I believe it will be a classic."--Dennis Covington, author of National Book Award finalist Salvation on Sand Mountain

"Fascinating, mordant, deeply intelligent, and beautifully written, The World Without Us depicts the spectacle of humanity's impact on the planet Earth in tragically poignant terms that go far beyond the dry dictates of science. This is a very important book for a species playing games with its own destiny."--James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency

Reviews

Reviewed by Michael Grunwald

If human beings vanished from the Earth, our ceramic pottery and bronze statues would last much longer than our wood-frame houses. New York's subways would be flooded within days; Lexington Avenue would be a river within decades. Head lice would go extinct, and predators would make short work of our doggies, but a lot of endangered fish and birds and trees would flourish in our absence. We endangered them, after all.

A diligent and intelligent science writer named Alan Weisman discovered all this while investigating what would happen to this planet if people suddenly disappeared. Now he has converted his thought experiment for Discover magazine into a deeply reported book called The World Without Us, and it's full of interesting facts. For example: The European starling spread like avian kudzu after some Shakespeare buff introduced every bird mentioned by the Bard into Central Park. The demilitarized (and therefore depopulated) zones of Korea and Cyprus have become undeclared wildlife sanctuaries; so have Chernobyl and abandoned forests in New England and Belarus. Almost every ounce of plastic that's ever been manufactured still lurks somewhere in our environment. And radio waves are forever, so extraterrestrials at the edge of the universe might be able to watch "I Love Lucy" reruns billions of years after we're gone. Who knew?

Also: Who cares?

Ultimately, The World Without Us is trivia masquerading as wisdom. By journeying around the world to interview biologists and paleontologists, engineers and curators, Zápara elders and Masai ecoguides, Weisman has done a remarkably thorough job of answering a question that doesn't particularly matter. Imagining the human footprint on a post-human planet might be fun for dormitory potheads who have already settled the questions of God's existence and Fergie's hotness, but it's not clear why the rest of us need this level of documentary evidence. It's nice to know that domesticated plants (like wheat) and animals (like horses) would be out-competed by their wild counterparts post-us, but it's not inherently important to know. If the larger point is that our domesticated plants and animals are not really natural, well, that we already know.

When Weisman does make larger points, they are achingly familiar. Yes, man is doing foolishly destructive things -- like warming the climate with carbon and tearing the peaks off mountains and littering the oceans with plastics -- that will have long-term consequences for the Earth. This no longer qualifies as news. And yes, nature and the Earth are resilient, while man and his works -- with exceptions such as Mount Rushmore, the caves of Cappadocia, and Styrofoam -- are fleeting. Ozymandias could have told us that. And while Weisman is an admirable reporter, his prose -- always lucid, sometimes elegant -- has an irritating look-ma-I'm-writing quality. This is how he describes one guy he meets: "His olive features bespeak Sicily; his voice is pure urban New Jersey." I think he's bespeaking of an "Italian-American." It's not an exotic species around Jersey.

For all its existential ruminations, this is basically an environmental book, an imaginative effort to make us think about our impact on the Earth. It reminds us: This is a nice Earth! It's going to be around for millions of years, and we're not, so let's stop littering it with nuclear reactors and plastic bags that will leave toxic messes long after we're gone! But as Weisman demonstrates, the Earth will do just fine without us. It's an excellent healer, and time -- especially geologic time -- is an even better one.

Actually, there's a much more compelling reason for us to stop despoiling the Earth and depleting its resources: If we don't, we might create that world without us. As Jared Diamond has shown, unsustainable civilizations tend to collapse; as countless environmental writers have shown, our gas-guzzling, water-wasting, plastic-producing civilization is not sustainable. This is an issue of policy and morality, not just theory.

Weisman knows this, but he believes that people don't like to hear about environmental destruction in those apocalyptic terms. It's too scary. He describes his ruminations as a non-threatening effort to change hearts and minds through indirection. If we imagine the world without us -- even though Weisman makes it sound as if the world could be better off without us -- we might start taking care of it. But just in case this philosophical bank shot proves insufficient, Weisman does offer one modest proposal in his final chapter, his single policy solution to all the planet's problems. And it's preposterous: "limit every human female on Earth capable of bearing children to one." Sure, right after we ration air, outlaw war and limit teenage masturbation to once a week.

