According to Bill McKibben, “This is one of the grandest thought experiments of our time, a tremendous feat of imaginative reporting,” and I agree with that characterization, minus the hyperbole. In "The World Without Us," Alan Weisman asks us to “picture a world from which we all suddenly vanished. Tomorrow” (4), whether as a result of an unspeakably efficient virus, a religious rapture, or alien kidnapping. The cause really doesn’t matter, because Weisman’s focus isn’t on us: it’s on the earth we would leave behind, the earth exactly as it is at this moment. “How would the rest of nature respond if it were suddenly relieved of the relentless pressures we heap on it and our fellow organisms? Could nature ever obliterate all our traces? How would it undo our…cities and public works…our plastics and toxic synthetics…our art, our many manifestations of spirit? (4)” While the book is eerie in spots (especially the description of a lone electrician cannibalizing spare parts in a silent, abandoned high rise hotel in Cyprus two years after civil war descended on the country in 1974), it poses a fair question. After all, how do we know just what our effects on the earth really are without answering what the earth would be like without us?

Understand, Weisman isn’t asking from an attitude of “Oh, the whole planet would just be better off!” In fact, as chapter followed chapter, I was more and more impressed by the various situations human beings could not just abandon without the whole earth paying a huge price. One obvious advantage of us sticking around is our efforts to protect and promote threatened and endangered species. Another at least potential upside, is our ability not just to cease the activities that have placed so much stress on our planet but to commence activities that will counteract them—i.e. we have the power now not just to offset our carbon use but to find ways to sink the excess carbon we’ve already spewed into the atmosphere. If we were all to vanish tomorrow, our exhaust-spewing and CFC-emitting and DDT-spraying (still used all over the developing world) would stop, cold-turkey—probably a good thing, yes—but all of the carbon already in the atmosphere would just cycle slowly, slowly through the oceans, through plants, for millions of years before returning to pre-Industrial Revolution levels. Same sort of deal for mercury in the oceans, plastic in landfills, and nuclear waste…

Speaking of which, Weisman actually details what the consequences would be if humans just stepped away from our 441 functioning nuclear power plants, our ICBMs, and temporary nuclear waste storage facilities. “Chernobyl” doesn’t even begin to cover it. Chernobyl’s cesium-137 and strontium-90 have 30-year half-lives (216). Weapons-grade plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,110 years (202). Uranium-235’s is 704 million years. U-238’s (“depleted” uranium) is 4.5 billion (205). The U.S. just began permanent storage of nuclear waste—in 1999, in New Mexico (206). Most is floating around, stored temporarily in holding tanks and waste processing facilities, and without humans to tend to their preservation and burial (cross your fingers for seismic stability), the earth would experience something on the order of at least 441 Chernobyls. Not to mention elevated levels of hydrogen cyanide, dioxins, furans, lead and chromium and mercury (140) from our countless oil refineries and petrochemical plants, two other enterprises that don’t really allow for a clean hasty exit. Thus, if nothing else, this book exposes the LaHaye/Jenkins "Left Behind" series as the worst kind of pulp fiction it is—more concerned with conservative fundamentalist Christian ideology than with the ultimate fate of God’s creation and created.

Weisman does briefly touch on the religious dimensions of his question in a final chapter, entitled “Coda: Our Earth, Our Souls;” however, he mostly ignores the alternative futures and “end-time” scenarios proposed by various religions since they all focus almost exclusively on humankind’s ultimate destiny and not Earth’s. To Weisman, those destinies are inextricably linked.

Weisman is a journalist, his prose reflects it, and for my part, I enjoyed his “facts first” approach. I believe that a true appreciation for the reality of any situation arises more from a knowledge of specific details than broad themes, and every so often, a particular detail in "Without Us" would leap off the page at me, shock and illuminate. For example, Weisman writes, in relation to the lifespan of plastic, “Would geologists millions of years hence find Barbie doll parts embedded in conglomerates formed in seabed depositions? Would they be intact enough to be pieced together like dinosaur bones? (124)” Ugh. Million-year-old Barbie doll fossils? Equally startling was the factoid that after the Battle of Waterloo, farmers were so desperate for fertilizer that the bones of horses and humans alike were ground down and applied to crops. Call me crazy, but the idea that even prim and proper 19th-century Europeans could be driven to semi-cannibalism did more to drive the fear of ballooning populations into me than any table of human caloric needs or UN Population Projections chart.

