The World Without Us

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More About This Book

Overview

Time #1 Nonfiction Book of 2007

Entertainment Weekly #1 Nonfiction Book of 2007

Finalist for the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award

Salon Book Awards 2007

Amazon Top 100 Editors’ Picks of 2007 (#4)

Barnes and Noble 10 Best of 2007: Politics and Current Affairs

Kansas City Star’s Top 100 Books of the Year 2007

Mother Jones’ Favorite Books of 2007

South Florida Sun-Sentinel Best Books of the Year 2007

Hudson’s Best Books of 2007

St. Louis Post-Dispatch Best Books of 2007

St. Paul Pioneer Press Best Books of 2007

If human beings disappeared instantaneously from the Earth, what would happen? How would the planet reclaim its surface? What creatures would emerge from the dark and swarm? How would our treasured structures—our tunnels, our bridges, our homes, our monuments—survive the unmitigated impact of a planet without our intervention? In his revelatory, bestselling account, Alan Weisman draws on every field of science to present an environmental assessment like no other, the most affecting portrait yet of humankind's place on this planet.

Finalist for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction

Editorial Reviews

From Barnes & Noble
Starting with the chilling premise of our sudden extinction, Alan Weisman combines science with speculation to take us on an audacious tour of what the planet might be like without us. Drawing upon the expertise of engineers, naturalists, scientists, zoologists, oil refiners, biologists, religious leaders, and others, Weisman weaves an evocative narrative that's like a chilling walk through a haunted house -- we witness the disintegration of homes and cities, watch as species wax and wane. But what a walk it is. Weisman has given us a colorful and endlessly fascinating fantasy that's also a shocking environmental wake-up call.
Janet Maslin
This book's global-scale dismay about humanity's environmental impact is its most important theme. But it's Mr. Weisman's more marginal facts that give The World Without Us so much curiosity value…From the gyre that is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to the flower-growers of Kenya to the Rothamsted Research Archive in Britain, a repository for more than 300,000 soil samples, Mr. Weisman covers a huge amount of terrain. His research is prodigious and impressive.
—The New York Times
More Reviews (1) Fewer Reviews
From The Critics
In his morbidly fascinating nonfiction eco-thriller, The World Without Us, Weisman imagines what would happen if the earth's most invasive species—ourselves—were suddenly and completely wiped out. Writers from Carson to Al Gore have invoked the threat of environmental collapse in an effort to persuade us to change our careless ways. With similar intentions but a more devilish sense of entertainment values, Weisman turns the destruction of our civilization and the subsequent rewilding of the planet into a Hollywood-worthy, slow-motion disaster spectacular and feel-good movie rolled into one…In the end, it's the cold facts and cooler heads that drive Weisman's cautionary message powerfully home. When it comes to mass extinctions, one expert tells him, "the only real prediction you can make is that life will go on. And that it will be interesting." Weisman's gripping fantasy will make most readers hope that at least some of us can stick around long enough to see how it all turns out.
—The New York Times Book Review

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780312427900
  • Publisher: Picador
  • Publication date: 8/5/2008
  • Edition description: Reprint
  • Pages: 432
  • Sales rank: 75,427
  • Product dimensions: 8.14 (w) x 7.78 (h) x 0.74 (d)

Meet the Author

Alan Weisman is an award-winning journalist whose reports have appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Discover, and on NPR, among others. A former contributing editor to the Los Angeles Times Magazine, he is a senior radio producer for Homelands Productions and teaches international journalism at the University of Arizona. His essay "Earth Without People" (Discover magazine, February 2005), on which The World Without Us expands, was selected for Best American Science Writing 2006.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

