Alan Weisman - The World Without UsOnce every few years we find a book that is so astounding that we have an uncontrollable need to share it with the world.  These books are typically great works of literature where the reader often considers putting their entire life on hold until the story is completely told, and leaves us speechless for a short time after.  I believe that Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us is one of these books.

Before getting into the details, though, I would like to say that this is NOT a paid review.  After reading this book at the behest of a friend of mine, I think it’s something that everyone should read.  The conversations that have been sparked as a result of this novel have left my brain thirsty for more, and I’d welcome an international audience :P
With all the questions that surround us on a daily basis, there is one that many of us have considered as we stop to reflect on the large buildings that reach high into the skies, and the pollution that we have both buried in the ground and burned into the atmosphere; What if we didn’t exist anymore?

Much like the other eternal question, “Where did we come from?”, we know that we can never truly say how the world would change if we were not present.  Thinking of the question, let alone answering it, requires a magnificent suspension of the vanity that characterizes most humans.  But as we hear more about the effect we play on the world’s biosphere with our wasteful ways, this question is asked by more people.

Alan Weisman, an author, journalist, radio producer and professor, has asked this seditious question in his new book, The World Without Us.  Forcing us to acknowledge the effects we’ve all had on the planet, he engages our imagination in what could have been or might have been, or even what might still be yet to come.  Rather than ask how we humans will go about fixing the mess we’ve made over the last few thousand years, he simply takes us out of the equation and allows us to think about the possibilities.

Using some of the most up-to-date science, Weisman asks the quesions and then explores the answers with some of the world’s greatest scientists.  What would happen to animals and stocks without agriculture?  What would happen to the cities?  Would another species see their opportunity to conquer the world?  How long would our humanly constructs last?  Would the Pyramids stand against time better than the city of Tokyo?

Using some of the last areas of the planet devoid of humans, he takes us to the primeval forests bordering Poland and Belarus to the Kenyan heights.  He tells us about a four-storey hotel in the war-torn Cipriot town of Varosha and the trees that are growing between the cracks in the asphalt, the buildings literally falling apart beside him.

His description of just how quickly nature woud dismantle Manhattan, returning it to the wildlife after five hundred years of colonial rule, is incredibly well written and makes us wonder just how long some of the world’s most beautiful cities could survive without human intervention.  Without us to heat and repair our buildings, our tall structures of steel and glass would begin to decay in just a few years.  Subways and many of our roads would be destroyed within a decade.  Our strongest bridges, while able to withstand incredible forces of nature, would begin to fail after just a few centuries.

Interestingly enough, though, our plastics will long outlive even the most advanced of city structures.  In the half-century since the large-scale manufacture of plastics started, more than one billion tons of the stuff has been produced and there is still no real plan for recycling this material.  All but a tiny, incinerated portion of it still exists, dumped somewhere in the environment with a large quantity going out to the ocean.  Plastics are immune to decay from bacteria and sunlight, making it our immortal polymer.

Weisman reports that a quarter trillion pounds of plastic is produced every year, and quite a bit shows up on beaches around the world, carried by tides, and eaten by sea creatures that later die from intestinal problems.  A 1998 study showed that there was six times as much plastic in the ocean as plankton by weight on the surface of a thousand-mile crossing of the North Pacific Gyre.  He also cites a study nearly four months later near the mouths of creeks in Los Angeles feeding into the Pacific Ocean that showed 600 times as much plastic as plankton.  With our ever-disposable society throwing more away, this number is constantly on the rise.

Currently there are over 6.1 billion humans on the globe and, if our reproductive rates continue on their current trend, the world’s population will reach 9 billion by the middle of this century.  Nine billion is a number that most experts believe is just too large for the world to handle.  Offering a rather draconian thought on the situation, if every human female on Earth were limited to bearing one single child, the human population would drop to about 1.6 billion in time for the start of the 22nd century.  That’s not to say that it’s women’s fault for the number of people on the planet, as it takes two to tango, but it does give us something to think about.

So … what then?

Weisman’s final thoughts are poignant.  Just as light keeps moving, so does human thought.  We’ve been transmitting our thoughts in the form of television and music for a hundred years, and much of this has bled off into space.  Maybe, he posits, that will be the human legacy that nature can never erase.  Once we are gone, maybe our thoughts or even our memories will keep bouncing around the universe, eventually finding their way back to the post-human Earth we betrayed and abandoned.

Seriously … if you only read one book in the next 10 years, make it this one.