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. ( )

What would happen on the Earth if, one day, all the people suddenly disappeared? Alan Weisman suggests some kind of Universalist rapture or mass exodus with the help of space aliens as a vehicle for our departure so that he can continue with his thought experiment. How would nature deal with everything left behind by 21st century humanity?

Weisman looks at several places in the world,remaining vestiges of the of the pre-human world and case studies for his thought experiment. Bialowieza Puszcza is a vestigal old growth forest on the border between Poland and Belarus. It is not untouched by man, of course, but has been preserved since the middle ages as a royal hunting preserve and as a national park. The wisent, the European bison, is still in residence there along with deer, wild boars an other European large mammals. No aurochs, sadly. Weisman suggetsts that a forest like Bialowieza Puszcza could once again cover most of Europe.



The subways, tunnels and buried streams on Manhattan would suddenly fill with water. New York pumps thousands of gallons of water every day out of it's underworld. When the pumps stop all would go underwater. This water would rust out the steel structure holding New York up, cause the streets to become canals, the buried streams to re-emerge and the tall buildings to fall. Central Park would become the source of seed to reestablish a forest on the island, wildlife would cross the bridges, soon to collapse from rust and lack of maintenance, and repopulate the island. Rats and cockroaches would die off without the support of their human hosts to feed them and heat their homes. - That's a good thing, Martha.

Houston would become a huge oil and chemical spill which would pollute the ship canal and cause problems for life far out into the Gulf of Mexico. Over time, Weisman hopes, nature would heal the mess, as it is doing for Prince William Sound. It could take centuries.

Nuclear power plants need us to keep them from melting down. Nature would move right in to te contaminated areas, however, as it has done at Chyrnobl An article that he wrote about the aftermath of Chernobyl is, in fact, the inspiration for this book. Grasses, trees, animals and human squatters have occupied the contaminated zone around the ruined nuclear plant, and will pay the inevitable penalty in increased cancers and birth defects.

The worlds oceans would recover, over time, coral reefs would come back and, interestingly, Weisman predicts that the oceans would soon be filled with huge sharks and other large predators. Some studies have suggested that, in a healthy, balanced ocean, much of the biomass is stored in large carnivores, and not is the smaller herbivores and plants as on land. This is because to the rapid rate of reproduction of small fish and of plankton, corals and other marine life, which is quickly eaten. The large carnivores live longer and store that energy, to be recycled years later, when they die of natural causes.

There is no big message in The World Without Us, no doomsday prophecy. Weisman simply wanted to think about the effect humanity has had on the world and his method for doing so was to imagine our sudden withdrawal. He does suggest that the Earth might miss us if we went away. Humanity is a part of nature, too.

I'll Never Forget The Day I Read A Book!

The science was absolutely spot-on, but the author couldn't seem to find his voice, whether to stay in a non-fiction voice or in a fiction voice. I couldn't last fifty pages within this one - and I was disappointed, because I'd been hearing such good, glowing things about it.

The science of the situation as explained in the book is its only saving grace, really. Such a shame. ( )

I found this book tedious. It was suggested by a friend and I think less of him for not realizing this book is tripe. ( )

Where to start? This book is the most comprehensive material I’ve ever read concerning humankind’s effect on the environment. Although the premise is somewhat simple, and certainly not new, Weisman delves into what the reader feels like is EVERY aspect of humanity’s effect upon the world. From the smallest ripples (slowly decaying infrastructure) to the largest waves (the world slowly repopulating itself with megafauna such as giant American sloths) he investigates the repercussions of a total disappearance of humans from the face of the earth. Weisman goes back into the past—drawing parallels between the Mayan civilization’s suicidal greed and overpopulation and our current lifestyle—and into the future, imagining the lifetime of ‘I Love Lucy’ re-run wavelengths.

I was surprised by how factual this book was. Although Bill McKibben blurbs it as being “a tremendous feat of imaginative reporting,” the book’s content is so thoroughly researched it seems like a prediction of what exactly will happen if we continue on this destructive path. Weisman offers MANY sources (with a 29 page “select” bibliography) as well as differing theologies for nearly every concept he presents. Les Knight, the founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (and a “thoughtful, soft-spoken, articulate” man) has his arguments proposed adjacent to those belonging to the self-explanatory Church of Euthanasia.

In my opinion, Weisman is rarely preachy or pedantic, assuming an objective tone as he describes the current human-wrought decimation upon his beloved world. His love of the world is apparent, however, in every image of verdant hillsides he conjures up, notably absent of human life. That’s what truly distinguishes this book from a dry recounting of doomsday factoids.