A Lingering Scent of Eden

You may never have heard of the Bialowieza Puszcza. But if you were raised somewhere in the temperate swathe that crosses much of North America, Japan, Korea, Russia, several former Soviet republics, parts of China, Turkey, and Eastern and Western Europe—including the British Isles—something within you remembers it. If instead you were born to tundra or desert,subtropics or tropics, pampas or savannas, there are still places on Earth kindred to this puszcza to stir your memory, too. Puszcza, an old Polish word, means forest primeval. Straddling the border between Poland and Belarus, the half-million acres of the Bialowieza Puszcza contain Europe’s last remaining fragment of old-growth, lowland wilderness. Think of themisty, brooding forest that loomed behind your eyelids when, as a child, someone read you the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales. Here, ash and linden trees tower nearly 150 feet, their huge canopies shading a moist, tangled understory of hornbeams, ferns, swamp alders and crockery-sized fungi. Oaks, shrouded with half a millennium of moss, grow so immense here that great spotted woodpeckers store spruce cones in their three-inch-deep bark furrows. The air, thick and cool, is draped with silence that parts briefly for a nutcracker’s croak, a pygmy owl’s low whistle, or a wolf’s wail, then returns to stillness.

The fragrance that wafts from eons of accumulated mulch in the forest’s core hearkens to fertility’s very origins. In the Bialowieza, the profusion of life owes much to all that is dead. Almost a quarter of the organic mass aboveground is inassorted stages of decay—more than 50 cubic yards of decomposing trunks and fallen branches on every acre, nourishing thousands of species of mushrooms, lichens, bark beetles, grubs, and microbes that are missing from the orderly, managed woodlands that pass as forests elsewhere.

Together those species stock a sylvan larder that provides for weasels, pine martens, raccoons, badgers, otters, fox, lynx,wolves, roe deer, elk, and eagles. More kinds of life are found here than anywhere else on the continent—yet there are no surrounding mountains or sheltering valleys to form unique niches for endemic species. The Bialowieza Puszcza is simplya relic of what once stretched east to Siberia and west to Ireland.

The existence in Europe of such a legacy of unbroken biological antiquity owes, unsurprisingly, to high privilege. During the 14th century, a Lithuanian duke named Wladysl.aw Jagiello, having successfully allied his grand duchy with the Kingdom of Poland, declared the forest a royal hunting preserve. For centuries, it stayed that way. When the Polish-Lithuanian unionwas finally subsumed by Russia, the Bialowieza became the private domain of the tsars. Although occupying Germans took lumber and slaughtered game during World War I, a pristine core was left intact, which in 1921 became a Polish national park. The timber pillaging resumed briefly under the Soviets, but when the Nazis invaded, a nature fanatic named Hermann Göring decreed the entire preserve off-limits, except by his pleasure.

Following World War II, a reportedly drunken Josef Stalin agreed one evening in Warsaw to let Poland retain two-.fifths of the forest. Little else changed under communist rule, except for construction of some elite hunting dachas—in one of which,Viskuli, an agreement was signed in 1991 dissolving the Soviet Union into free states. Yet, as it turns out, this ancient sanctuary is more threatened under Polish democracy and Belarusian independence than it was during seven centuries of monarchs and dictators. Forestry ministries in both countries tout increased management to preserve the Puszcza’s health. Management, however, often turns out to be a euphemism for culling—and selling—mature hardwoods that otherwise would one day return a windfall of nutrients to the forest.

It is startling to think that all Europe once looked like this Puszcza. To enter it is to realize that most of us were bred to a pale copy of what nature intended. Seeing alders with trunks seven feet wide, or walking through stands of the tallest trees here—gigantic Norway spruce, shaggy as Methuselah—should seem as exotic as the Amazon or Antarctica to someone raised among the comparatively puny, second-growth woodlands found throughout the Northern Hemisphere. Instead, what’s astonishing is how primally familiar it feels. And, on some cellular level, how complete.

Andrzej Bobiec recognized it instantly. As a forestry student in Krakow, he’d been trained to manage forests for maximum productivity, which included removing excess organic litter lest it harbor pests like bark beetles. Then, on a visit here he was stunned to discover 10 times more biodiversity than in any forest he’d ever seen.

It was the only place left with all nine European woodpecker species, because, he realized, some of them only nest in hollow, dying trees. They can’t survive in managed forests, he argued to his forestry professors. “The Bialowieza Puszcza has managed itself perfectly well for millennia.

