by By Alan Weisman
Picador Books, St. Martin’s Books, 2008
Written by award-winning science journalist Alan Weisman, The World Without Us is an imaginative blend of science and fiction. One early reviewer dubbed it “an audacious intellectual adventure.” Anyone who reads this book in the usual sequence, from beginning to end, might be suspicious of its scientific validity. I recommend reading the Acknowledgments at the end of the book first. The amazing array of people and sites Weisman visited throughout the world is convincing evidence of the audacious journalism and sound science behind his remarkable adventure
Weisman’s thesis is simple. Most of us, he claims, have an “obstinate reluctance” to believe that our world could be headed toward a grim and catastrophic end. He suggests that we try to “picture a world from which we all suddenly vanish. Tomorrow.” Then he takes us on a journey through time to see what would happen. Will the planet be better off? Or, he asks, “is it possible that the world without us would miss us?”
The book is divided into five parts, with 19 chapters. Chapter one is a visit to a primeval forest in Poland – a temperate Eden – for a glimpse of the world before we arrived. Then, abruptly, in a chapter titled “The City Without Us,” Weisman imagines a mind-boggling scenario where humans have disappeared from New York City. From then on you’ll be hooked for the next 300 pages.
In the next few chapters, Weisman takes us to unfamiliar landscapes in present-day Africa and even more unfamiliar landscapes in the Americas prior to the arrival of Homo sapiens. A scientist he interviews claims that, if we had never come here, “North America would have three times as many animals [weighing] over one ton as Africa does today.” The reasoning behind this claim becomes a key piece in the argument Weisman weaves for his predictions of what will happen when we “vanish.”
Much of Part Two is almost overwhelming with details and storylines. We’re shown: how abandoned urban centers fall apart, the likely fate of elaborate underground cities in Turkey, the global impact of discarded plastic debris and tires, the ten-million square mile “Gyre” – a gyrating dump in the middle of the Pacific Ocean where much of the world’s debris retires.
Readers of Northern Woodlands will be especially interested in the chapter, “The World Without Farms.” Here, Weisman traces the historical impacts on the land as humans spread across the North American landscape. He then asks what might happen without us: “Would those lands return to their former, pre-agro-pastoral state? Do we even know what that was?” Here he draws on New Englanders William Cronon and David Foster for his past forest explorations.
Part Three explores the fates of the ancient and modern “Wonders of the World,” (such as the Panama Canal), the likely impacts of war and nuclear power on the future, wildlife extinctions, and the disappearance of the Mayan civilization. Here he cites archaeologist Arthur Demarest: “The balance between ecology and society is exquisitely delicate. If something throws that off, it can all end.”
The use of Demarest’s statement just before his concluding chapters in Part Four – some 50 rather dark and ominous pages – revealed for me Weisman’s hidden agenda in this finely crafted book. As he takes us around the world in a fascinating search for what would happen if we disappeared, he has subtly made us take a deeper look into what is happening as a result of the myriad environmental threats we too often ignore or deny: global warming, air and water pollution, soil degradation, over-population, over-consumption, deforestation, genetic manipulation, and on and on. Rather than berate us over all the damage we’ve wrought on the planet, he simply gives us a glimpse into the future if we continue on our present path. And, most importantly, he reminds us vividly of what’s at stake.