Customer Reviews

The World Without Us

5 star:		(150)
4 star:		(86)
3 star:		(46)
2 star:		(23)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

This is a charming book on a macabre subject: if every person on earth died tomorrow what would happen to the works of man? Using New York as an example the author details the slow, inevitable destruction of the subways, bridges, buildings, the return of the forests and the animals, and the disposition of those things that never seem to go away: poisonous heavy metals, plastic, and radioactive waste.

He also describes the decay of man-made works in other parts of the world, including a vivid description of what would happen to an oil field in Texas if humans suddenly disappeared. That would be hell in the short term -- but some of the speculations about earth without humans sound pretty attractive: back to the Garden of Eden, before Adam, Eve, and the snake.

The book is a cautionary one, telling about the fate of earlier societies who outran the potential for their environment, and taking the long view of the human species -- up till and including the final demise when the sun becomes a big cinder about 5 billion years for now. Will the last work of man to survive be a plastic water bottle? An amusing section gives a voice to the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement -- which proposes that human beings help themselves become extinct. Another describes the Pioneer spacecraft, sent out to hunt for other forms of intelligent life in the Universe. All that other civilizations may know of us is contained on the spacecraft: Mozart, Chuck Berry, and a few other details, to be precise.

It's a fascinating read of well-reasoned speculation.

Smallchief

Basically, this focuses on a "what if" situation: what if something, be it the bird flu, a new virus or (fill in the blanks) destroyed all the people on Earth? What then? What would happen to our world, without us in it?

Using a combination of very solid research and science, the author gives readers a view of what would -and would not - endure -and for how long. He gives a look at the world shortly after we leave and then a futuristic look at its evolution from there, with various scenarios. I found it riveting to read. Also, it made me realize that, as important as we may consider ourselves, the earth could evolve and change without us, often in positive ways. It was humbling, at least for me.

Finally, the writer's style is just breathtaking. I can't sum it up here (it'd be like trying to describe a painting instead of seeing it firsthand) but the writing makes the book extremely rewarding. I'd have gotten through it, even if written by a less competent writer, because I find the subject matter inherently fascinating, but I'm grateful that this was so nicely done.

I've always found this topic interesting, so when I heard that this book was coming out I rang the bookshop straight away and reserved a copy. Finding old ruins or remains in the bush fascinates me; an old fence running straight through thick scrub, or an abandoned railway cutting with trees growing through it. "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" After finishing the book though, I can't say I would go out of my way to recommend it. It's not bad.. just disappointing. The topic holds a lot of promise; this book just doesn't deliver.

The foundations are all there; the topic is novel and the amount of research the author has done and the creative thinking used should have provided more than enough material for an interesting book.

I think the problem is with the writing. The approach taken is very similar to that seen in Jared Diamond's books; in each chapter, introduce a different place in the world, discuss it's specific situation or history, then draw out a more general conclusion from the more specific situation. It's worked for Jared Diamond, but it doesn't work here. The problem is that in many chapters the author does too good a job of concealing what general point he is trying to make; several times I found myself thinking "This is a moderately interesting story... but what does it have to do with the topic of the book?" After finishing some chapters I found I still wasn't sure!

The writing style also grates. He uses a kind of journalistic, "reporter on the scene" approach. "Jim swivelled clockwise in his chair, as he revealed the true reason behind the drop in pH in the pacific's coral atolls!". There is a perplexing amount of fluff regarding scientist's hairstyles, what they're wearing, where they went to school and other filler. I guess the idea is to do the "popular science" "let's make science relevant to the common man" thing; by fleshing out the otherwise faceless scientists with details of their lives and personalities. Boring. If the science itself isn't interesting, don't expect the scientists to make up for it!

