The World Without Us | 
 enlarge | Author: Alan Weisman
Publisher: Picador
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
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Rating:  249 reviews
Sales Rank: 889
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 432
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.5 x 0.8
ISBN: 0312427905
Dewey Decimal Number: 304.2
EAN: 9780312427900
ASIN: 0312427905
Publication Date: August 5, 2008
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Product Description
Time #1 Nonfiction Book of 2007
Entertainment Weekly #1 Nonfiction Book of 2007
Finalist for the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award
Salon Book Awards 2007
Amazon Top 100 Editors’ Picks of 2007 (#4)
Barnes and Noble 10 Best of 2007: Politics and Current Affairs
Kansas City Star’s Top 100 Books of the Year 2007
Mother Jones’ Favorite Books of 2007
South Florida Sun-Sentinel Best Books of the Year 2007
Hudson’s Best Books of 2007
St. Louis Post-Dispatch Best Books of 2007
St. Paul Pioneer Press Best Books of 2007
If human beings disappeared instantaneously from the Earth, what would happen? How would the planet reclaim its surface? What creatures would emerge from the dark and swarm? How would our treasured structures--our tunnels, our bridges, our homes, our monuments--survive the unmitigated impact of a planet without our intervention? In his revelatory, bestselling account, Alan Weisman draws on every field of science to present an environmental assessment like no other, the most affecting portrait yet of humankind's place on this planet.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 244 more reviews...
 Great concept, long boring delivery December 2, 2008
Great topic, this would have been an excellent 20-30 page paper. It turned instead into a disappointing and wordy 275-page book. While thought-provoking, long sections (second third for example) aren't engaging and it takes serious dedication to keep reading. All the chapters about infrastructure degradation quickly become repetitive and boring.
The book is overall mostly descriptive with limited speculations (towards the end). I am sympathetic to the criticisms of the consumerist society we live, but the author tends to rant way too much to my taste (a la Michael Moore). I feel like telling him: look I agree with you, can you provide me with something I do not know instaed of just agreeable but simplistic statements?
So 5 stars for the great idea, -3 stars for wasting my time over 275 pages when 20-30 would have been enough for the same content.
 Thought-provoking facts, but taken with a grain of salt November 30, 2008
One thing that surprises me about this book is some of the comments from other reviewers printed on the back: "This book is the very DNA of hope"--The Globe and Mail or "Extraordinarily foresighted ... beautiful and passionate." While I agree with the foresighted comment (it's a book whose very premise is about the future without us, so if it wasn't foresighted, I don't know what it would be) the others I find strange in their overwhelming sentiment that this book left them with a positive feeling.
I'm not going to say this book depressed me but...well, it's a bit depressing. Basically between the plastics, the radioactive metals and the CFCs, we seem pretty doomed if all the facts in this book are correct. I mean, I suppose we are doomed anyway since our sun will eventually expand and consume the planet, but our meddling seems to be shortening our lifespan as a species significantly. And even if that isn't taken into consideration, the multitude of ways we've permanently altered the landscape, through extinction and mining and carbon consumption and chemistry and genetic alterations is pretty harrowing when read all in one little tome, as this book presents it. And Weisman is willing to go back tens of thousands of years, to show how early man, through "controlled" burning and sophisticated hunting, has been shaping the land for millennia. I now realize that the "untouched" woods I hike through with my dogs are all "second-growth" forests--the new generation after the first one was, at some point, razed by humans for farming. Because pretty much every stitch of the earth has been razed at some point, if this book is correct.
However, I'm not always sure that everything Weisman presents is as horrible as it seems. The plastics and the radioactive fallout and the destruction of the ozone layer are pretty inarguable bad and scary--though even he admits that nature will likely one day evolve to thrive off of those pollutants. Birds and other animals, in fact, seem to exist around Chernobyl and thrive, despite the fact that the area is still considered inhabitable. But sometimes I felt like his description of humans altering the landscape (like through the controlled burns, hunting, agriculture, etc. ) took things a little too far. Mass extinction of many species in one area in a short time would be bad, but is there not an element of Darwinism to the creatures who have evolved to live in the world we changed? Are there not species that have a symbiotic relationship with us? Are we all really as bad as all that? Are we, too, not of this earth?
I think Weisman's ending sentiment is an important one, though it's difficult for me to imagine it ever having an impact until it's too late. Basically, our species has become so adept at surviving, that we are outliving our resources. However, unlike other animals that have done this in the past, only to be culled by horrible methods (starvation due to lack of resources, pandemics due to overcrowding, etc.), we have an advantage--we know that we're doing it and we have the ability to stop it ourselves very easily. Stop having so many children. Basically, Weisman's reported theory is that if all female humans on earth be restricted to one child, our population would go down to 19th century numbers within a century. It seems so incredibly extreme when said that way, but the improvements it would have on our lives would be incredible. We would still have all the advantages of modern life, only with far greater resources to support it. The problem, of course, is that we're still too obstinate in our instinct to procreate. People would never agree to self-limit their families, they have to basically be forced, and that presents a scary sci-fi dystopian future kind of vibe.
