JedFonner.com

Have you ever wished you were the only person on Earth? Maybe while sitting in holiday rush-hour in Tyson’s Corner or when you can’t write a simple book review without a thousand different interruptions? Well, take that and imagine one fewer person. That’s the premise of The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. This book, which was on the NY Times Best Seller List for 14 weeks straight, imagines a planet suddenly devoid of human life. The author explores how the Earth would heal itself and evolve without the pressure of human presence.

Weisman explores many different aspects of a suddenly human-free world. First, he provides some fascinating background on what the world was like before humans arrived. From the time of the dinosaurs until the relatively-recent eras when our early ancestors were spreading out over the globe, he explains how the planet has adapted to the emergence of new creatures, with humans of course being the latest and greatest. The author then moves to the present and describes what would happen to everything we’ve built without anyone around. I was amazed at how quickly New York City would crumble, how forests might quickly spread out across the Great Plains, and what catastrophes might await as nature overtakes our sprawling oil and gas refineries in the South. Weisman really brings to light the power of Mother Nature, the damage we’ve wrecked on her in just a few millennium, and how much of that damage will be around for quite a while. Lastly, the book hypothesizes how our landscapes and the planet would start to self-heal after eons of human-less existence.

I would consider this book to be non-fiction science-fiction, since it is largely a book of hypotheses on what might happen. But Weisman’s hypotheses are based on a large amount of research and numerous interviews with experts across the globe. I wish there was a little more cohesiveness between chapters. Weismann tends to jump between subjects quite abruptly with little to connect the chapters together. But if you treat each chapter as series of loosely-related articles instead of chapters in a novel, you’ll be less annoyed at this lack of continuity. All in all, however, I found The World Without Us to be a fascinating read.

The website, www.worldwithoutus.com/, provides some interesting flash animations of what would happen in a world without us. The book is available on Amazon for around $15.