I’m not sure if I’m left with a feeling of hope or despair for the future, after reading The World Without Us. Weisman makes it clear that we can try to repair what we’ve broken—at one point bringing up a study from the World Population Program that states that if all fertile women began having only one child starting tomorrow, “our current 6.5 billion human population would drop by 1 billion by the middle of this century,”—but I’m not convinced. As the Dalai Lama says, ignorant as the rest of us to what the future may hold, “Who knows?”

“Yet the biggest elephant of all is a figurative one in the planet-sized room that is ever harder to ignore, although we keep trying. Worldwide, every four days human population rises by 1 million. Since we really can’t grasp such numbers, they’ll wax out of control until they crash, as has happened to every other species that got too big for this box. About the only thing that could change that, short of the species-wide sacrifice of voluntary human extinction, is to prove that intelligence really makes us special after all.”

Weisman imagines what the world would be like if all humanity was instantly wiped from the earth. How quickly would buildings topple and the forests take over? What would happen to our nuclear reactors? In a fascinating passage, Weisman looks at how quickly the subways would fill with water if no one was there to manage it. Very sobering - it makes you realize that much of what we are doing is fighting nature, which will in the end most likely take over. ( )

Some very interesting insights into how human civilisation works today, worked in the past and on the time scale of its impact. In some places the book seems to lose its focus on the latter aspect; however, still a good read. ( )

I think it is worth a read but it was a little less enlightening than I had hoped.

See my review at http://my.timepage.org/?p=144 ( )

First half of the book is great and just as advertised. It seemed like the ending was, well, more like 'uh oh, I promised the publishers 3 more chapters!' rather than 'here is some more fun thought experiment for you!' so it loses a star and a half for wandering off course and getting somewhat dull and repetative at the end (that seems to be a common theme with this genre). ( )

If you like stories that terrify you, then this is the book for you. Take heed, however, this is not a book you can close the cover on if you wish to escape the intensity of the story within. This story is not based on fiction but on meticulously researched facts. In this book you will read the terrifying truth of how the human race has changed the planet, and a few suggestions on how we can start to address some of the damage we have done. This book is a must read for those interested in the health of our planet, and even more of a must read for those that think our planet has no health problems at all. ( )

There is much more to this book than the "what if?" scenario of the title and blurbs suggest. My advice: jump straight to Chapter 9 "Polymers are Forever" and be amazed. At the very least you will discover what a nurdle is. And you will never think about facial scrubs the same way again> ( )

I'm sorry to say, I didn't care for this at all. The concept was very intriguing -- I love reading fictional stories set in a post-apocalyptic world, so I was curious what the world would *really* be like without us. But after reading several hundred pages of Weisman's book, I feel cheated. There's very little about what would happen, and instead very much about everything we're doing wrong. I don't need to be convinced; I'm of the firm belief that humanity as a whole is doing quite a few things wrong right now. I agree with Weisman, I do. But I didn't need to spend chapter after chapter talking about it here. If I wanted to do that, I would have looked for a book titled "What We're Doing Wrong to the Earth", perhaps.

There's a teeny bit of what I was looking for. I learned that most buildings wouldn't last (but which ones would go first? tell me the first 100 years, even) and lots of plants would take over, and the Statue of Liberty would be at the bottom of the ocean and last forever. Great. I got that from any post-apoc scifi novel or movie ever made. And I really didn't need to spend quite so much time reading about the many different kinds of trees that would last, wouldn't last, would move into areas they hadn't been before, and so on, and so on. The author rather cleverly starts the book with a chapter about how the city of New York would fare if we all went away. That chapter was what I assumed the whole book would be, but it's not. I can't help but feel tricked, as if the publishers were counting on me leafing through that first chapter and plonking down my cash. But istead there was just the occasional mention of the kind of thing I'd expected (Mount Rushmore lasts. The pyramids don't. In not many more words than that, surrounded by chapters and chapters that all seem to somehow or other be about birds.)

Look: as a book on the importance of conservation, it's good, great even. If I was judging it on that alone, two thumbs way up, 4 or 5 stars for sure. But I was expecting something entirely different, something that spent less time talking about the mistakes of the past and present and more time on the future. ( )

TThe World Without Us by Alan Weisman left me feeling a bit out of my normal mental state. The scope is huge and the implications are almost too daunting to take in after finishing. The premise is unique: what would happen to planet earth if humans suddenly didn't exist anymore. "Impossible" I thought, "but still interesting". Basing his arguments in reams of scientific research, Weisman exports the reader outside of our current reality, into cities, farms, the ocean where humans simply are not a factor anymore.