The husky, bearded young Polish forester became instead a forest ecologist. He was hired by the Polish national park service. Eventually, he was .red for protesting management plans that chipped ever closer to the pristine core of the Puszcza. In various international journals, he blistered official policies that asserted that forests will die without our thoughtful help, or that justified cutting timber in the Bialowieza’s surrounding buffer to reestablish the primeval character of stands. Such convoluted thinking, he accused, was rampant among Europeans who have hardly any memory of forested wilderness.

To keep his own memory connected, for years he daily laced his leather boots and hiked through his beloved Puszcza. Yet although he ferociously defends those parts of this forest still undisturbed by man, Andrzej Bobiec can’t help being seduced by his own human nature.

Alone in the woods, Bobiec enters into communion with fellow Homo sapiens through the ages. A wilderness this pure is a blank slate to record human passage: a record he has learned to read. Charcoal layers in the soil show him where gamesmen onceused fire to clear parts of the forest for browse. Stands of birch and trembling aspen attest to a time when Jagiello’s descendants were distracted from hunting, perhaps by war, long enough for these sun-seeking species to recolonize game clearings. In their shade grow telltale seedlings of the hardwoods that were here before them. Gradually, these will crowd out thebirch and aspen, until it will be as if they were never gone.

Whenever Bobiec happens on an anomalous shrub like hawthorn or on an old apple tree, he knows he’s in the presence of the ghost of a log house long ago devoured by the same microbes that can turn the giant trees here back into soil. Any lone, massive oak he finds growing from a low, clover-covered mound marks a crematorium. Its roots have drawn nourishment from the ashes of Slavic ancestors of today’s Belorusians, who came from the east 900 years ago. On the northwest edge of the forest,Jews from five surrounding shtetls buried their dead. Their sandstone and granite headstones from the 1850s, mossy and tumbled by roots, have already worn so smooth that they’ve begun to resemble the pebbles left by their mourning relatives, who themselves long ago departed.

Andrzej Bobiec passes through a blue-green glade of Scots pine, barely a mile from the Belarusian border. The waning October afternoon is so hushed, he can hear snowflakes alight. Suddenly, there’s a crashing in the underbrush, and a dozen wisent—Bison bonasus, European bison—burst from where they’ve been browsing on young shoots. Steaming and pawing, their huge black eyes glance just long enough for them to do what their own ancestors discovered they must upon encountering one of these deceptively frail bipeds: they flee.

Just 600 wisent remain in the wild, nearly all of them here—or just half, depending on what’s meant by here. An iron curtain bisects this paradise, erected by the Soviets in 1980 along the border to thwart escapees to Poland’s renegade Solidaritymovement. Although wolves dig under it, and roe deer and elk are believed to leap it, the herd of these largest of Europe’smammals the world without us remains divided, and with it, its gene pool—divided and mortally diminished, some zoologists fear. Once, following World War I, bison from zoos were brought here to replenish a species nearly extirpated by hungry soldiers. Now, a remnant of a Cold War threatens them again.

Belarus, which well after communism’s collapse has yet to remove statues of Lenin, also shows no inclination to dismantle the fence, especially as Poland’s border is now the European Union’s. Although just 14 kilometers separate the two countries’ park headquarters, to see the Belovezhskaya Pushcha, as it is called in Belorusian, a foreign visitor must drive 100 miles south, take a train across the border to the city of Brest, submit to pointless interrogation, and hire a car to drive back north. Andrzej Bobiec’s Belorusian counterpart and fellow activist, Heorhi Kazulka, is a pale, sallow invertebrate biologist and former deputy director of Belarus’s side of the primeval forest. He was also .red by his own country’s park service, for challenging one of the latest park additions—a sawmill. He cannot risk being seen with Westerners. Inside the Brezhnev-era tenement where he lives at the forest’s edge, he apologetically offers visitors tea and discusses his dream of an international peace park where bison and moose would roam and breed freely.

