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The World Without Us Hardcover – July 10, 2007

by Alan Weisman (Author)

503 customer reviews

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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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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. 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. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker

Teasing out the consequences of a simple thought experimentwhat would happen if the human species were suddenly extinguishedWeisman 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. Texass unattended petrochemical complexes might ignite, scattering hydrogen cyanide to the windsa "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.
Copyright © 2007 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker

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Product details

Hardcover: 336 pages
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books (July 10, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0312347294
ISBN-13: 978-0312347291
Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 1.2 x 9.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 503 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #81,125 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #133 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Human Geography
- #160 in Books > Science & Math > Biological Sciences > Ecology
- #206 in Books > Science & Math > Earth Sciences > Environmental Science

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Eric Maroney

Life Finds a Way

June 21, 2017

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Alan Weisman's The World Without Us is supposed to explore what would or could happen to our world if humans suddenly ceased to exist. Weisman does do this, but he must of necessity discuss how we have altered/destroyed much of our world, in order to illustrate what would happen if we were to disappear.

So, Weisman takes us on a tour from the mass extinction of the passenger pigeon in North American, to the Moa bird in New Zealand. We look at climate change, nuclear waste, and plastic islands in the oceans. It is a depressing catalog.

The only bright spot is that, to quote Jurassic Park, nature finds a way. Animals, plants and birds no longer found in Korea thrive in the depopulated DMZ. In the quarantine zone around Chernobyl, wolves have returned, along with moose, deer, badger, and horses.

The take away, the world will do fine without us. In fact, it might just thrive.

2 people found this helpful3 people found this helpful

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Jonas

An Adventure in Journalism

August 2, 2015

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

The reason you came for this book is probably to find out what will happen to your home or New York City after people disappear. You want to learn if it will really be like "I Am Legend" or other Post-Apocalyptic stories where people are gone. At least, that's why I came.
And Weisman does explain just that. But he does so in the first few chapters. The remain 15 or so go into details about Earth without man you never would have expected. He examines places like Cyprus and the Korean DMZ, which people haven't touched in ages. He takes you places you never would have expected. Each chapter is a different story, a different location, a different analysis. Each could be it's own article.
This book ends up teaching a lot about human history as well. I certainly didn't expect that.
This book is an interesting read, a learning adventure across the globe. As cheesy as it sounds, its a great ride.

5 people found this helpful6 people found this helpful

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Pepper

Interesting Facts Buried Amongst Boring-As-Hell Facts

June 13, 2013

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

I bought this book from the angle of a writer of post-apocalyptic stories. I wanted to understand exactly how the world would degrade (and how quickly) once humans were taken out of the picture. But most of this book is a history lesson.

I understand the need to look back in time in order to see where we might be in the future. But the time frames were so far-flung (and therefore so unrelatable) that I found much of this book so thoroughly boring that it was a real struggle to get through.

It's also obvious that the author did enormous amounts of research in putting this book together. Unfortunately, that left a lot of instances where the book went into painful detail about how this concept or that concept worked, and was just more writing for me to struggle through.

I really, really wanted to love this book. And while there are gems sprinkled throughout, I found the book as a whole to be utterly boring.

11 people found this helpful12 people found this helpful

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Todd J. Glosier

Not a recap of the TV show

July 7, 2015

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Quit different from the TV series. This book focuses mostly on the environmental consequences of our civilization if it were to vanish overnight.
The author uses examples of abandoned areas on earth now, such as the exclusion zone around Chernobyl and the DMZ on Cyprus to try and show what our planet used to look like before civilization came along.
He sites the work of researchers all over the world documenting the accumulation of waste and garbage that already clogs our oceans and beaches, such as the great Pacific gyre, and attempts to give an idea of how long it will take mother nature to clean up after us.
He also talks about the 400+ nuclear power plants and waste storage sites all over the world and gives an estimate of how long it would take to decay below lethal levels.
This is not light reading and the book assumes the reader has some basic scientific knowledge, but the style and prose are reader friendly.
Recommended for anyone with an environmental bent or those who just want to know what we might leave behind us.

3 people found this helpful4 people found this helpful

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Andrew M.

Misleading book.

September 4, 2018

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

For a book that is supposed to discuss the future and what would happen to the world if humans were to suddenly disappear, you would think it would discuss what would happen in great detail. Instead, this book spends 80% of it's pages discussing history, pre-history, and how humans have ruined everything. The first two chapters hook you in by discribing how houses and cities will fall apart without humans to maintain them, but the next 4 chapters are about natural history and evolution of animals and plants throughout Europe, Africa, and the Americas, most of which are extinct (which the author goes into verbose detail about how humans are responsible). After 100 pages I couldn't take it anymore, I wanted to learn about infrastructure and how nature will take back the world, but this book goes off on so many unrelated tangents that I gave up. I feel like I got jipped.

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