I say, read this book for the amazing facts and ideas presented. It will change the way you view everything--and I mean everything. From the hill on the horizon to the birds perching on your rooftop to the plastic water bottle you bring to the gym. But take it with a small grain of salt. It is doubtful that all is as bad as Weisman sometimes presents it, and statistics range so wildly in some of his reports that the two figures almost prompt different conclusions (like, for instance, the 4,000 to 100,000 human deaths resulting from Chernobyl--that's a bit of a difference!). Or his numbers concerning the fatalities of birds in North America every year. He claims we have 20 billion birds in North America, and yet when you add up the numbers he claims are killed by power lines, cars, house cats and windows every year, you realize something simply must be wrong, because otherwise we're killing off far more birds than could possibly reproduce to sustain that number. The fact is, there's no way one man got all these thousands of facts and figures exactly right, since not even the scientists studying the different subjects their entire lives necessarily have the facts right. And there is one small paradox that he failed to touch upon, which I find strange. The thing is, in a world without us, who will be there to appreciate all the beautiful things that flourish in our absence?
errata November 24, 2008
Errata:
Page 94: "Only 6,000 years ago, what is now the world's largest nonpolar desert was green savanna." This change is attributed to: "Our tilted axis straightened not even half a degree, but enough to nudge rain clouds around". No, the larger forcing was the change in the time of perihelion, the time of closest approach relative to the seasons. Perihelion in winter (as it is currently) weakens the northern hemisphere monsoons.
Page 141: "In turn, Sweden's shores were the receptacles for trash from England...the water seemed to obey the wind currents, which in these latitudes is easterly." Westerly.
Page 152: "Beneath it, the water describes lazy, clockwise whorls towards a depression at the center". Clockwise whorls around a mound (of approximately 1 m) at the center.
Page 162: "...humanity's total biomass -- which the eminent biologist E. O. Wislon estimates wouldn't fill the Grand Canyon--won't be missed for long." At 50 kg per human, the biomass of 6.5 billion humans occupies 1/3 of a cubic kilometer. A simple calculation. Perhaps there is confusion with an estimate of total biomass?
Page 267: "14-foot zirconium-alloy hollow rods stuffed end to end with uranium pellets that each contain as much power as a ton of coal". Energy, rather than power. And to be clear, emphasize that "each" refers to the pellet, not the rod. 1 gram of fissionable uranium is equiavalent to 1000 kg of coal.
 Interesting "What If?" Look at the World November 23, 2008
A very well written and captivating look at Mother Earth's response to the disappearance of humans. I felt the author did a fantastic job at educating the reader on the devastating impact of important human discoveries that we take for granted today. It really will make you think twice about bringing home a plastic bag from the grocery store.
I also enjoyed the limitation of religious theories and beliefs as this book is dedicated to physical science.
life will find a way - but we should too November 20, 2008
It's an easy speculation to say that without humans, the earth will restore, recleanse, rectify itself. Indeed, in his book The World Without Us, Alan Weisman repeatedly hints to the reader that the world doesn't need us as much as we need it. But Weisman goes beyond the obvious implication and details just how incredibly short-sighted we humans have been in just a brief time on this planet.
Weisman thoroughly stresses home the point that despite our tendencies toward toxicity, life will indeed find a way, whether it be millennia or billennia. There are a whole lot of ideas to take away from this thought experiment, for example the futility of our marvelous infrastructure once we are no longer around to monitor it; what will happen when wonders like the Chunnel, the Panama Canal, our volatile oil refineries and nuclear reactors/repositories as well as our subways have no one to flip the off switch or close the valve? How will the unmeasurable amount of polymers (plastic) dumped in our oceans annually begin to degrade, and what are the hopes of a hungry microbe that evolves the ability to feed on them?
Of the many thought provoking speculations and projections Weisman so meticulously researches and thoughtfully relates, he proposes the irony that the realization of our collective death may just perhaps contribute to the saving of ourselves. Interviewing the organizer of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, and yes it it's a real organization, he postulates that if humans were really serious about curbing overpopulation, thereby eliminating juvenile delinquency among other issues, we might just have an epiphany:
" ...spiritual awakening would replace panic, because a dawning realization that as human life drew to a close, it was improving. There would be more than enough to eat, and resources would again be plentiful, including water. The seas would replenish. Because new housing wouldn't be necessary, so would forests and wetlands.
...Like retired business executives who suddenly find serenity by tending a garden, Knight envisions us spending our remaining time helping rid an increasingly natural world of unsightly and now useless clutter, in pursuit of which we'd once swapped something alive and lovely." (p.243)
As improbable it may be that people would go to such extremes or even somehow suddenly become extinct, Weisman's book is an ambitious and enlightening experiment that brings us closer to acknowledging our impact upon and responsibility to the world, while we're still with it.
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