You know how some books change the way you think about things? This was one of those books.

Amazing research on how the world would survive/thrive without humans on it, and what of our achievements would last. Wonderfully written, so it was hard to put down.

Everyone should read this book.

A little more shallow but way more interesting and wide-ranging than I expected. Depressing, though. Not sure I've ever spent so much time seriously considering the ethics and obvious benefits of murdering everybody. As if I weren't misanthropic enough to begin with.

This reads very much like John Krakauer, on the environment--in the best possible way. While it's undoubtedly alarming, Weisman has the skill and foresight to keep it from being alarmist. It's not a cautionary tale, but rather a thought experiment with some keen observations along the way. As with Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven, you're left to draw your own conclusions...but it would be very difficult to conclude that humans can continue our current relationship with the planet indefinitely. This seems like a great book to give to nay-sayers of environmental collapse. For those of use who are already convinced, it provides a variety of reasons to dig deeper (the chapters on plastic and nuclear energy are particularly terrifying). Read it.

I really found the material in the book fascinating (though very depressing ... how badly we are ruining the earth). On the other hand, I found the organization poor which made sitting down and reading the book difficult. The chapters did not seem to flow well together and each chapter was often confusing in its organization, too, especially in the beginning very long chapters.

I've heard about this book for years. I'm glad I finally took the time to read it. There's a lot of fascinating speculation about how the world might change if we were to leave. It really drives home just how much we've scarred our home planet. Weisman's writing is at times a bit long-winded and he probably would have benefitted from tighter editing. Still, even 15 years after it was initially published, this book is well worth reading.

This thought-experiment exploration of the environmental damage humans have inflicted on the natural world (and ourselves) makes for some bleak reading. The easy conclusion is that all life except us, our domestic animals, and a few parasites would be better off in a world without us, but Weisman manages to balance the book so that paradoxically at its core is a message of hope -- if we were to disappear, life can and will adapt to the toxins and pollution we've left behind, and Earth will recover.

What remains is the stark, implicit question: are we intelligent enough to make choices so that Earth can recover even while we're still here, or are we truly a plague species doomed to follow the same path of every other animal that exceeds its resources?

An interesting and at times difficult read. As someone with an inadequate scientific education, I was able to understand and follow his narrative - perhaps not as critically as it requires - but I wasn’t drowning in jargon. He writes sensibly enough. It’s an interesting thought experiment and I spent swaths of the book imaging the world he presented. Some of it glorious but most of it depressing (Houston, Texas: land of my birth and upbringing most of all! The Great Pacific Garbage Patch! American imperialism, too). There’s a small, hopeful(?!) snippet - pp 239-40 - claiming coronaviruses won’t kill us all nor is it worth the trouble to weaponize them! Yay? Most interesting to me is the notion that the one human artifact that will live on the longest is radio waves sent into space...

RTF