The World Without Us -- Book Review
The World Without Us
By Alan Weisman
New York: St. Martin’s Press 2007
The World Without Us is an outstanding achievement on many levels. It is well written, well researched, imaginatively conceived, and keenly relevant. The conception is a simple thought experiment: if humans were to suddenly disappear from the earth, how long would all that we have created last? Another way of putting it would be: how long would it take the earth to recover from the devastation and havoc that we have wrought upon it? For those who feel a need to go to the barricades in order to defend the earth the answer might be comforting: for the most part, the earth will dispose of us and most of our legacy in fairly short order. Within a few hundred years and certainly within a few millennia the earth would obliterate most of what we have left behind and reclaim for untamed wilderness most of what we have imposed upon it as “civilization.” There are some exceptions, such as things carved or built with stone, plastic will last at least 100,000 years, and radioactive waste will be killing things for millions of years. But most everything else is highly perishable. Weisman has gone to an enormous effort to write this book, traveling to every corner of the globe: England, Africa, Turkey, the Korean Demilitarized Zone, Poland, Cyprus, Guatemala, Panama, the South Pacific, all over North America, talking to a wide range of scientists, engineers, and even religious leaders. The amount of knowledge he has packed into this book is staggering. And it is all conveyed in a very readable engaging style that is a joy to be immersed in. The book does get a hold of you. One sees very clearly from this book how precarious our civilized way of life is and how dependent it is upon constant maintenance and vigilance. Some of the many topics covered are: the New York City subway system, plant species introduced into foreign environments by humans, the fate of skyscrapers, the extinction of prehistoric North American mammals, the effect of elephants on the ecology of Africa, reckless development on the northern coast of Cyprus, underground cities in Cappadocia, Turkey, the fate of plastic and the Pacific Ocean Gyre, storage tanks containing highly explosive fuels and gases, oil refineries along the Texas coast, the return of agricultural land to forest, fertilizers and their impact on the environment, the English Channel Tunnel (the Chunnel), the Panama Canal, the ecology of the Korean demilitarized zone, the degradation of the ozone layer, radioactive waste, unattended nuclear power plants, mountaintop removal coal mining in West Virginia, the collapse of the Maya civilization, burial caskets and tombs, the fate of artwork, coral reefs, as well as many smaller topics and tributaries, all thoroughly researched with personal visits and conversations with experts. This is a very informative, interesting, well written narrative about our past and our future and the future beyond us. It is also about how fragile our civilized way of life is and how easily and how quickly it could fall apart. The modern world certainly isn’t necessary. Nature would make short work of it. The remnants of us could soon be precariously eking out survival on what little is left of it. Weisman has given a fine panorama of the durability and the impermanence of all human achievement.