At first, I was a little resistant to the author’s tone in the first couple chapters. He came across very sure of himself and even a little condescending. He sings the glories of mosquito abundance after humans stop spraying pesticide and quotes E.O Wilson on the same page, yet E.O. Wilson has explicitly stated before that he would love to see mosquitoes go extinct. After a few chapters though, I began to settle into Weisman's style and was pleasantly surprised by the variety of subjects that he adeptly cruises through with intelligence and wit. Geology, History, Politics, Engineering, Biology, Ornithology are all hit upon. It was also impressive the number of places that Weisman visited in order to write the book: North Korean, Houston, Panama Canal, Poland, New York, ect. Even if Weisman had a particular environmentalist bent, he was doing his homework and citing his sources rigorously.

The most unsettling parts of this book for me, albeit well written, were the sections on plastic. The fact that this relatively recent invention has become so pervasive is not something necessarily new to me, but the extent to which it is explained here in this book was concerning. These particles of plastic just keep breaking down into smaller and smaller parts where smaller and smaller creatures eat them. That and they are predicted to be stable for the next 20,000 years is hard to even think about. The uncertainty about how plastic particles are going to affect an ecosystem for that amount of time is what is worrisome to me. The same goes for nuclear fusion leaks. It saddens me that one of the legacies we could be possible leaving behind for our grandchildren's grandchildren is an utterly useless and poisoned land. A poisoned land that could possibly be dangerous for thousands and thousands of years.

One of the more simply fascinating sections was the piece on Cappadocia in Turkey, where entire cities lie underground being unused for centuries. Lost underground cities are always sure to please and it always triggers my D & D playing imagination when I discover mysterious forgotten civilizations. Especially when there is a good chance that there are even more subterranean catacombs still undiscovered.

I also found the jobs of the scientists who design granite nuclear waste slabs fascinating. These guys have to come up with some type of way to convey to humans or other intelligent life in the far future that these nuclear waste dumps are dangerous. Assuming that language mutates so fast, how do you warn someone who is thousands of years in the future and how do you insure that the medium you even choose to relay this message is going to last that long. Again, my RPG adventure mind was eating this up, just imagining myself being one of a few straggling tribes of humans left on the planet thousands of years from now stumbling through the desert of what was once South West United States and finding a mysterious hunk of granite that strange symbols on it. How would we decipher it? What would we think of its creators?

All of these things just reinforced my sense of human insignificance, but not in a way that meant human life is meaningless, but just that its not as significant as many of us go on thinking it is. As an atheist, I am often confronted with the notion that this life is all you get, so you better make it good. This book did a good job of explaining that what we are doing will have drastic effects on the planet for a long time whether we are here or not. Also, however, even if we as a species disappeared tomorrow, the planet would recover in due time and life would continue to thrive despite the millennia long problems we would be leaving behind. ( )

A fun and eye-opening thought experiment. Weisman does a great job showing the damage we're doing to the planet, and is able to leave the reader with a sense of responsibility to act even though the point of the book as a whole focuses on the insignificance of our activities when compared to the resilience of nature and the scale of geologic time. This book is hopeful and encouraging, illuminating the huge environmental consequences of human activity without being fatalistic. ( )

Really should be 4 1/2 stars. Fascinating reading, but a little disjointed. ( )

Weisman puts the question “What if ?” to the reader, then thoroughly, intelligently and scientifically systematically answers the question: How long and by what process would it take for nature to reclaim the world if humans were to suddenly disappear?

In many ways, animals and plants would thrive and take off. Several places in the world have been negatively impacted greatly because of what man has done, Chernobyl, Johnson Island, and a large number of coral reefs to name a few. However, to say that the world would go back to pre-human conditions without us is naive and a romantic fantasy.

Without human mechanics and equipment operators, our 141 nuclear reactors would meltdown, spreading radioactive waste on clouds that would spread globally, as well as leech into the soil and ground water, eventually finding their way to lakes, rivers and oceans. Also in need of these human beings care and service are the vast number of petroleum refineries, which would also suffer catastrophic failure in our absence and spread heavy metal and carcinogenic particle laden smoke along trade winds, reaching ground in other parts of the world in the rainfall. No, the world without us would NOT be a better, cleaner Edenic place.

