The World Without Us

If ever a book makes you want to root for the end of humankind on earth, it is Alan Weisman's The World Without Us. Man, by the end of reading this last night I was depressed and definitely on Team Nature.

Billed as a grand "thought experiment", the book explores what would happen to Earth (and thus all contained in it) if mankind were to be wiped out. Kaput. Weisman begins by helping us understand what the world was like before we evolved into mass-migrating and weapon using hunters. One word: megafauna. My favorite part of any book is when the author starts talking about 13,000 pound ground sloths and glyptodonts "resembling armor-plated Volkswagens, with tails that ended in spiked maces."

The book presents a really-well written and devastating portrait of the collateral damage that comes with an evolving and ever more technologically advancing human race: extinctions, extreme pollution (literally an ocean full of plastic), eroding ozone layers and melting ice caps.

On that feel good note, Weisman turns his attention to what would happen to all aspects of life on Earth if we were no longer there to bug it. What would happen to the cities, the farms, the nature reserves, the nuclear power plants? What would the world look like without war (he visits the DMZ in between North and South Korea for an idea of how nature would fill in the spaces) or electricity (what would happen to those nuclear reactors)? Would we basically just leave the earth with a legacy of non-destroyable plastic and rubber tires?

Well, it's not all hopeless, I guess. But this book was massively thought-provoking, however much it might have depressed me. I definitely recommend it.

My Favorite Passage:
"I'm so amazed," he says, "by the ability of life to hang on to anything. Given the opportunity, it goes everywhere. A species as creative and arguably intelligent as our own should somehow find a way to achieve a balance. We have a lot to learn, obviously. But I haven't given up on us." At his feet, thousands of tiny, trembling shells are being resuscitated by hermit crabs. "Even if we don't: if the planet can recover from the Permian [age], it can recover from the human."

The lesson of every extinction, says the Smithsonian's Doug Erwin, is that we can't predict what the world will be 5 million years later by looking at the survivors. "There will be plenty of surprises. Let's face it: who would've predicted the existence of turtles? Would would ever have imagined that an organism would essentially turn itself inside out, pulling its shoulder girdle inside its ribs to form a carapace? If turtles didn't exist, no vertebrate biologist would've suggested that anything would do that: he'd have been laughed out of town. The only real prediction you can make is that life will go on. And that it will be interesting."