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Book Description
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 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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- Book Details
- English Books
- Rating:
(38)
4 stars 
3 stars 2 stars 1 star - Hardcover 304 Pages
- ISBN-10: 0312347294
- ISBN-13: 9780312347291
- Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
- Pub date: Jul 10, 2007
- Also available as: Paperback and Audio CD
- In other languages:
... and other languages繁體書, 简体书 and Libri Italiani
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The premise of the book was interesting and intriguing. I was curious, though, how the author was going to fill nearly 300 pages with only the deconstruction of man's designs. He doesn't - he fills the pages with a series of admonitions against what we've done with and to our environment.
... Continue
The premise of the book was interesting and intriguing. I was curious, though, how the author was going to fill nearly 300 pages with only the deconstruction of man's designs. He doesn't - he fills the pages with a series of admonitions against what we've done with and to our environment.
It's not that the wrist slaps are necessarily unwarranted, but in opening that door (rather than sticking to 'the world without us'), Mr Weisman ignores a fundamental fact. We're here. Yes, things change if humans disappear, and that's an interesting thought experiment. But we're here and not likely going anywhere soon - we've engineered our environment to support and sustain high-density populations. So... now what?
Mr Weisman would have had a shorter book had he stuck to the premise on the cover, but he chose, instead, to introduce the lecture on environmentalism (or lack of). In doing so he offers nothing in the way of a thought experiment on addressing it outside of rolling back time. With that departure, Mr Weisman left me behind and a great idea became a so-so read.
This is an interesting concept to do a research and see how the nature takes over all the artificial artifacts. In another sense, this would tell us how human destructs the nature; if we don't consider ourselves is part of it. There are many places in the world where are absent of human traces that ... Continue
This is an interesting concept to do a research and see how the nature takes over all the artificial artifacts. In another sense, this would tell us how human destructs the nature; if we don't consider ourselves is part of it. There are many places in the world where are absent of human traces that supply for this research. There will always be species that eventually dominates the ego system, sometimes at the cost of others.
The book doesn't make any suggestion how we should learn from this research, besides I am starting worrying my house for the speed of eroding.