It is unmistakeable that mankind has forever irrevocably altered the Earth.

click for full review: http://thekoolaidmom.wordpress.com/20... ( )

To quote Neil (from the Young Ones) 'HEAV-Y man'. This book is dense, filled with facts, and I found it a heavy, heavy read. I'm glad I persevered and got to the end, but a bit of light relief would have been good. I found myself reading another book, I hadn't really meant to, in the middle of this one, just for a bit of light relief. The fact that the second book was a story of grinding poverty and hard, hard times, says something about 'The world without us'!

The book basically lists all the things that could go wrong (sometimes right) after we humans leave the planet. No explanations of where we were headed, but as there were no piles of rotting corpses in the scenarios I assume it was something benign? It made me want to read 'Do androids dream of electric sheep' by P. K. Dick again. I read this over 30 years ago (scary), and the vision of the vestiges of the human race left on an exhausted planet Earth, after everyone else has escaped off-world has stuck in my (failing) memory all these years. For younger readers, the book also affected Ridley Scott, the film-maker who based the film 'Blade Runner' on parts of the plot, but left LOADS out - read the book if you haven't already.

But I digress. The world without us, is a tour de force, but would benefit from a few good colour illustrations, and would lend itself to the 'Life on Earth' treatment. It would make a really interesting documentary series. I've heard a rumour that it has already been on TV, but cannot find any corroborating evidence of this?

What fascinated me was the explanation of the destruction of other large predators in every continent except Africa. It's amazing to think that elephants once roamed the USA, and how most animals we think of as indigenous (including humans) are usually from somewhere else. If our wildlife were to get species-ist, they may have expressed the opinion that humans (all of us from eskimos to aboriginees) should go back to Africa where we came from, and stop ruining the environment on all the other continents and mucking it up for the elephants and the bears! The fact that some wildlife has adapted and evolved to take account of our presence says something about the resiliance of nature, and gives some hope for the future, whether or not us humans remain on the planet and continue to concrete over the ground and release indestructable plastics and toxins into the atmosphere!

Have a read of this if you have an enquiring mind, particularly if you are writing a post-apocalytic science fiction novel!

The World Without Us gives a bleak look at the future of the planet, but I would not recommend it unless you are extremely interested in the minutiae of the topic. This book started out entertaining and unique, making the first half difficult to put down. Unfortunately, it quickly became very repetitive and boring, and I was unable to get much past halfway. There are some interesting facts in here that are not well publicised and need to be said, but this book could have been halved without deleting any of the relevant content. Good concept, but way too long. ( )

This is an exercise in speculative non-fiction. Recommended

The author has taken what was originally an essay, and expanded it into a book. It is a dissertaion on how we have changed the world around us, and how permanent, or not, those changes are. In some cases, such as the Green line between the Turks and the Greeks in Cyprus. It is a classic tale of the reclamation of land by the wild. A forest burned several years ago, and now the hillside is covered with poppies that have not been common there for ages. The forest in Poland that is the last remnant of the Northern European forest is described in terms almost lyrical. In some ways it reminded me of the descriptions of forest in "Freckles" and "Girl of the Limberlost".

The information about the struggle of New York to stay as it is - the pumps removing the underground rivers, the park service removing seedlings, and the squirrels stealing all the seeds from the forest remnant there. Those parts are encouraging.

But the description of the effect of plastic on the ocean life is very depressing. Plastic became a force of nature after WWII, but nature has not figured out what to do with it. It is eaten by most sea creatures, and if they are lucky, they excrete it. If not, it lodges in their gut, causing a fatal constipation. That is discouraging.

It is hard to read the book in one sitting. The scenarios are supported by examples, but rarely statistics (making it more readable than "An Inconvenient Truth"). It has only touched on Climate Change, so far. The encouraging thing is that he talks of people who are studying the problems, and looking for solutions. ( )

I added this book to my to read list after seeing the author on the Daily Show. He was an interesting speaker, and highlighted some of the more interesting points to this book, which examines what would happen if the human race were to suddenly disappear from the planet. It’s an alternately fascinating and depressing book.

The fascinating sections include an account of how nature could reclaim Manhattan Island, contrasted with how nature has returned to the nuclear zone around Chernobyl.

The depressing sections include a description of exactly what we’ve unleashed into the environment by creating such things as plastics. There’s a reason it took me more than a week to get through this book. The news isn’t all sweetness and light. We can never put the earth back to the way it was before we started mucking about with the environment.

I do recommend this book. It’s a fascinating look at what we’ve done, and the implications of those actions. Just don’t read it if you’re looking for an uplifting story. ( )

I really enjoyed this book, only it's way too long and meanders way too much. The book was based on an essay by Weisman and after reading the entire book I wished I had just read the essay. ( )