The World Without Us

Weisman offers us an interesting glimpse of how the world would be if humanity ceased to exist tomorrow. He explores several interesting places around the world and asks experts in various Fields such as Plastics, Horticulture, Forestry, Pertroleum, and others how long it would take for various manmade structures to deteriorate and what the effects of this would be?

Over all he makes it sound as though 20th and 21st Century humans are a Bane to the Earth and it would be better for us to become extinct. He does however show how many people are making progress in making others aware of environmental condidtions and trying to reverse their impact.

His best chapter describes what would happen to New York City if people disappeared and there was no one left to repair the infrastructure. He describes how the roads, buildings, sewers, subways, and other manmade objects would slowly disappear into the reemerging forest like Ur of the Chaldees disappeared into the Desert when the course of the Euphrates changed.

Another chapter I found interesting was the one on the Petroleum producing centers of the Houston and Galveston areas in Texas. The 'nuclear winter' that might hapen if humans disappeared and the fascilities fell into disrepair and exploded. This was especially poignant this week as the Colonial Pipeline mentioned was shut down By hurricane Gustav and we all the way east in Charlotte NC has no Gasoline!!

I would say it is a great book to make you more environmentally conscious. It is also a great What if to make you ponder a Future without us.

A wonderful book. Anyone who cares about the world they live it should read it. And those that do not should read it twice.

One of the most fascinating non-fiction titles that I have ever read in my entire life and, believe me, I have read some very good ones.

Written by Alan Weisman, an award-winning journalist, who imagines what the world would be like if all of a sudden humans vanished from the face of the earth .... but not without a trace. He uses this hypothetical scenario to talk about the changes man has brought about to earth and how long would the human creations last without us (yes, the 'trace' I was talking about).
He takes this wonderful premise as a vehicle to discuss such diverse topics as human and animal evolution, air and water pollution, animal and plant extinction, natural disasters, Mayan history, NASA's Voyager and Pioneer spacecrafts, the fascinating history of Cyprus, the fate of 441 active nuclear reactors of the world, the history of the Panama Canal, the ecology of the uninhabited demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, the ramifications of the Chernobyl disaster, the future of human art, among other things.

The book discusses too many disciplines of science to name here.

Breathtaking in its scope and meticulous in research, this book is definitely a great intellectually stimulating read.

It's a hugely informative, highly readable, immensely entertaining read which is breath-taking in its concept and has been called 'one of the grandest thought experiments of our time.'

There have been many reviews of this book, and I agree with most of the complimentary comments. Instead of rehashing these comments, I'll focus on two shortcomings. One, like similar books covering this subject, the author focuses too intently on one major urban center: New York City. And while this provides a microcosm for other cities around the world, I feel that the book would have benefited greatly from focusing on vignettes from cities around the world, rather than devoting so much time to New York. Certainly, the author discusses other locations, but NYC dominates. Second, and perhaps less important, is the author's overuse of lists. Especially annoying in the audiobook version, the frequent lists in the book are an unwelcome and tedious distraction from the flow of the writing. Lists of animal species, tree types, etc., are unnecessary and disruptive. I found that these often took me out of the feeling of the work and caused me to skip ahead or simply to put the book down. This is not to knock the entire work as being unreadable, simply that this particular neance I found very annoying.

Excellent book. Full of information on what we are doing to our environment and food for thought as to possible solutions. Definitely not a scare tactic treatise like many environmentalist-type books tend to be, but a honest look at where we've come from, and where we're going. Things look OK and manageable. The things we've made will take a long time to disappear. The things that we've thrown into the oceans will take a millennium to degraded. They eventually will, but how will the environment deal with them? Unlike many articles on the environment, this book doesn't preach about stopping development right away for the sake of the Earth. The term "sustained development" comes to mind. We need to keep going, but at a conscious pace. I remember a phrase from the movie "Jurassic Park" where Dr. Malcolm (the chaotician) tells the group around the lunch table that we are so consumed with the excitement of what we "can" do but we never stop to think if we "should." We need to keep building. We need to keep advancing. How we do it seems to be the problem. The book does conclude nicely though. There's a sense that all is not lost and that there is a consciousness among the offenders that things just cannot continue this way. There are many programs in the developed world to recycle waste and not treat the Earth as a dumping ground. An excellent read indeed.