The World Without Us

Answering a question that many have asked themselves, "What would happen to the planet if humans were suddenly gone?," Weisman creates a provocative image of the Earth and nature. Noting how the Earth would slowly reclaim everything that we Humans have taken from it, he sets the stage for us to come to the realization that we have such a dramatic affect on this magnificent, swirling blue ball that's full of energy and life that without checking ourselves, we could ultimately stop it in its tracks.

Specifying methods that we can put into use in order to hinder our negative impact on the Earth, and ways that we can become more in tune, as a race, with the song that nature constantly sings, The World Without Us offers up a hopeful vibe that everyone can feel. Regardless of political affiliation or stance, something that we can all agree upon is that we are dependent on this planet, and therefore harming it is not a wise course of action. Weisman shows us that we are doing just that, but shows that passing judgment would be both counterproductive and way too soon, for the fat lady is not yet singing. There is still time, there is still hope, and Weisman shows us just how to embrace both.

Here's the bad news:

The world has probably already ended, but we're just not perceptive enough to realize it.

Here's the good news:

You can read all about it in Alan Weisman's fascinating book "The World Without Us" (2007).

Be prepared, however. "The World Without Us" is a powerful blow to the kidneys that has the amazing ability to make a reader want to curl into a ball, suck his thumb, and wait for someone - anyone - to swoop in and rescue us.

The premise for Weisman's book is a simple one: What would happen to the earth if humanity suddenly vanished? But in getting to the answer, Weisman has to explore the current condition of the planet.

And it ain't pretty.

This explanation from the book on what may have happened to the vanquished Mayan civilization speaks volumes about our modern conundrum:

"Society had evolved too many elites, all demanding exotic baubles... a culture wobbling under the weight of an excess of nobles, all needing quetzal feathers, jade, obsidian, fine chert, custom polychrome, fancy corbelled roofs, and animal furs. Nobility is expensive, nonproductive, and parasitic, siphoning away too much of society's energy to satisfy its frivolous cravings."

Hello, kettle!

The book, while sloppily organized, stays pinned to your eyeballs. What horrible thing will I discover next? "The World Without Us" reads like a suspense novel - only its all true. I stopped reading several times in fits of bleary-eyed despair.

One of the most shocking revelations was the existence of a massive floating plastic trash dump in the Pacific Ocean about the size of Texas. Here we have hundreds of miles of ocean thick with bottle caps, plastic bags, six-pack rings, balloons, and sandwich bags. Oceanographers called it the "The Great Pacific Garbage Patch" - the place where all plastic garbage is churned and burped up by the Pacific.

After reading about this I was seized by a desire to purge my house of every plastic item. I wanted to strip naked and live in harmony with nature (eating bark and grass). Sounds crazy, I know, but here are just a few of mind-boggling things you'll discover reading "The World Without Us."

* If humans disappeared, the average house would last about 100 years before toppling over due to decay. But if you cut a one-foot diameter hole in the roof, the same house would crumble in about 10 years. This is the power of nature once it gets inside and gets to work.

* Here's a quote that should make you pause: "Except for a small amount that's been incinerated... every bit of plastic manufactured in the world for the last 50 years or so still remains. It's somewhere in the environment." How much is that? One billion tons.

* If people vanished, the 441 nuclear power plants currently in operation would run on autopilot for several months and then begin to overheat. The resulting deadly radioactive damage to the environment would poison the areas around the plants for a very, very long time - we're talking geological time of hundreds of thousands of years.

* Mount Rushmore would probably last about 7.2 million years.

* There are about 20 billion birds in North America alone - yet the population is plunging. Two of the strangest mass killers of birds are windows and cats. Birds can't see windows and they fly into them and snap their own necks at alarming rates. About one billion a year die this way. Domesticated cats - even when well fed - hunt and kill about 28 birds each every year. There are between 30-60 million cats in North America. Do the math.

It's this kind of painstaking research and details that makes "The World Without Us" an astonishing, jaw-dropping read. If you can stomach the enormity of the damage humans have wrought and ignore the book's scattered organization and tendency to jump from topic to topic at random, then you're in for experiencing one of the best and most powerful non-fiction books written in the last several years.

Read it and then do something - anything - to help save us from, well, ourselves.

Like literate blather? Then head over to the Dark Party Review!

Great topic, this would have been an excellent 20-30 page paper. It turned instead into a disappointing and wordy 275-page book. While thought-provoking, long sections (second third for example) aren't engaging and it takes serious dedication to keep reading. All the chapters about infrastructure degradation quickly become repetitive and boring.
The book is overall mostly descriptive with limited speculations (towards the end). I am sympathetic to the criticisms of the consumerist society we live, but the author tends to rant way too much to my taste (a la Michael Moore). I feel like telling him: look I agree with you, can you provide me with something I do not know instaed of just agreeable but simplistic statements?

So 5 stars for the great idea, -3 stars for wasting my time over 275 pages when 20-30 would have been enough for the same content.

