The World Without Us by Alan Weisman
|
List Price: Our Price: $5.49 You Save: $9.51 (63%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $0.48 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of The World Without Us
Book Review: A World Without Us
Summary: 5 Stars
I bought this book as a gift and it was well received. I haven't read it personally but I am told it is well written and intriguing.Book Review: Yoooooohoo! Anybody home?
Summary: 4 Stars
"Worldwide, every four days human population rises by 1 million." - Author Alan Weisman in THE WORLD WITHOUT US
But, what if the Earth's humans disappeared? This is the premise of THE WORLD WITHOUT US, a book version of what you may have seen on Life After People (History Channel) or National Geographic: Aftermath - Population Zero.
Weisman approaches his subject from two perspectives; what the Earth might have looked like had humans not evolved, and what would likely happen to the world and, more specifically, human creations, if we were to suddenly blink out of existence because of, say, a massive, species-ending plague. To illustrate the former is more difficult as Homo sapiens is so ubiquitous across the planet, but the author points to the Bialowieza Puszcza forest on Poland's eastern border and Chambura Gorge in Uganda as roughly representative sites. To illustrate the latter is much easier as one only has to look as far as Pripyat, abandoned after the Chernobyl nuclear accident, unoccupied Varosha on Cyprus isolated between the Turkish and Greek zones, the depopulated DMZ between North and South Korea, or New England's temperate forest, now larger than it was in 1776 due to a depopulation trend after the Civil War.
Weisman was perhaps at his most interesting when describing what would happen to humankind's creations in its absence. Almost charming, especially to a Los Angeles area resident such as myself, is the narrative picture of the dissolution of New York City infrastructure as vegetation and wildlife reclaim the environment; gee, what a pity. On the other hand, the demise of oil refinery complexes and nuclear power stations has apocalyptic potential. Regarding the huge refinery complex in Texas City, TX:
"With no one to monitor controls or the computers, some reactions would run away and go boom. You would get a fire, and then a domino effect, since there'd be nothing to stop it ... All the pipes would be conduits for fires ... That blaze could possibly go for weeks ... If this happened to every plant in the world, imagine the amount of pollutants ... They would also release chlorinated compounds like dioxins and furans from burning plastics. And you'd get lead, chromium and mercury attached to the soot ... the clouds would disperse through the world. The next generation of plants and animals, the ones that didn't die, might need to mutate in ways that could impact evolution."
Of course, the book's subject matter opens the way for a discussion of the durable poisons that humans have injected into the environment and which will persist with us or without us: waste from nuclear generating plants, plastic polymers of all sorts, polychlorinated biphenyls, phosphate and nitrate fertilizers, and fluorocarbons. It's enough to make Al Gore weep, or at least go on the stump selling carbon offsets.
And what are the chances that every last member of the human race might cease to exist? Very slim in the relative short term as there are survivors of even the most virulent and infectious disease agents. But past human societies have achieved near extinction. Consider the Mayans, for example, whose culture dominated Central America for 1600 years before virtually vanishing in the eighth century AD for reasons not yet completely understood.
Perhaps the most imaginatively stimulating subtopic concerns the evidence of our existence that extraterrestrials at large might stumble across. The author makes reference to the "I Love Lucy" television shows that have been beaming to the stars for years and will reach the edge of our galaxy in 2450 AD. And then there's the Golden Record, a gold-plated copper analog disc on which are recorded both sounds and images of the Human Race, carried on both the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft as they speed away from the Solar System.
While THE WORLD WITHOUT US seemed slightly disorganized, and the few photos included highlighted the fact that more would have added value to the whole, it was throughout both thought-provoking and instructive. And though the phrase "built to last" has no meaning whatsoever on the cosmic scale, I certainly won't be tempted to toss my empty water bottle out the window the next time I drive through a national park.
Book Review: The End of the World As We Know It
Summary: 4 Stars
Here's the bad news:
The world has probably already ended, but we're just not perceptive enough to realize it.
Here's the good news:
You can read all about it in Alan Weisman's fascinating book "The World Without Us" (2007).
Be prepared, however. "The World Without Us" is a powerful blow to the kidneys that has the amazing ability to make a reader want to curl into a ball, suck his thumb, and wait for someone - anyone - to swoop in and rescue us.
The premise for Weisman's book is a simple one: What would happen to the earth if humanity suddenly vanished? But in getting to the answer, Weisman has to explore the current condition of the planet.
And it ain't pretty.
This explanation from the book on what may have happened to the vanquished Mayan civilization speaks volumes about our modern conundrum:
"Society had evolved too many elites, all demanding exotic baubles... a culture wobbling under the weight of an excess of nobles, all needing quetzal feathers, jade, obsidian, fine chert, custom polychrome, fancy corbelled roofs, and animal furs. Nobility is expensive, nonproductive, and parasitic, siphoning away too much of society's energy to satisfy its frivolous cravings."
Hello, kettle!
The book, while sloppily organized, stays pinned to your eyeballs. What horrible thing will I discover next? "The World Without Us" reads like a suspense novel - only its all true. I stopped reading several times in fits of bleary-eyed despair.
One of the most shocking revelations was the existence of a massive floating plastic trash dump in the Pacific Ocean about the size of Texas. Here we have hundreds of miles of ocean thick with bottle caps, plastic bags, six-pack rings, balloons, and sandwich bags. Oceanographers called it the "The Great Pacific Garbage Patch" - the place where all plastic garbage is churned and burped up by the Pacific.
After reading about this I was seized by a desire to purge my house of every plastic item. I wanted to strip naked and live in harmony with nature (eating bark and grass). Sounds crazy, I know, but here are just a few of mind-boggling things you'll discover reading "The World Without Us."