I also thought there could have been a lot more science in this book. There is a fair bit, but it's often just mentioned in passing and not explained in any detail. With the general style of the book, I guess maybe they didn't want to make it too "technical". The end result is that unless you have a fairly broad scientific education (I do) you are going to struggle to understand any of the brief explanations for phenomena described in the book. I often found myself wishing for a whole extra paragraph of explanation on the scientific aspects.

Instead we get more of a focus on philosophy, big picture musings and what I would call "poetic" writing. It didn't work for me.

There is also two quite different themes dealt with by this book: what will happen to our civilisation's artefacts (buildings, monuments, waste etc) after we are gone, and what will happen to the natural world after we are gone. Switching between the two gives a lack of focus.

I do hope Weisman writes more books. Writing style can always be improved (just write more books!), but imagination and insight can't be fashioned so easily. The author is an imaginative thinker, and reading more from him would be interesting.

This is an oddly hopeful book. Hopefull because it offers compelling evidence that life on earth will outlive human tampering with the ecosystem, yet odd because it also demonstrates that the world won't miss us much. In fact, it's pretty clear that, on balance, the world would be better off without us.

"Balance" is the key here, something that we as a species know little about. Even though we are well aware that we're destroying our own habitat, and have been for at least 60 years, we can't seem to stop ourselves. But author Alan Weisman isn't a scold and doesn't do a lot of overt finger wagging, which is one of the reasons to buy this book. Rather, he offers absorbing examples of the many ways in which life bounces back after eco-tragedies like Chernobyl and, going back farther in time, various ice ages, volcano eruptions and asteroid pummelings.

One of my favorite examples is Weisman's description of the DMZ between the two Koreas, which has been a no-man's land since the late 50s when a stalemate was reached between the two sides. Rare cranes are staging a comeback in this zone, as are various types of flora and fauna that would probably be extinct by now were it not for this narrow strip of land where people don't go. And this resurgence has taken place in spite of rampant pollution and periodic explosions from abandoned land mines. There is even a conservation group that has grown up in South Korea to advocate for the cranes and, by association, preservation of the DMZ. There's one upside to the continuing standoff at the 38th parallel.

Lately, I have been interested in emerging viruses and the resurgence of diseases that humans believed we conquered (at least in the US) such as TB and cholera. Weisman presents some interesting linkages between alterations in the environment (think greenhouse gases) and the rise of microbes that are resistent to long-standing medical treatments.

But it is his discussion of unanticipated benefits of some human errors that is most astounding. Take, for instance, the island of Cyprus, which has been split between warring Greeks and Turks for the past 30 years or so. One group abandoned a resort city on one side of the island because the peace agreement assigned that area to the other ethnic group. As the buildings and infrastructure have slowly crumbled, plant life has flourished and a range of animal species have moved in, making the place somewhat akin to a nature preserve. And this has occured despite the fact that much of the infrastructure releases poison gases and foul debris as it inexorably deteriorates.

All of this is to say that, given enough time and absent human interference, Mother Earth will quite likely heal herself, and perhaps a new "top dog" species will evolve to replace us. I can't help feeling that this is good news, especially if evolution makes our descendents a little smarter than we seem to be.

This is a CLEVER book!

Exceptional, macabre, subversive, frightening, (vaguely seditious, even) - and assuredly harrowing - Weisman has constructed his thesis in such a fashion as you never see the sucker punch coming until long after he has set you up - and then it is too late. (Which, ironically, could be taken as the ultimate truth to be gleaned from this book.)

I originally read a short excerpt a year or so ago in Discover magazine wherein Weisman described how, as I recall, New York would eventually disappear, beginning to disintegrate almost immediately upon the disappearance of the humans needed to maintain its physical infrastructure. (Interesting real world irony: the recent - August, 2007 - flooding of the New York subways by three inches of storm water and resulting shutdown/disruption of the system wonderfully underscore Weisman's discussion of that city's demise.)

I picked the book up upon its release expecting more of the same - you know, descriptions of the crumbling majesty of man's works, the exposure of the weakness of our technology, the inability of our monuments to actually endure without us, and to a great degree I got what I paid for.

