|
Loading... The World Without Usby Alan Weisman
This was a fascinating book about what would happen to the earth if humans suddenly disappeared--fascinating, scary and a wake up call.  walterqchocobo | Apr 8, 2013 |  This book is one of the best things I have read in a long while--beautifully written, elegantly imagined and argued, chock full of startling information. I only gave it four stars because the solution Weisman proposes in the last few pages is really one that deserves a much lengthier treatment, including proposals for overcoming the serious resistance the idea of limiting each woman to a single child will encounter from all sorts of people around the world. But this is the only book or article about the environmental stress humans are putting on our only habitat which directly addresses the fact that there are simply more of us than the earth can sustain. (  ) nmele | Apr 6, 2013 | What would happen if every human just disappeared from the earth tomorrow? Weisman investigates and reports on this thought experiment. Engagingly written. (  ) satyridae | Apr 5, 2013 | I believe the world would be much better off without us. (  ) Sullywriter | Apr 3, 2013 | Quite possibly the best nonfiction book that I have ever read. I have been wanting to read it ever since I read the article about it in Salon last year, and it lived up to my expectations, and then some. I have to say I was rooting for the Rapture (not the Rapture specifically, but the disappearance of humans) by the end of the first chapter or so. This book is really incredible in its breadth and depth - Weisman covers places and phenomena I'd never heard of and didn't know existed. If only we were smart enough to preserve it all... ( ) JennyArch | Apr 3, 2013 |
 That said, the science and factual stuff is, almost invariably, mind-boggling. I did not know, for instance, that ships the length of three football pitches entering the locks of the Panama Canal have only two feet of clearance on each side; that there may well be at least one billion annual bird deaths from flying into glass in the United States alone; or that graphic designers have been called in to imagine what warnings against coming too close to nuclear waste containers will be comprehensible 10,000 or more years from now.
References to this work on external resources.
|
 Google Books — Loading...
Popular coversRatingAverage: (3.85)
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
5
Wikipedia in English (13)
2