* If humans disappeared, the average house would last about 100 years before toppling over due to decay. But if you cut a one-foot diameter hole in the roof, the same house would crumble in about 10 years. This is the power of nature once it gets inside and gets to work.
* Here's a quote that should make you pause: "Except for a small amount that's been incinerated... every bit of plastic manufactured in the world for the last 50 years or so still remains. It's somewhere in the environment." How much is that? One billion tons.
* If people vanished, the 441 nuclear power plants currently in operation would run on autopilot for several months and then begin to overheat. The resulting deadly radioactive damage to the environment would poison the areas around the plants for a very, very long time - we're talking geological time of hundreds of thousands of years.
* Mount Rushmore would probably last about 7.2 million years.
* There are about 20 billion birds in North America alone - yet the population is plunging. Two of the strangest mass killers of birds are windows and cats. Birds can't see windows and they fly into them and snap their own necks at alarming rates. About one billion a year die this way. Domesticated cats - even when well fed - hunt and kill about 28 birds each every year. There are between 30-60 million cats in North America. Do the math.
It's this kind of painstaking research and details that makes "The World Without Us" an astonishing, jaw-dropping read. If you can stomach the enormity of the damage humans have wrought and ignore the book's scattered organization and tendency to jump from topic to topic at random, then you're in for experiencing one of the best and most powerful non-fiction books written in the last several years.
Read it and then do something - anything - to help save us from, well, ourselves.
Like literate blather? Then head over to the Dark Party Review!
Book Review: An extremely informative environmental read
Summary: 4 Stars
The subject of "A World Without People" has fascinated me for quite some time. I've watched several television series on the subject (Aftermath - Population Zero, Life After People - The Series etc.) just to learn more on the topic. Alan Weisman's "World Without Us" isn't quite the same as the dramatic reinactments you'll see on TV but more about environmentalism. It's more in the sense of how the world has changed because of people and how the world moves on after we're gone. While he does touch on some of the destruction nature will undoubtedly impose upon the physical things we leave behind, he focuses more on the damage mankind has already inflicted upon the world. The book itself is very informative on many topics including soil erosion, pollution, deforestation etc. Here are my thoughts on "The World Without Us."
Pros
+ Amazing amount of evironmental information backed by very concrete evidence, mostly provided by scientists and professors.
+ Made me extremely conscious of just how much plastic I use and discard on a weekly basis. Since reading the chapter on the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" and plastics my recycle and reuse efforts have greatly increased. Out of everything in the book this subject left the biggest impression on me.
+ Fascinating chapter on the last European primeval forest, Bialowieza Puszcza. As I read the chapter I was constantly reminded of the Grim's Fairy Tales I read as a child.
+ Chapter on the Korean DMZ where wildlife and terrain are now virtually untouched was a concept that never even occurred to me. I found it both intriguing and foreboding.
Cons
- There's no cohesive or unifying theme to the book. The writing is extremely reminscent of numerous college essays or a research paper.
- Some very dry reading, especially if the subject isn't something you're particularily interested in. For me the chapters on human evolution, African pastorialism, nuclear reactors and the invention of fertlizer were all a bit of a struggle to get through.
- Weisman's short descriptions of the people he was interviewing became a bit redundant and uncessary. For example; Professor John Smith, a short man in a tweed jacket with tight curly brown hair showing streaks of grey states, "in X amount of years these specific trees will overtake the asphalt."
The premise of this book is undoubtedly interesting and fascinating. I could see many college professors using this title as required course reading for a class on environmentalism. Even with it's few drier chapter's I definitely feel it's a book that any environmentally conscious person should read and would enjoy. I especially recommend it if you've ever wondered about the enormous strain humanity has imposed upon the world.
Book Review: life will find a way - but we should too
Summary: 4 Stars
It's an easy speculation to say that without humans, the earth will restore, recleanse, rectify itself. Indeed, in his book The World Without Us, Alan Weisman repeatedly hints to the reader that the world doesn't need us as much as we need it. But Weisman goes beyond the obvious implication and details just how incredibly short-sighted we humans have been in just a brief time on this planet.
Weisman thoroughly stresses home the point that despite our tendencies toward toxicity, life will indeed find a way, whether it be millennia or billennia. There are a whole lot of ideas to take away from this thought experiment, for example the futility of our marvelous infrastructure once we are no longer around to monitor it; what will happen when wonders like the Chunnel, the Panama Canal, our volatile oil refineries and nuclear reactors/repositories as well as our subways have no one to flip the off switch or close the valve? How will the unmeasurable amount of polymers (plastic) dumped in our oceans annually begin to degrade, and what are the hopes of a hungry microbe that evolves the ability to feed on them?
Of the many thought provoking speculations and projections Weisman so meticulously researches and thoughtfully relates, he proposes the irony that the realization of our collective death may just perhaps contribute to the saving of ourselves. Interviewing the organizer of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, and yes it it's a real organization, he postulates that if humans were really serious about curbing overpopulation, thereby eliminating juvenile delinquency among other issues, we might just have an epiphany:
" ...spiritual awakening would replace panic, because a dawning realization that as human life drew to a close, it was improving. There would be more than enough to eat, and resources would again be plentiful, including water. The seas would replenish. Because new housing wouldn't be necessary, so would forests and wetlands.
...Like retired business executives who suddenly find serenity by tending a garden, Knight envisions us spending our remaining time helping rid an increasingly natural world of unsightly and now useless clutter, in pursuit of which we'd once swapped something alive and lovely." (p.243)
As improbable it may be that people would go to such extremes or even somehow suddenly become extinct, Weisman's book is an ambitious and enlightening experiment that brings us closer to acknowledging our impact upon and responsibility to the world, while we're still with it.