But that is only the icing on the cake. As I said, this is a truly clever book, both in structure and execution. It would appear the author has engaged a particularly subversive technique in selling his book by appealing to a rather compulsive (and vaguely perverse) need within the human animal to see what follows him, to understand what things will be like after he is gone, much like the wish to attend one's funeral to find out what memories will survive your ending.

The set-up is delightful: in order to first discuss what the world would be like without us, one first must discuss what the world was like before we arrived and built our civilization, and then examine how the world has changed due to our civilization's "footprint". Only then is a contextual reference in place from which the author can give us an understanding of what the world will be like after our passing.

The end result: in very clear and accessible language, Weisman details how we have really made a mess of things without ever appearing to lecture us. Instead, utilizing an almost casual, yet precise style of writing, peppered with sprinkles of dry humor, he examines the effect of things such as the breakdown of plastics, the remains of our petrochemical industries (the section on Houston, Texas is downright mind-boggling), the way in which modern building techniques will be overwhelmed by the forces of nature, and the manner in which nature will quickly move to fill in the gap made by our disappearance from the biosphere.

All the while Weisman breaks down the science that allows us to understand why these things will occur into manageable bits and pieces, never leaving us scratching our heads in confusion at what he is describing. He uses examples from the real-world to underscore his points; the section on the rapid deterioration of the buildings on the Island of Cypress following the 1974 war there is particularly instructive in illustrating how finite the structures we build truly are.

But most subversive of all: the overarching background theme of Weisman's book is what would happen if humanity disappeared in a single instant. This sudden disappearance coming to pass, of course, is unlikely to impossible. So what Weisman is really doing, without ever once coming out and saying so, or even hinting at it, is describing the terrible state of the biosphere after 150+ years of the Industrial Age have passed. This technique is so effectively employed you may find yourself looking up in surprise from the book from time to time in one of those lightblub moments where it will occur to you that what Weisman is talking about will not only happen after we are gone, but is occurring now.

I would suggest this - seriously - as a gift book for people who are on the fence or just a little over the other side on issues ranging from environmentalism to global warming. Not only does it qualify as a good read, I think it one of the best ways to get people to see the damage we are doing to ourselves without engaging in arguments or to pleading with them that "If you only read this you'll truly understand!" knowing all the while they won't read it. Instead, if anything, appeal to that perversely morbid curiosity I mentioned, that odd conceit that makes humans wonder what survives past their deaths.

The only downside: ultimately this is an extremely disquieting book, particularly if you have children or grandchildren, in the sense of how thoroughly Weisman lays out the case for how unmistakably, and often unintentionally, badly we have been mucking up our world.

This is our legacy Weisman is talking about, our true legacy.

This is the stuff nightmares are made of.

My wife & I have lived on 19 acres in the southeastern USA for the last 13 years. Our policy on most of the land is to let nature do what it will with as little intervention as possible, and one of the most pleasant aspects of this is watching the progression of nature as barren soil becomes "weeds" then small trees then a young forest. In the warm, wet climate of the southeast, this happens very quickly. In the last few years, we have witnessed the return of forest birds, such as warblers, and the departure of pasture and cropland species.

So, the premise of "The World Without Us" resonated with me: suddenly, there are no humans; what happens next? It's difficult to see how this postulated situation could develop; war, catastrophic climate change or an asteroid collision would cause considerable damage to non-human aspects of the world, for example. A particularly virulent disease might do the trick, but how the people disappear is outside the scope of the book; they're just gone. What happens afterward is the subject here.

Recent heavy rains in New York City have validated Mr. Weisman's first conclusion: the subways will flood, only without people to keep the pumps running, they stay flooded, undermining the towers of Manhattan. Steel corrodes; glass breaks; bricks and mortar fall apart. In a few decades, Manhattan has become a forest again. A recent trip to Central America convinces me that dogs might not survive without humans; the dogs there barely survive alongside the very poor humans.

