Author: Alan Weisman

Publisher: Audio Renaissance; Unabridged edition

Pub. in: July, 2007

ISBN: 142720148X

Pages:  

Measurements: 5.9 x 5.1 x 1.1 inches

Origin of product: USA

Order code: BB00080

Other information: ISBN-13: 978-1427201485

A bestseller on Amazon.com. Chinese translation is available now.

The World Without Us is a well-written and enjoyable book with a fascinating premise; "picture a world from which we all suddenly vanished. Tomorrow." Whether it is from a highly specific virus, space aliens, or the Rapture, the book explores what would happen to humanity's works and the natural world if people vanished overnight but otherwise left the world intact. Speaking to engineers, atmospheric scientists, architects, marine biologists, paleontologists, chemists, and many other experts as well as visiting and studying areas where the active hand of man has vanished (in and of itself quite interesting, such areas include the abandoned Cyprus resort town of Varosha and jungle-covered Maya ruins), author Alan Weisman has put together a very worthwhile book.

It was surprising which of the great works of humanity would survive the collapse and which would not. Mount Rushmore's granite for instance erodes only one inch every 10,000 years, and as it is in a very seismically stable area should be recognizable for the next 7.2 million years. The Chunnel (or English Channel Tunnel), even without maintenance, would not quickly flood, as it was dug within a single stable geologic layer and has an excellent chance to last millions of years (though the French end, only 16 feet above sea level, could conceivably flood if sea levels were to rise).

In contrast other monumental works would rapidly disappear. The Culebra Cut, the man-created pass through the mountains of Panama that allows the Canal to connect two oceans, is quite artificial. To dig it required the labor of 6,000 men working every day for seven years, moving 100 million-plus cubic yards of dirt, work that has never ceased thanks to silt accumulations and frequent small landslides, requiring daily use of dredging rigs (and that is just one of the ways the Canal could be swallowed up by nature if man were to vanish). New York City's subways could vanish even faster, possibly flooding in as little as 36 hours if two inches of rain or more falls (every day pumps struggle to remove 13 million gallons of water from the system from rain, run off, and natural groundwater, pumps that would cease to work with the disappearance of humans). Additionally, streets would start to crater and collapse as soil is sluiced away from under pavement by moving water and eventually waterlogged steel columns that support some streets corrode and buckle.

Far more important though for life on Earth would be the lasting legacy of human pollution. Plastic would be an enduring contribution of humanity to the world's ecology and eventually geology. Utterly staggering amounts of plastic flows into the world's oceans; in addition to the 8 million pounds of plastic dumped annually by oceangoing ships, vast amounts wash out from the world's landfills (something like 80 percent of plastic in the oceans comes from land). Weisman described the experience of sailing through the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a Texas-sized span of ocean between Hawaii and California surrounded by a slowly rotating high-pressure vortex of hot equatorial air. The region is a "widening horror of industrial excretion," now known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a sea covered with floating refuse, ships plying through it "not unlike an Arctic vessel pushing through chunks of brash ice," except instead of ice one finds cups, bottle caps, plastic bags, and other refuse (later calculations showed that visible plastic - not those that had sunk to the bottom - was about 3 million tons).

Unfortunately, no organism has yet evolved to break down the hydrocarbons in plastic and at the same time ever smaller amounts of plastic are entering the ecosystem, as the slow mechanical action of wind, waves, and tide against the shoreline was breaking down plastics into ever tiny fragments at the same time already tiny pieces of plastic were entering the seas; plastic micro bead exfoliants, tiny granules embedded in many hygiene products, designed from the beginning to go down the drain, too small to be filtered by typical sewage works, and unfortunately bite-sized for many small organisms like barnacles and jellyfish.

Despite everything, many areas though would recover surprisingly fast. The Korean DMZ, an area 151 miles long and 2.5 miles wide, has essentially been without people since September 6, 1953. Despite being for 5,000 years an area of intense rice cultivation, is now home to Asiatic black bears, Amur leopards, and red-crowned cranes, animals otherwise vanished from the Korean peninsula. After an abandoned elevated iron bed of the New York Central Railroad on Manhattan's West Side saw its last train in 1980, windblown dust and urban soot accumulated to such a degree that soil formed, flowers and exotic ailanthus trees sprouted, eventually leading city officials to designate the unexpected green area a park.

With regards to the world's 441 nuclear plants, the bad news is that one by one they would overheat, some burning, others melting, but all spilling radioactivity into the air and nearby bodies of water. Most would eventually though undergo deep self-internment (as melted cores flow through the reactor floors, forming radioactive lava that melds with surrounding steel and concrete that would eventually cool) and if Chernobyl is any indication, there is reason for hope. Within the Zone of Alienation around the plant (the 30-kilometer radius circle of the plant, whose millions of tons of nuclear waste include an entire pine forest that died within days of the blast and which couldn't be burned as its smoke would be lethal), plants and animals have returned. Barn swallows, skylarks, moose, lynx, and wolves now live in newly green pine forests in areas too radioactive for humans to live in.

I have just scratched the surface of this fascinating book, as Weisman covers so much more, such as the recovery of coral reefs, what happens to the ozone layer, the natural succession of English farmland, the return of New England forests, the ugly end of the "petroscape" around Houston, and even how long the average American house would last.

(From quoting Tim F. Martin, USA)

Target readers: A must-read for all those who care about our planet and its inhabitants.