Even as a thought experiment, a one-child policy is a terrible idea, a draconian one-size-fits-all solution to a variety of complex problems. (In America, for starters, our problem is overconsumption, not overpopulation.) It's also exactly the kind of nature-first idea that makes environmentalism so threatening to so many people. Humanity's goal should be to limit our impact on the Earth, not to limit our presence on Earth. We don't have to do it for the Earth's sake; we should do it for our own sake. It's our home.

At one of those depressingly apocalyptic environmental conferences, I recently heard a speaker give the best argument I've ever heard for saving the Earth: "It's the only planet we know of that has chocolate." There probably wouldn't be chocolate in a world without us. And even if there were, it wouldn't do us much good.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Perhaps operating on the assumption that he won't be around, Alan Weisman gets a head start on measuring the global human footprint. Although he doesn't intend The World Without Us to be an explicitly environmental work, the specter of global warming hangs over the book like a heavy toxic cloud. Some reviewers wonder whether all the doom and gloom is necessary: Why investigate a question that skirts the underlying cause of the problem? That said, Weisman, a professor at the University of Arizona, has done his research and collected a wide range of data to support his findings, which he delivers in graceful, entertaining prose. We think Michael Grunwald's review in the Washington Post sums it up nicely: sure the book's trivia. Quite a few of us like that.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Starred Review. If a virulent virus—or even the Rapture—depopulated Earth overnight, how long before all trace of humankind vanished? That's the provocative, and occasionally puckish, question posed by Weisman (An Echo in My Blood) in this imaginative hybrid of solid science reporting and morbid speculation. Days after our disappearance, pumps keeping Manhattan's subways dry would fail, tunnels would flood, soil under streets would sluice away and the foundations of towering skyscrapers built to last for centuries would start to crumble. At the other end of the chronological spectrum, anything made of bronze might survive in recognizable form for millions of years—along with one billion pounds of degraded but almost indestructible plastics manufactured since the mid-20th century. Meanwhile, land freed from mankind's environmentally poisonous footprint would quickly reconstitute itself, as in Chernobyl, where animal life has returned after 1986's deadly radiation leak, and in the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, a refuge since 1953 for the almost-extinct goral mountain goat and Amur leopard. From a patch of primeval forest in Poland to monumental underground villages in Turkey, Weisman's enthralling tour of the world of tomorrow explores what little will remain of ancient times while anticipating, often poetically, what a planet without us would be like. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Teasing out the consequences of a simple thought experiment—what would happen if the human species were suddenly extinguished—Weisman has written a sort of pop-science ghost story, in which the whole earth is the haunted house. Among the highlights: with pumps not working, the New York City subways would fill with water within days, while weeds and then trees would retake the buckled streets and wild predators would ravage the domesticated dogs. Texas’s unattended petrochemical complexes might ignite, scattering hydrogen cyanide to the winds—a "mini chemical nuclear winter." After thousands of years, the Chunnel, rubber tires, and more than a billion tons of plastic might remain, but eventually a polymer-eating microbe could evolve, and, with the spectacular return of fish and bird populations, the earth might revert to Eden.
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*Starred Review* Given the burgeoning human population and the phenomenal reach of our technologies, humankind has literally become a force of nature. We are inadvertently changing the climate; altering, polluting, and eradicating ecosystems; and driving evolution as other organisms struggle to adapt to a new human-made world. So what would happen if humankind suddenly vanished? Journalist Weisman, author of Echo in My Blood (1999), traveled the world to consult with experts and visit key sites, and his findings are arresting to say the least. He learned that without constant vigilance, New York's subways would immediately flood, and Houston's complex "petroscape" would spectacularly self-destruct. Weisman visits an abandoned resort on the coast of Cyprus and marvels over nature's ready reclamation. Marine biologists share sobering information about the staggering amount of plastic particles in ocean waters as well as vast floating islands of trash. Weisman is a thoroughly engaging and clarion writer fueled by curiosity and determined to cast light rather than spread despair. His superbly well researched and skillfully crafted stop-you-in-your-tracks report stresses the underappreciated fact that humankind's actions create a ripple effect across the web of life. As for the question of what would endure in our absence, Weisman lists a "redesigned atmosphere," astronomical amounts of plastic and automobile tires, nuclear waste and other inorganic poisons, and, eerily, the radio waves that will carry our television broadcasts through the universe for all time. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0312347294
• ISBN 13: 9780312347291
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336