I am skeptical of some of the details of Mr. Weisman's scenario. Ailanthus trees do very well in a city, but are they sufficiently shade-tolerant to survive in a mature forest? Fallen branches would pile up in Central Park, but would coastal New York be arid enough to allow forest fires to spread? Still, this is a very interesting and important book.

The description of the last sliver of ancient forest in Europe, located in a national part divided between Poland and Belarus, reminds us that there are even now bits of nature ready to retake the human-modified land, even if the future won't be like the past. As a forest creature myself, I am inspired to visit the national parks of Poland, something that never occurred to me before.

Most books written about the environment these days warn against impending catastrophe and urge readers to take action before it's too late. Alan Weisman, professor of journalism at the University of Arizona and reknown science writer, tries a novel approach. In an extended hypothetical, he imagines what the world would be like if humans suddenly disappeared, and all that they created remained. The benefit of this approach is that it takes away the polemical edge that makes most environmental writing so disquieting. No one can work up much passion or concern about a world without people.

Weisman takes a look at what would happen to our homes if they were suddenly abandoned. A house would probably be completely gone in about 500 hundred years. The main cause of decay would be water. Water would seep in everywhere causing mold. Mold, in turn, would eat away at the wood. Every steel or iron object would rust away. Eventually vegetation would reclaim the spot where one's home once stood.

Water is also the main antagonist in cities such as Manhattan. Before there were humans there were as many as 40 streams in Manhattan. Now all that water runs underneath the city in the sewage system. Maintenance workers pump out about 13 million gallons of water a day to keep the subway from flooding. Weisman estimates that, with humans gone, Lexington Avenue would collapse in about two days and become a rushing river. Buildings would soon crack and topple, and new ecosystems would emerge from the rubble. The end result, again, would be the resilience of life. Weisman is an optimist for the planet and life in general, not necessarily human life.

There is no single unifying narrative in this book, it is rather a series of essays of some imaginative science writing. Weisman takes us to Bialowieza Puszcza, a protected land on the border of Poland and Belarus. This is Europe's last primeval or old growth forest - the stuff of fairy tales - with trees 150 feet tall and 10 feet in diameter, covered with scary looking moss. Before there were humans, all of Europe was covered with this kind of forest, and, presumably, would be again if humans vanished.

Weisman also visits the Korean DMZ, a stretch of land about 150 miles long and 2.5 miles wide. Since the end of the Korean War this land has been untouched by humans. In the interlude all kinds of wildlife have returned and flourished, including the red-crowned white crane and the Amur leopard, both endangered species.

Life's ability to survive in these circumstances is the upside of Weisman's story. On the downside, however, he makes some ominous predictions. For example, since the end of World War II humans have been producing tons of plastic material. Plastics are not biodegradable unless they are incinerated. Weisman claims that much of this plastic material ultimately finds its way into the oceans and ends up killing fish and other sea creatures at an alarming rate. He predicts that these creatures are doomed whether humans disappear or not - more likely if they don't disappear.

Weisman also speculates on what might happen to the world's 441 nuclear reactors and the world' petrochemical plants if left unattended. Toxic waste would enter into the environment and endager life for the next 250,000 years...minimum.

Towards the end of the book, Weisman comes back to the existing world and acknowledges that human beings will probably be around for the foreseeable future, reaching a population level of about 8-10 billion by the year 2050. Here he makes a rather harsh policy proposal: All families worldwide should be restricted to one child, reducing the world population to 19th century levels. If this is not done the human race could well face the extinction hypothesized in this book, or worse, since they will have had more time to do damage.

The usefulness of this excercise may not be apparent to many, but it does underscore in a novel way the far-reaching impact human beings have on the natural world.

While fascinating and well written, "The World Without Us" has a bait-and-switch feel to it as if you had been promised an action-packed adventure movie and instead found yourself sitting though a screening of "An Inconvenient Truth."

