The World Without Us

#162
Title: The World Without Us
Author: Alan Weisman
Publisher: Libri
Year: 2007
324 pages

Weisman's enjoyable and hard-to classify thought experiment takes as its starting point the question, what would happen to the world if all humans were to disappear suddenly, simultaneously, and not cataclysmically? Weisman attempts to answer this from many perspectives in relation to architecture, nuclear waste, animal life, and global warming, to name a few. He musters support from a variety of fields and includes both data and interviews in his exploration. The intent of the fantasy, of course, is to suggest that there are matters of pollution, resource exploitation, and inequity of which we could be more aware and which could spur proactive behavior. Other than a few editing errors (primarily transpositions), Weisman is easy to follow and strikes a pleasant authorial tone. I'd have liked a section on future geological change, continental drift, and the effect of volcanic action, but perhaps that is for Simon Winchester to write instead.