The release date for the English version of 'The World Without Us' by
Alan Weisman is Jul 2007. If you enjoy this novel, it is available for buy as a paperback from Barnes & Noble or Indigo, as an ebook on the Amazon Kindle store, or as an audiobook on Audible.
A fascinating, page-turning exploration of Earth after humans
Alan Weisman takes a completely novel method to discussing the effects of people on the environment in The World Without Us. He invites us to imagine our Earth in the absence of humans. Weisman explains in this expansive story how our vast infrastructure would crumble and eventually disappear without humans; what commonplace objects might become fossils; how copper pipes and wiring would be reduced to mere seams of reddish rock; why some of our oldest buildings may be the last examples of architecture still standing; and how plastic, bronze sculpture, radio waves, and some man-made molecules might be our most enduring contributions to the cosmos.
The World Without Us describes how flooding in New York's subway system will begin to undermine the city's foundations only days after people vanish and how asphalt jungles would give way to actual ones as the world's cities collapse. It tells the many ways that chemically treated and organic farms would return to the wild, how billions more birds would thrive, and how, in the absence of humans, cockroaches in cold cities would die. Weisman depicts what the planet might look like today if it weren't for humans by drawing on the knowledge of engineers, atmospheric scientists, art conservators, zoologists, oil refiners, marine biologists, astrophysicists, and religious leaders like the Dalai Lama and rabbis. Paleontologists, on the other hand, describe a prehuman world inhabited by megafauna like giant sloths that stood taller than mammoths.
Weisman demonstrates Earth's amazing ability to repair itself by taking us to areas that are already human-free, such as the Korean DMZ, Chernobyl, and the last remaining piece of ancient European woodland. Weisman's story finally moves toward a radical but convincing solution that doesn't rely on our mortality as he demonstrates which human destructions are irreversible and which instances of our greatest art and culture would remain longest. It is the epitome of narrative nonfiction, delving deeply into human affects on the world in a manner that no other book has done by providing an enticing idea with both gravitas and a very readable touch.