The World Without Us

The World Without Us
by Alan Weisman

The World Without Us
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Book Summary Information

Author: Alan Weisman
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Published)
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2007-07-10
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books

Book Reviews of The World Without Us

Book Review: The World Without Us
Summary: 5 Stars


In the end, nature triumphs. This book explores what would occur if we humans were, alone of all life, to disappear in an instant, and all else left unimpeded to proceed upon its course. Nature would not return to its pre-human condition, because we have eliminated species and transplanted fauna. Nature, were we to leave it, would transform into something it wasn't before us; but nature, without us, would thrive, and in time, it would obscure nearly all trace of our having been here.

The title is slightly misleading, because this isn't a book only about the way nature would overtake cities with greenery, water, and wild animals, and how it would wear down metals and plastics till they lose all artificial form. The author alternates in his discussion between how we have changed and held back nature to how nature would change and readjust if we were suddenly gone. For example, some species would not survive without us, or not survive quite as well, and some would survive far better.

Machinery, no longer maintained, would stop, and safeguards would fail. Poisons would be released. Species would die, migrate, or adapt. Damns would strain, then burst. Nature would reclaim and readjust. In time our significant part in the changes of nature would diminish, and the system of nature would proceed unimpeded by our ghostly influence. But it may be that nature will never "detoxify" itself fully of human effects.

Although detoxification is not a metaphor explicitly used in the book, it seems apt, when looking at some of the effects we have on the biology of nature. Plastics, manufactured polymers in existence for little more than half a century, would endure in substance for unknown centuries beyond us, regardless of their decomposition of form. The post-human presence of plastics is a long-term change we have made in the environment of nature. Centuries after we are gone, this presence of plastics in nature will continue to effect and change nature through its effect on non-human life.

Plastics are just one far-reaching toxic consequence of our having been here. Radioactive waste will last even longer. Not only the waste we bury and store and hide away now, but the post-human waste that is exposed and accrues from the collapse and decay of nuclear processing plants and the breakdown of metals that sheathe thermonuclear warheads.

Nature is not a static system. Before we were here, there was change in nature. Being here, we have wrought change; and after we are gone, change will persist. Nature does not need us. We need it.

Summary of The World Without Us

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.

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