However, I find myself dissatisfied with "The World Without Us" on two fronts. The first is that, though Weisman travels from South Korea to Hawaii, researches exhaustively, and interviews a veritable army of experts in his attempts to answer how the world would fare without us, the number of women whose views and projections find their way into his book is precisely zero. One, if you count the protagonist of Weisman’s prelude, “A Monkey Koan,” Ana María Santi, who speaks a patois of Quichua and Zápara in what amounts to an anecdote rather than a consultation, and two, if you count Noonkokwa, a Maasai woman married to a naturalist at an ecotourist lodge in Kenya (whose views ARE quoted in the book), who reportedly desires her family life, including number of children, to conform to the Maasai cultural norm. True, Weisman does cite many women in his acknowledgments, but why are their voices not heard in his book? This is especially disappointing to me, considering how by Weisman’s own admission in the acknowledgments, the original idea for the book came from Josie Glausiusz, an editor at Discover Magazine, and a woman. Don’t get me wrong, I’d rather hear exclusively from men if women of comparable expertise cannot be found, but anyone who contends that not enough women occupy high enough niches in the sciences to be cited at least once in a 275-page book that cites so many experts doesn’t have his/her head glued on straight.

Perhaps I wouldn’t mind this so much (there’s nothing wrong with the substance of the book, after all), except in his “Coda: Our Earth, Our Souls,” Weisman proposes limiting “every human female on Earth capable of bearing children to one” as an “intelligent solution” to the problem of squaring increasing human needs with those of a planet not correspondingly growing (272). This to me is so unintelligent as to deserve the designation ‘wishful thinking,’ if not ‘nonsense.’ For starters, who would decide on this measure? Implement it? Enforce it? I’m sure no one wants to see the forced sterilizations such as those inflicted upon American women in the 1930s repeated all over the globe. Not to mention…I don’t know about you, but I’M not going to be the one to tell AIDS-ravaged Africa that it can’t produce as many children in the next few decades as it wants to; right or wrong, I’m not going there.

However, the strongest argument against such a global one-child policy is embedded within Weisman’s book itself. In a chapter entitled “Where Do We Go From Here?” Weisman explores the merits of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT) as well as the transhumanist/posthuman movement which advocates the jettisoning of our physical bodies in favor of immortal existence in a virtual reality created by software. Such moves would, Weisman agrees, decrease humanity’s earthly impact and ease the sorrow and weariness we feel watching our world slowly degrade. “The vision of a world relieved of our burden, with its flora and fauna blossoming wildly and wonderfully in every direction, is initially seductive. Yet it’s quickly followed by a stab of bereavement over the loss of all the wonder than humans have wrought amid our harm and excess. If that most wondrous of all human creations—a child—is never more to roll and play on the green Earth, then what really would be left of us? What of our spirit might be truly immortal?” (244). In the end, I think it is Weisman’s shared affection for both Earth and humanity, and his refusal to give up on either, that make his book so worth reading.

subject matter not the most fun - book club was hoping for something sort of pleasant after reading the handful of books we read where humans cut down all the trees and destroy the earth. I much prefer the lessons from Braiding Sweetgrass - can we strive to live WITH the Earth instead of assuming that the salvation for the planet lies in humans being gone?
gave it a 7/10 back in July but I want to give it a 5 in my memory.
had issues with his representations of indigenous cultures and generalization of "Africa" as a monolith.

What would happen if people suddenly vanished off the face of the earth? How long would it take the world to "recover" from the human virus? In this book, Weisman tries to answer these questions. As he takes us through the process in which our structures, creations and newly invented substances biodegrade over years (often as few as ten or as much as millions plus) it is clear that what will seemingly last forever is plastic.

On a positive note, while it is true that we are bad, bad people who are killing the planet, it is equally true that evolution is surprisingly adaptable and will hopefully be able to create all new creatures who can do things to process and break down the many newly introduced man-made substances. Interesting, well-written and readable. I couldn't put this one down.

A mixed bag. The book is well researched and spans a vast number of scenarios, but that in itself is a bit of a problem, sometimes it seems it only skims the surface, and parts of it I already knew about. It also didn't flow as well as one might hope from a popular science book. However, the Hot Legacy chapter made it well worth reading and the omnipresence and longevity of plastics is truly frightening, if not quite as frightening as the longevity and toxicity of depleted uranium.

I loved this so much that I convinced Jason to read it, too.

My dad lent me this, but I'm having a tough time getting going on it. I'm interested in the subject matter theoretically, but man, I just can't stick with a non-fiction book! I get distracted. I have a short attention span.

Entropy can be poetry.

The chapter about plastics was pretty mind-blowing, otherwise it was pretty "meh".

Outstanding. Equal parts terrifying and hopeful. A grand thought experiment about a world bereft of humans and the natural world's unflinching pulse.