The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

When I first heard about this book I didn’t particularly want to read it. I took the premise to be that humans are inherently (if unintentionally) destructive and self-serving and that the world would be infinitely better without us. This is an attitude that rubs me wrong on many levels, not because I don’t think humans have a harmful impact on the environment (I’m pretty sure we do) but because I don’t think it’s a constructive attitude, and because I think the world is far too complex a place for us to make sweeping generalizations without qualification.

But a discussion with the author on Science Friday on NPR a little while back piqued my curiosity, because the book is the result of a rather interesting thought experiment. You can’t question the assertion that humans have impacted the earth—our structures and systems and agricultural endeavors cover an awful lot of land. And most of these things require occasional-to-constant upkeep. So what would happen to everything we’ve put on the earth if we were to suddenly disappear? A lot of us have played this game before—we look at the ruins of past civilizations and try to imagine what some archaeologist thousands of years in the future would make of our own. Weisman’s game is just the extreme version. If all humans were to suddenly disappear from the face of the earth, what would become of everything that we have created for better or worse? How long would it take nature to reclaim what we have built up or torn down or tamed? What would stay around, and for how long? How might other life forms thrive or perish or change and adapt in our absence?

The process of exploring these questions leads to some interesting, sometimes scary, sometimes hopeful, observations. New York City, for instance, requires almost constant pumping to keep from flooding, and the waters would take over quickly if no humans were left to keep the pumps running. Cats, it turns out, are bad for the environment (or at least the bird population), and dogs are not and would probably not do well in our absence. Plastic never really breaks down completely and there is a huge, unintended junkyard in the middle of the ocean where all our plastic bottles and bags and bits and pieces gradually make their way. Nuclear meltdowns, like Chernobyl, have particularly scary effects, and yet the wildlife around Chernobyl, while changed, seems to be adapting and even flourishing.

I did take some issue with the writing. The book was very carefully divided into chapters within sections, but I was never able to figure out what differentiated one section from the next, and even the chapters were sometimes only loosely organized around a theme. Weisman jumped from location to location, and topic to topic, so that I felt like I was reading a string of mini-essays rather than a well-formed narrative. Although I enjoyed the read for the most part, the writing made me a little impatient at the beginning and the end, and is probably my biggest complaint with the book.

But The World Without Us made me think, and I learned some things I didn’t know, and those are never bad things.