The World Without Us
By Alan Weisman
320 pages
$24.95
ISBN 0-312-34729-4
B+
The World Without Us generated buzz when it catapulted itself to the bestseller list in the summer of 2007. In it, author Alan Weisman -- a veteran journalist and really, really good science writer -- describes what would happen to the Earth were all 6.5 billion human beings to be plucked from it overnight. Because we would vanish in a single day, we would neither kill off any more species nor inflict any more damage to the natural world.
Most reviewers found Weisman's vision hopeful, but the bottom line of
World Without Us is that the planet would be far better off without us. It would return to an Eden-like state of unrivaled beauty and wonder until the sun consumes it more than 5 billion years from now.
End-of-the-world movies are all the rage now in the culture of the masses: More than 450 people are waiting to borrow one of the 60 copies of "I Am Legend" available through Douglas County Libraries.
People intrigued by the scene of Hollywood consumed by multiple twisters in "The Day After Tomorrow" or by images of New York City partially submerged in films such as "A.I. Artificial Intelligence" will find tempting poetry in Weisman's descriptions of the planet healing itself after our untimely, or timely, disappearance: New York subways flooding; coyotes returning to Central Park; forests growing in place of suburbs -- with stainless steel cookware and aluminum dishwasher parts at the foot of trees; the Americas reuniting when a Panama Canal yields without human attention; cockroaches perishing in unheated cities but feral housecats demonstrating immense staying power; human head and body lice becoming extinct; 300 years felling bridges, toppling dams.
Always the great equalizers: Water, the absence of humanity to care for all things human.
What would endure the longest or remain indefinitely as evidence of our existence is the great irony. In 7.2 million years, Mount Rushmore would still be there, barring an asteroid crashing into it or violent earthquake. Toxic manmade chemical compounds -- still intact although likely buried. Radio and TV broadcasts: forever traveling outward, diluted.
Weisman offers more than great writing. His exhaustive research includes interviews with sources such as structural engineers, biologists, atmospheric scientists, art conservators, zoologists, astrophysicists and paleontologists.
The book is weakened occasionally when Weisman gives in to temptations and tries to tackle subjective issues such as American foreign policy during construction of the Panama Canal, and when, toward the end, Weisman stumbles through what seems intended as suggestions for change; he serves up a mishmash of thought on religion, population control, groups such as Earth First! and the ideas of people who think we should venture to other planets.
He seems to be backing down, to be proposing that we could head off our demise when his premise seemed to be that if we were not plucked off the Earth tomorrow, all bets were off.
And how much nicer to let the coyotes have Central Park and watch cities such as Houston, built in river deltas, simply wash away.
Jeanie Straub
Reference Librarian, Douglas County Libraries: Parker Library
jstraub@dclibraries.org
DouglasCountyLibraries.org