Ewww creepy - the amoeba and bacteria bit makes me think of it as a living garbage island!

God bless wikipedia. That's picture of the dead baby chick is so sad though :(

The condition of the gyre is something horrible, and you can find out a lot more by reading up on your neighborhood friendly wikipedia! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacif... :D

It has been a while since I read it but apparently something with water currents causes a GIANT floating cesspool to form of the garbage that gets dumped into the ocean made up mostly non-biodegradable plastic. It is referred to as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and is twice the size of Texas (it is a hard image to get out of my head)!!!! The author is hoping that sometime way in the future some amoeba or bacteria will evolve to digest plastic.

Rachel, can you elaborate? That huge floating garbage pile sounds a bit bizarre!

I REALLY loved this book. He touched on so many interesting issues and I really learned a lot. How about that huge floating garbage pile in the middle of the ocean?!?! Yikes!

Definitely looking forward to this.

The one let-down I've heard about it from reading a review which mentioned that it lacks in any pictures? (At least in the Australian edition) This seems a shame, as even rudimentary photographs or projected CG images could have been great catalysts to better imagining what Weisman envisions.

But regardless, I still am very excited to read!

I thought WWU was brilliant, also. For me some of the most interesting parts veered away from the narrow "how long will the stuff we built last after we leave" question and explored, broadly, the question of human impact on the planet (and outer space, too). I was fascinated by the megafauna extinction, too, but I was particularly saddened by the description of the passenger pigeon's extinction. And WWU inspires a passion for some of the remaining wonders, human-built and natural, of the world, like the salt caves of Turkey and the Great Forest of Poland.

See my profile for a longer review.

My wife is reading this now. I hope to get to it soon.

I've always regarded the History Channel as the Hitler Channel, but lately it has been the Doom Channel. "Crude," and "How the Earth Was Made" were on back to back the other night, and I stayed up late to watch both because I couldn't turn it off. All kinds of mass extinctions happening. Both shows were really good. Crude did not beat around the bush like I expected, and I appreciated that. The basic message was we're screwed with crude. And How the Earth Was Made I could watch several more times easy.

Thanks for the book recommendations, Shannon. I will check them out.

I don't think we get the History Channel in Toronto, so I haven't seen that show. But the thing that scares me most in life, and has done for some time now, is the idea that all our crap, all our tvs and computers and toasters and cars and plastic wrap and Tupperware and pens etc., will be here pretty much forever. The idea of these things not only never biodegrading and composting, but also leaching toxins into the soil and water and getting into the stomachs of many organisms, scares me shitless. I'd like to leave as light a footprint as I can, but it's pretty hard. Still, the idea of replacing electronics etc. just because it's come out in a new colour or whatever is just silly.

And on that note, I recommend Giles Slade's Made to Break: a History of Obsolescence in America, which is a fascinating study (and very well-written) of how our consumer society started and about Planned Obsolescence etc. In short: blame GM!! Seriously though, it goes well alongside George Monbiot's Heat, which is another must-read.

Didn't you find "Life After People" a little boring after having read The World Without Us? It was interesting to see Chernobyl, but everything else was just "eh". I couldn't believe they missed out on plastics though. You're right.

I've noticed that the History Channel has been having tons of post-apocalyptic stuff lately: mega disasters, the world ending in 2012, etc. I could eat it all up with a spoon. I don't know why it so very fascinating to see how we might all go down, but it is.

Just finished this book, and I need a few days more to digest everything. There is a LOT of information here. NY inundated with water very quickly. Cats will be fine, dogs not so much. Birds are up against it. Camels and horses originate from the Americas. Mega fauna - maga cool. 20 foot giant sloths! Wouldn't that be something to see? Plastic - really bad shit. Somehow The History Channel's Life After People left out plastic. How do you miss that?

I LOVED that book! I learnt so much from it, it's full of interesting facts and history. It just goes to show that, in order to understand where we are now and where we're headed, we really have to understand where we came from.

Ben, I loved that chapter too. I had no idea all those animals existed on those continents. I also loved reading about the underground cities in Turkey. The Africa chapter was eye-opening as well, and the section about the no-go zone between North and South Korea.

The World Without Us is how I found this group. What a great book! I agree that it's much more than speculation, Amy. I especially like the chapter "The Lost Menagerie" about the megafaunal genocide (author's term) in the Americas.

Also, cool group!

Still waiting to get it from the library. :(

I know we all love fiction apocalypse-type books, but has anyone read The World Without Us other than me?

I heard about it on NPR in September and immediately had to go out and buy it. I've never had a work of non-fiction activate my imagination in so many ways: dense Hansel & Gretel forests, roaming megafauna, organisms that learned to digest organic matter over time, lost cities, underground caverns ... I absolutely love this book because it's so much more than post-apocalyptic speculation.