The World Without Us | Alan Weisman

The World Without Us | Alan Weisman | Intriguing

books:

The World Without Us

	The World Without Us Alan Weisman Thomas Dunne Books, 2007 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 249 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

The world without us

A well researched and written look at the global footprint humans are making on the world. A vivid account of human pressures on the environment and what the implications are for the future. Weisman is not just a prophet of doom but paints a stark picture of the future.

Intriguing

Well thought out ideas. Gives an amazing, although somewhat dismal, picture of what humans are doing to the world. This book shows just how much of a drastic influence we have over the Earth by describing what would happen to all of our "controlled" creations should we suddenly not be here to upkeep them. It is definitely rousing a call for us to find ways to solve our destructive habits before it is too late. Should we really just disappear or should we learn to respect our fragile ecosystems? In short, this was an excellent and thought provoking piece of literature.

for more information click here

Plastic Latitudes

It's more than a simple thought experiment or a what-if. In formulating his eponymous scenario, Weisman consulted with a pageant of experts with titles such as architectural engineer, atmospheric physicist, subway worker, archaeologist, marine researcher, microbiologist, ethnobotanist, nuclear safety engineer, coral reef specialist, Smithsonian extinction expert, planetary scientist, ichthyologist, limnologist, an actual rocket scientist, and...Sufi master (to name a very few). His research leads us from the Serengeti to the Northern Territories, the Korean demilitarized zone, the Texas petrochemical complex, the Vienna Institute of Demography, and the site of Chernobyl.

It's disturbing on one level, liberating on another, to think about what would happen to our stuff on a different time scale than we usually think about: our houses, our steel bridges, our embalmed and buried dead. Would continental wildlife venture across the Chunnel to re-colonize Britain by traversing a 35-mile dark underground passage? There are surprises, such as what might happen to domesticated cats and dogs, the statue of liberty, our music, and to cockroaches. (Not what you think).

But the book explores the philosophical besides just the technical questions, and without judgment. You might guess that the book could end up as a condemnation of the species in question based on the ruination of garbage, ozone-depleting coolants, coal mining where entire tops of mountain in Appalachia are blasted away, soil depletion, the massive scale of destruction of birds by cell phone towers, of heavy metals, PCBs, disrupted ecosystems, and the billions of tons of plastic that swirl trapped in the currents of the Horse Latitudes. But Weisman succeeds in creating a balanced essay anyway, also noting the likely fates of our monuments, such as the Panama Canal, Mount Rushmore, the New York City Subway system, and symbols of our humanity: the messaging system designed by semiotics experts to warn away would-be future archeologists from opening the WIPP landfills that store nuclear waste, and the copper engravings launched into space on the Pioneer 10 spacecraft designed to convey the essence of human civilization within a series of images and musical recordings. What does it mean, our hopes to leave some lasting trace of who we are?

The author concludes with a few thoughts on population growth, although I can imagine a next book on that subject alone, and maybe the book wanted to be about that all along. Weisman has done a great service to invite certain ideas into mainstream discourse. This book belongs on your required reading list.

for more information click here

Interesting, but sometimes dull

If humans were to go extinct in the next few years, it's safe to say that mother nature will fully recover. There are some things she will likely not be able to fix, nuclear waste being top of the list, but evolution will help her to take care of a lot of the other problems humans have created, at least according to "The World Without Us" by Alan Weisman.

Luckily Weisman didn't just focus on one city and tell us how it would be destroyed and returned to its natural state, which was what I feared when I began reading the book. The first chapter focuses on New York City, the penultimate city to most Americans, but he quickly moves on to other things. Weisman talks to bridge workers to find out how quickly bridges would corrode and crumble depending on climate. He also looks into how buildings deteriorate, how roads crack and give way to trees and plants, and how other species would be effected by the loss of humans.

The chapters about deterioration of man-made buildings were difficult for me to read as I don't have a very scientific mind. I had to really focus on each paragraph to be sure I was really understanding, which made this a long book for me. I found the chapters about case studies (Chernobyl, the DMZ between the Koreas, etc.), and those about other species, to be the most fascinating. As a crazy environmentalist I find myself always thinking everything would be better off without humans, but this just isn't the case. There are several species that would likely become extinct themselves as a result of human extinction, many of those being the animals we have painstakingly domesticated and bred for our own use.

Other chapters that took turns I didn't expect were the chapter on war, in which Weisman argues that war is actually good for the environment despite horrible examples of it causing destruction, and the section about birds, in which we learn that birds are the least effected by humans because they don't have to spend all their time on Earth with us but they are still killed in the hundreds each year because of human interaction.

Overall, I found this book to be really interesting and I appreciated the illustrations that helped to explain some of the more difficult issues and managed to break up the dense text for me. The book is well researched and well written, giving a very full picture of what would happen if humans disappeared without destroying the Earth in the process.

for more information click here