When I told people I was reading this non-fiction book and that the premise was "What would happen to the earth if the human race suddenly vanished?" the usual response was to say something like, "So it's fiction?"

Ugh. NO.

First of all, to understand what could happen, we have to understand what has already happened so far. And then, backed up by scientific knowledge from various experts in various fields, the author explains a very likely outcome of what would happen if we were just -- poof -- gone. This book is absolutely fascinating. So much so, that I was routinely ignoring the fantasy fiction I was concurrently reading and kept heading back to this book. I don't often find non-fiction page-turners but this one qualifies. And along with fascinating, this book is frequently alarming -- but not in a strident, self-righteous tone or anything like that. This book presented me with many facts about the earth and our impact on it in a straightforward manner that just makes your proverbial jaw drop. The two most alarming chapters for me were Chapter 9: Polymers Are Forever and Chapter 15: Hot Legacy. In the former I learned all about the plastic refuse that is currently clogging our oceans. A LOT of plastic, mind-boggling... the Great Pacific Garbage Patch was mentioned and then I learned that there are at least six other large plastic-strewn gyres*.

So. That's bad. But then along comes Chapter 15 which goes into detail about radioactive waste, how much of it we have, what we're doing with it, and just how bad it is. HOLY CRAP. Take Uranium-238, for example. This "depleted" version of U-235 has a half-life of 4.5 billion years. In the United States alone, there's at least a half-million tons of it. U-238 is an unusually dense metal, so we've been making armor-piercing bullets out of it. (They can pierce tank armor.) There's enough concentrated U-238 in the bullet points that radioactivity in the ashen debris can exceed 1,000 times the normal background level. They'll emit radiation for more years than the planet likely has left. (That is, this stuff will still be radioactive when 4 or 5 billion years from now our sun expands to a red giant and incinerates the inner planets in our solar system. Nice.)

I could go on but suffice it to say that this book should be required reading. An excellent book.

*Oceanography. a ringlike system of ocean currents rotating clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and counterclockwise in the Southern Hemisphere. ( )

Pretty compelling book that finds intriguing examples and projections of just what would happen to the globe if we disappeared. In most cases it would obviously cope just fine without us, barring nuclear and chemical waste. Raises questions about whether population trends on the planet can be sustained. ( )

Shouldn't an intellectual exercise be interesting? ( )

The premise of The World Without Us is a hypothetical future: what would happen to the Earth if all of humanity suddenly disappeared? To explore that, Weisman looks over our present and our past, touring the planet from deep wilderness to urban cores, history from the Paleozoic Era through the Paleolithic up to the modern day, and places where humans have already vanished, including Chernobyl and the Mayan civilization. It’s an interesting survey of our planet and the true fragility of infrastructure that seems very solid in our daily lives. The book is a tour, not a reference, and has no handy timelines for quickly generating descriptions for abandoned cities if you’re writing. ( )

I found this to be an easy and enjoyable read... swinging from science fiction apocalypticism to hard core environmentalism. Eye opening in a lot of ways. The information about plastic was especially interesting, that there are some 4000 factories in India that make nothing but plastic grocery sacks, and that most of that plastic is still here, somewhere, on Earth.

Whether this book makes any impact or not remains to be seen, but I'm pretty sure the author was writing more to entertain than anything else.

Recommended, although can be depressing at times. ( )