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The World Without Us (Audio CD)
by Alan Weisman
| Category:
Science fiction, Pop-science, Environmental protection, Fiction |
| Market price: ¥ 428.00
MSL price:
¥ 368.00
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MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
An engaging thought experiment, Alan Weisman's book presents a novel and innovative view of man's impact on the world. |
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AllReviews |
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Dennis Covington, author of National Book Award finalist Salvation on Sand Mountain, USA
<2007-10-22 00:00>
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. |
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James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-22 00:00>
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. |
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Sahra Badou (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-22 00:00>
Ever imagine this planet without a species known as humans? What would happen to this planet if we were suddenly extinct? Would it return to its natural state as the Garden of Eden? Another question may be asked: Is it a possibility that the human species becomes extinct?
In answer to the last question, the answer is a "Yes" and a "No". I think our planet "reboots" itself from time to time in order to regenerate itself. By "rebooting", I don't mean the annihilation of the human species (or any other species on the planet), but by considerably reducing its size to one that cannot cause any harm to the environment. It is also a way for the planet to renew itself, and maybe to upgrade itself and the species living on it.
Such past "reboots" could have been the ice ages, major earthquakes, tsunamis, meteorites slamming into our planet, and volcanic activities. Another "reboot" might not be in the far distant future. If Al Gore is right, it might be man-made. With global warming looming on the horizon, all coastal cities are at risk of ending up under water!
According to the author, Istanbul might vanish by landslides. New York can soon experience an ice age. Many nations live in earthquake zones and near active volcanoes.
The author asks an interesting question: what would happen to our structures should we disappear from the surface of the earth? What will happen to our buildings, bridges, atomic weapons, etc.? What will happen to chemicals we have created, such as plastics and insecticides? Would they remain on our planet as a testament of our existence, or would they vanish with time without our care? Will atomic bombs mistakenly explode, i.e. from earthquakes, volcanic activity, meteorites etc... if we were not on this planet to prevent such accidents from happening?
When the Dalai Lama was asked whether this world would go on without us, he said, "Who knows?" (p. 270). A Turkish Sufi said, "The world exists to serve people, because man is the most honorable of all creatures." (p. 270). So in other words, our planet cannot go on without us. He further adds, "We take care of our bodies to live a longer life. We should do the same for the world. If we cherish it, make it last as long as possible, we can postpone the judgment day." (p. 271).
Does it matter at all whether we are on this planet or not, since around 5 billion years from now, the sun will expand into a red giant, absorbing all the inner planets back into its fiery womb? (p. 269).
This book is an interesting thought experiment, is very informative, and is fun to read. |
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A. Robinson (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-22 00:00>
This is not a book about an apocalypse or how humans are ruining the Earth or futurism. This is book about our legacy as a race. There is nothing humans can do that time cannot undo, so the question then is, "How long of a time?". Yes, how long of a time before there would be no memory of the human race left? That is what this book addresses. Although the effect of humans on their environment can ripple into the future, it is not as long as you think it would be. Humans are a forgettable species.
In this book's long quest, it takes a few rest stops along the way for some wonderful "sightseeing". I find it interesting that civilization marvels at the number of animals in Africa that weigh over one ton (five of them like the elephant, hippo, etc), yet the Americas used to have fifteen (ground sloths bigger than elephants for example). Where did they all go? They were hunted into extinction by humans by the end of the last glaciation 13,000 years ago. There is no condemnation of what humans are doing, just a simple report of the facts, facts that raise questions like, "Would large animals return if humans went extinct?". Then there are the still "standing" remains of an underground civilization in Turkey that will last an awfully long time. That is interesting but no one lives there anymore and it does not belong to modern civilization, yet apparently that ancient civilization will be remembered longer than ours.
This is a "what then" book. What if humans disappeared? What would happen then? How long would New York remain standing as compared to LA? How long would it take your house to crumble to it's foundation? All of these questions and more are addressed in a factual manner. It makes it so easy to remind ourselves just how fragile our illusory "rock solid" civilization really is - even for the bad things we do. |
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Jason Cooper (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-22 00:00>
Weisman sets out to examine what would happen to the earth and its natural systems if humans were suddenly gone from the planet. From the beginning, it is a fascinating proposition: what are the consequences of human activity and what vestiges of human existence will last far beyond our time on the planet?
To answer the question of how the earth would fare without us, the author explores what humans are doing to the planet now. Weisman uses the example of 30-year-old abandoned buildings in Varosha, a resort on the island of war-torn Cyprus, to predict what will become of the architecture that man has constructed.
Far more worrisome are the toxic hotspots that we will leave behind. Some of the chemicals used to create bombs, missiles, and other destructive hardware will endure for hundreds of thousands of years, if not longer. The world's 441 nuclear reactors have produced spent uranium fuel rods that have a half-life of 4.5 billion years. Incredibly, animals have returned to places such as the Chernoybl site in Ukraine, and there is evidence that nature is already finding ways to adapt to new realities.
What could become of facilities such as petroleum refineries as well as the nuclear plants is covered here. If abandoned, the nuclear facilities would certainly overheat and spill radioactivity into the air, a sequence of events that would have consequences for the planet - and all of its remaining inhabitants - for the rest of its existence.
Expertly researched and written, Weisman's effort is aided by a number of naturalists, engineers, and other experts throughout. The author has done an excellent job of presenting scientific issues in a way that the layman can read and appreciate. |
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Doanld Mitchell (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-22 00:00>
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. |
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Anita Gelbart (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-22 00:00>
I have a number of eccentric and eclectic interests, but now that this book's been written I no longer feel so weird. I've often wondered what would happen, if humans suddenly died out. This well-researched book tells exactly what would happen to the ecology of earth and our prized feats of engineering.
The author didn't simply speculate - he traveled the world from a primeval forest in Poland to Africa to the Korean DMZ to war-torn Cyprus to an obscure coral reef in the South Pacific. He interviewed engineers who manage our subways and bridges and nuclear power plants. He met with the famous paleontologist, Paul Martin, and the people in charge of the Panama Canal and the nearby hydroelectric dams. From their knowledge he vividly describes what would happen if humans vanished.
Some of his findings are surprising. The subways under New York City would flood, the buildings would come tumbling down, and within only a few centuries it would revert back to forest, unless global warming inundated the area with ocean water. Elephants might recolonize Asia and North America. Modern houses, made out of cheap building materials, would disintegrate in less than a century, but ancient stone structures would last for a millennia until they eventually eroded.
The book isn't intentionally activist. Nevertheless, the material covered will alarm anyone concerned with the future of our environment. We live in a scary reality of man's poisons, his altering of earth's chemical balance, his overpopulation.
Despite the title of the book which implies man's absence, this book is all about human history and pre-history. My favorite chapter was on the prehistoric mammals and their probable extirmination at the hands of man.
I'm a writer and a student of writing and can assure any potential readers that this book is creative non-fiction at its best.
The shortcomings are few. I found a few obvious minor errors. The author includes sloths in the order of marsupials. A few other errors are debatable. He states that wild apple trees would produce poor quality fruit. True, they wouldn't be as consistent and superior as domesticated varieties, but most trees would produce usable fruit and a few would be just as tasty. I wish the author would've covered the white tailed deer population and how it would explode and impact the enviroment. How long before predators returned and balanced the population? Perhaps Mr. Weisman can write a second volume. |
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The New Yorker (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-22 00:00>
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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Publishers Weekly (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-22 00:00>
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. |
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Michael Grunwald, From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com, USA
<2007-10-22 00:00>
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. |
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