Goodreads | The World Without Us

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the world?	1	12/20/2007 03:44PM

Mike rated it:

09/01/07

Read in August, 2007

I began this book, a careful extrapolation of what might happen to the world if humanity up and disappeared, about three weeks ago. I enjoyed it, for many reasons delineated in the positive reviews below and in raves in various press outlets. But a hundred pages in, I got caught up in other things.

I finished it while on the plane rushing Eastward, about three hours after I'd heard that my father had unexpectedly had a heart attack. So forgive this mordant self-indulgence, but I read the b...more I began this book, a careful extrapolation of what might happen to the world if humanity up and disappeared, about three weeks ago. I enjoyed it, for many reasons delineated in the positive reviews below and in raves in various press outlets. But a hundred pages in, I got caught up in other things.

I finished it while on the plane rushing Eastward, about three hours after I'd heard that my father had unexpectedly had a heart attack. So forgive this mordant self-indulgence, but I read the book's very concretely-detailed attention to the devastating footprint of our collective human lives on planet Earth while engaged in far more abstract noodlings about what it would mean to be on a world without this person, or that one.

I have this odd fascination with end-of-the-world plots, doomsday scenarios. At age 17 I read Jonathan Schell's _The Fate of the Earth_ and wrote a slew of essays (in high school and college) on the inevitability of human annihilation; I think I lost my faith in any supernatural dimension at the same time I came to a strange faith in human destructiveness. And, of course, I was also 17, 18, 19--at the peak of my self-destructive capacities, uncertain I had a place in the world, or uneasy in the place I'd been allotted through nature and nurture's respective lotteries. Pissed off or plain pissed for many of those years, I saw in the world (like any good adolescent) nothing but echoes of my own self-loathing and fears. Or maybe that's unfair--maybe end of the world scenarios are ways to step outside one's self.

This won't be wrapping up neatly, by the way. I warned you--it's self-indulgent. No neat conclusions about my self, and no carefully-boxed connections of self, book, world. I'm riffing.

I have continued my appreciations, fictional (Stephen King's _The Stand_ just one of many books sating my apocaphilia) and nonfictional (Richards stand out: Rhodes on prions [meat will kill us all!], Preston on Ebola [viruses will bleed us out!]). After I finished this Weisman book, I picked up Jeff Carlson's sci-fi(ish) thriller _Plague Year_, which wasn't great but hit a spot. (Finished it as the plane taxied in to the airport and I headed out to meet my brother and go to the hospital.)

What I remember about all these books is how they prompted social engagement I might not have otherwise attempted. Schell got me politically engaged in anti-war movements, far beyond the scope of anti-nuke talk. As often, I gave the books to my father--whose appreciation for the works varied (he's no apocaphile), but who appreciated in a more subtle way the effort to imagine how bad things are, how bad we've made things, as tools for helping us to imagine how things might be. I think in talking with my Dad about these books, I slowly learned how to escape my self and that sense of my own ending and instead found ways, through the darkest and most pessimistic of scenarios, to keep pushing on my sense of how to be a good human being in the world.

Weisman, he says to anyone who even thinks this rant has much to do with the book anymore, may be corrosive in his accounting for the destructive force of humanity, but this isn't a hopeless book. To imagine the world without us is to seek to find ways to make sense of our selves in the world.

I passed the book on to my dad, and he seems to be really enjoying it. (He found the Carlson pretty dull.) ...less

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James rated it:

03/01/08

Read in January, 2008

This is a good book.

Not a great book, but a good book.

As a humbling, interesting book about Our World and the incompatibility of our Current Society with Ecology, it belongs on your shelf next to Guns, Germs, and Steel, An Inconvenient Truth, and The Omnivore’s Dilemma. And there is plenty to keep your eyes wide open in horror at our existence’s lack of harmony with the environment. Like the frightening petrochemical monstrosity that is Houston, Texas. Yeehaw!!!

This is a subversive boo...more This is a good book.

Not a great book, but a good book.

As a humbling, interesting book about Our World and the incompatibility of our Current Society with Ecology, it belongs on your shelf next to Guns, Germs, and Steel, An Inconvenient Truth, and The Omnivore’s Dilemma. And there is plenty to keep your eyes wide open in horror at our existence’s lack of harmony with the environment. Like the frightening petrochemical monstrosity that is Houston, Texas. Yeehaw!!!

This is a subversive book in that its thesis is simple, but in that innocent idea to hypothesize what the world would be without human life, Weisman has an intriguing frame for which to explore and assess the magnitude of human’s impact on the planet – an extensive, pervasive presence. Unfortunately, Our Legacy is most likely doomed to be chemicals, metals, genetic tinkering, ecosystem manipulation, farms, cities, industry, nuclear waste, mining, pollution, etc, et al. Interestingly enough, it is the bronze and copper sculptures as well as the radio waves of information that we have beamed into space that will probably be the longest-lasting remnant of our flawed existence.

It is oddly comforting to know that in our absence nature will quickly reclaim our cities, farms, and homes. It is equally alarming to know how much of our byproducts will continue to plague the planet long after our departure.

Weisman is at his worst when he lingers too long describing what would happen to the Panama Canal in our absence (Surprise, it’d stop working, like a lot of things…). He is at his best describing the beautifully, tragically ironic reclamation of the Korean DMZ by endangered fauna.

This book is frustrating when you realize that the only decent thing to do for The Cause would be to go away. It’s not a cause without supporters. The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement and the Church of Euthanasia both have their points. Even our current mode of departure with the expensive mortuary industry leading the way with exotically unnecessary coffins is rife with negative impact on the planet. But don’t bother getting too riled up about environmental destruction because Weisman makes a compelling case for our Doom to be wrought instead by New Technologies.

The creepiest, eeriest, scariest, most resounding part of the book comes when our modern civilization and the pompousness of our overindulged lifestyles is compared to the fall of the Mayan Empire: “Society had evolved too many elites, all demanding exotic baubles…a culture wobbling under the weight of an excess of nobles, all needing quetzal feathers, jade, obsidian, fine chert, custom polychrome, fancy corbelled roofs, and animal furs. Nobility is expensive, nonproductive, and parasitic, siphoning away too much of society’s energy to satisfy its frivolous cravings. Too many heirs wanted thrones, or needed some ritual bloodletting to confirm their stature. So dynastic warfare heightened. As more temples need building, the higher caloric demand on workers requires more food production…Population rises to insure enough food-producers. War itself often increases population – as it did in the Aztec, Incan, and Chinese empires – because rulers require cannon fodder. Stakes rise, trade is disrupted, and population concentrates…There is dwindling investment in long-term crops that maintain diversity. Refugees living behind defensive walls farm only adjacent areas, inviting ecological disaster. Their confidence in leaders who once seemed all knowing, but are obsessed with selfish, short-term goals, declines with the quality of life. People lose faith. Ritual activity ceases. They abandon centers.”

Sound familiar?

Not one to be entirely negative and without Hope, god bless him, Weisman offers compelling data in support of population control and concludes his acknowledgments with, “Without us, Earth will abide and endure; without her, however, we could not even be.”...less

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