This is unfortunate as the small parts of the book dedicated to discussing the purported subject matter (what would happen were the human race to suddenly vanish) are nothing short of fascinating, from flooding subway tunnels to nuclear meltdowns to refinery disasters to the longevity of ceramics and plastics.

In fact, the book wisely starts with an engaging description of the process by which nature would retake the city of New York (perhaps the better to lure in book store browsers who are unlikely to go beyond the first few pages). However, the chapters that follow seem more like a lengthy indictment of the human race for various crimes against nature. And so before we can read about what might happen to song birds in our absence, we must first read about the many ways in which our presence has decimated song bird populations. (Who knew our penchant for windows was a form of avian genocide?)

While such background information is surely useful, it simply crowds out most everything else. As such, it suffers from the unavoidable tedium of any one-sided argument. The overall effect is made worse when the author describes land as being "expropriated" from farmers for development rather than merely being "sold." And there are no real estate agents to be found, only "real estate mongers" and humans don't just use energy, they are "energy drunk," and so on.

It still merits two stars from me, partly for the portions of the book that deliver on the title, and partly because the author's discussion of humankind's numerous depredations upon nature is worthwhile and sobering. However, like many others here, I remain disappointed that the author spent more time on the latter than the former (a very unfortunate deception), and further, given that approach, he could not find the space to include more than a few throwaway lines on the many positive contributions our species has made to this planet.

I read a review of this book in the NY Times and I was intrigued, so I picked it from the library. The book is well researched and the author has talked to many experts. But the exposition of the material is too erratic to maintain my attention for long. Besides, there are several unsupported statements that are hard to believe, and make me wonder about the credibility of some of the other things the author claims. For example, do we really think that all dogs and rats would disappear from New York without our food or garbage supply? I agree that that many dogs are already too dependent from us and wouldn't make it on their own, but surely some of them would survive and become wild. And the rats? Rats are survivors by nature and they would find other sources of food, specially given that so many plants and animals would be colonizing the decaying city. Or does anybody think that rats don't live in the countryside? Another example: the sentence "the most commonly used in the developed world" is used to mean "the most commonly used in the US". Some of the conclusions drawn from the second statement are not necessarily true in the rest of the developed world.

I'm glad to see that for many people this book is an eye-opener. That is a good thing about it.

Here Alan Weisman has constructed an illuminating thought experiment, as embodied in the book's title. Some readers may find the idea of humans suddenly disappearing to be ridiculous, and to his credit Weisman quickly dispenses with questions of when or how such a catastrophe would happen. What follows is a mostly insightful look at whether the Earth and its environment would return to a pristine state if its most calamitous residents (us) suddenly disappeared. In some ways it would - cities and infrastructure would crumble surprisingly quickly, and farmlands would be promptly replaced by natural vegetation patterns. Unfortunately, our legacy of pollution and waste would persist for eons to come, as plastics and nuclear/chemical byproducts are likely to stick around forever - almost literally.

Parts of this thought experiment are concocted by Weisman himself, based on his experiences as a science writer, though others are backed up by expert testimony from such unexpected sources as subway engineers and real estate developers. Weisman also visits some real examples of nature re-colonizing formerly developed infrastructure, including a melancholy Cyprus resort town that has been abandoned due to war and politics, giving an indication of the quick dismissal of our largest works by the forces of nature. This generally fascinating book must be slightly penalized for somewhat lacking in focus, as Weisman often mixes up future projections with past complaints of environmental degradation (which are better found elsewhere and damage this book's inherent uniqueness), while the different chapters of the book tend to become short introductions to specific phenomena which do not find closure and are not fully integrated with the main narrative. In short, this book does function as a strong environmentalist manifesto, but some of the potential fascination embodied in its title remains unrealized. Regardless, after reading this I have concluded that the rest of the world wouldn't be too heartbroken by our disappearance. [~doomsdayer520~]