One thing that surprises me about this book is some of the comments from other reviewers printed on the back: "This book is the very DNA of hope"--The Globe and Mail or "Extraordinarily foresighted ... beautiful and passionate." While I agree with the foresighted comment (it's a book whose very premise is about the future without us, so if it wasn't foresighted, I don't know what it would be) the others I find strange in their overwhelming sentiment that this book left them with a positive feeling.

I'm not going to say this book depressed me but...well, it's a bit depressing. Basically between the plastics, the radioactive metals and the CFCs, we seem pretty doomed if all the facts in this book are correct. I mean, I suppose we are doomed anyway since our sun will eventually expand and consume the planet, but our meddling seems to be shortening our lifespan as a species significantly. And even if that isn't taken into consideration, the multitude of ways we've permanently altered the landscape, through extinction and mining and carbon consumption and chemistry and genetic alterations is pretty harrowing when read all in one little tome, as this book presents it. And Weisman is willing to go back tens of thousands of years, to show how early man, through "controlled" burning and sophisticated hunting, has been shaping the land for millennia. I now realize that the "untouched" woods I hike through with my dogs are all "second-growth" forests--the new generation after the first one was, at some point, razed by humans for farming. Because pretty much every stitch of the earth has been razed at some point, if this book is correct.

However, I'm not always sure that everything Weisman presents is as horrible as it seems. The plastics and the radioactive fallout and the destruction of the ozone layer are pretty inarguable bad and scary--though even he admits that nature will likely one day evolve to thrive off of those pollutants. Birds and other animals, in fact, seem to exist around Chernobyl and thrive, despite the fact that the area is still considered inhabitable. But sometimes I felt like his description of humans altering the landscape (like through the controlled burns, hunting, agriculture, etc. ) took things a little too far. Mass extinction of many species in one area in a short time would be bad, but is there not an element of Darwinism to the creatures who have evolved to live in the world we changed? Are there not species that have a symbiotic relationship with us? Are we all really as bad as all that? Are we, too, not of this earth?

I think Weisman's ending sentiment is an important one, though it's difficult for me to imagine it ever having an impact until it's too late. Basically, our species has become so adept at surviving, that we are outliving our resources. However, unlike other animals that have done this in the past, only to be culled by horrible methods (starvation due to lack of resources, pandemics due to overcrowding, etc.), we have an advantage--we know that we're doing it and we have the ability to stop it ourselves very easily. Stop having so many children. Basically, Weisman's reported theory is that if all female humans on earth be restricted to one child, our population would go down to 19th century numbers within a century. It seems so incredibly extreme when said that way, but the improvements it would have on our lives would be incredible. We would still have all the advantages of modern life, only with far greater resources to support it. The problem, of course, is that we're still too obstinate in our instinct to procreate. People would never agree to self-limit their families, they have to basically be forced, and that presents a scary sci-fi dystopian future kind of vibe.

I say, read this book for the amazing facts and ideas presented. It will change the way you view everything--and I mean everything. From the hill on the horizon to the birds perching on your rooftop to the plastic water bottle you bring to the gym. But take it with a small grain of salt. It is doubtful that all is as bad as Weisman sometimes presents it, and statistics range so wildly in some of his reports that the two figures almost prompt different conclusions (like, for instance, the 4,000 to 100,000 human deaths resulting from Chernobyl--that's a bit of a difference!). Or his numbers concerning the fatalities of birds in North America every year. He claims we have 20 billion birds in North America, and yet when you add up the numbers he claims are killed by power lines, cars, house cats and windows every year, you realize something simply must be wrong, because otherwise we're killing off far more birds than could possibly reproduce to sustain that number. The fact is, there's no way one man got all these thousands of facts and figures exactly right, since not even the scientists studying the different subjects their entire lives necessarily have the facts right. And there is one small paradox that he failed to touch upon, which I find strange. The thing is, in a world without us, who will be there to appreciate all the beautiful things that flourish in our absence?

Errata:

Page 94: "Only 6,000 years ago, what is now the world's largest nonpolar desert was green savanna." This change is attributed to: "Our tilted axis straightened not even half a degree, but enough to nudge rain clouds around". No, the larger forcing was the change in the time of perihelion, the time of closest approach relative to the seasons. Perihelion in winter (as it is currently) weakens the northern hemisphere monsoons.

Page 141: "In turn, Sweden's shores were the receptacles for trash from England...the water seemed to obey the wind currents, which in these latitudes is easterly." Westerly.

Page 152: "Beneath it, the water describes lazy, clockwise whorls towards a depression at the center". Clockwise whorls around a mound (of approximately 1 m) at the center.

Page 162: "...humanity's total biomass -- which the eminent biologist E. O. Wislon estimates wouldn't fill the Grand Canyon--won't be missed for long." At 50 kg per human, the biomass of 6.5 billion humans occupies 1/3 of a cubic kilometer. A simple calculation. Perhaps there is confusion with an estimate of total biomass?

Page 267: "14-foot zirconium-alloy hollow rods stuffed end to end with uranium pellets that each contain as much power as a ton of coal". Energy, rather than power. And to be clear, emphasize that "each" refers to the pellet, not the rod. 1 gram of fissionable uranium is equiavalent to 1000 kg of coal.