The Pushcha’s colossal trees are the same as those in Poland; the same buttercups, lichens, and enormous oak leaves; the same circling white-tailed eagles, heedless of the razor-wire barrier below. In fact, on both sides, the forest is actually growing, as peasant populations leave shrinking villages for cities. In this moist climate, birch and aspen quickly invade their fallow potato fields; within just two decades, farmland gives way to woodland. Under the canopy of the pioneering trees, oak, maple, linden, elm, and spruce regenerate. Given 500 years without people, a true forest could return.

The thought of rural Europe reverting one day to original forest is heartening. But unless the last humans remember to first remove Belarus’s iron curtain, its bison may wither away with them.

Excerpted from The World Without Us. By Alan Weisman

Copyright © 2007 by Alan Weisman.

Published in the United States by St. Martin’s Press

All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in any manner or medium must be secured from the publisher.

Customer Reviews
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  • Anonymous

    Posted December 21, 2007

    Astounding read!

    This imaginative depiction of the world without human beings is truly astounding! not only do we receive brief history of man, but also what history would be like without man. one of the most enthralling and thought provoking books I have ever read. I truly could not put it down. The imagery used creates a world never thought of before. My respect for nature has always been high, but Weisman opened my eyes to things I had never imagined or thought possible. truly remarkable, a must read!

    3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted August 1, 2007

    If only we humans were not born - blah, blah

    After reading some of the reviews... It was with great expectations I read this book. What a disappointment. It comes across as we humans have so poisoned mother earth we don't deserve to be here and after we are gone nature will reclaim all and make it pure again. The Garden of Eden will re-emerge and all harmony will return when man is gone. Except for maybe some of the poisons we created like spent nuclear fuel. On but nature will even make that pure again without our meddling even being involved. If you hate the human animal you will love this book. If you celebrate man's creations appreciate the environments we have improved and marvel at what we have achieved as a species save your money on this one.

    2 out of 4 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted June 12, 2009

    The World Without Us... seems to be a better place.

    The World Without Us is an excellent book that grasps the readers mind. It shows the earth today in a journey to return to its former self. The impact of humans on earth is great topic and this book was a real eye opener. I found it to be very detailed and it contained solid facts that were backed up by great research. I found it hard to understand at some point where Mr.Weisman deviates from the topic. The topics on there own are very good minus the fact that it feels very unorganized. There is no general thesis but it provides interesting points. once I got into the book the facts and images came swirling out. Overall it is a great book that I highly recommend to anyone interested in the world. I give this book 3.5 uninhabited earths out of 5.

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted November 22, 2008

    I Also Recommend:

    We Will Not Be Missed

    If you happen to be the last surviving human, after we do ourselves in, Alan Wiseman's book can serve as an interesting travel guide. I found his research authoritative and compelling. He introduced me to many fascinating places on our planet that will return to their primal state as havens teaming with life in the Post Human world. How about taking up residence in Chernobyl one day. This book makes a strong case that the planet is not in peril, it's just waiting for us to go!

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted March 10, 2008

    Earth after Life.

    I thought that this book was very well written. The author wrote very well in specific detail about many of the things that humans have impacted on the earth such as animals, the environment, and many more. He discusses what would happen to the world if humans were to suddenly disappear and what impact we would leave on the world such as heavy metals in the soil, nuclear waste and more. It was a very good book and i encourage others to read this book.

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted March 6, 2008

    Our impact

    The synopsis says: A penetrating take on how our planet would respond without the relentless pressure of the human presence. Everyone focuses on the overt theme...what happens if we all should disappear suddenly. Weisman's research is thorough and fascinating, his writing concise and illustrative. BUT by illustrating what happens to our world AFTER we have disappeared, Weisman clearly and devastatingly outlines just how negative human impact has been on the earth. In this, the book is one of the most persuasive tomes on the environment and environmentalism I've yet to read. It's a short leap, in my mind, from our current predicament to the potential solution proposed in the last few pages. Sadly, I think humans won't be disciplined enough to stick to the recommendation of one woman - one child.

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted May 27, 2007

    A reviewer

    Alan Weisman's book, The World Without Us, grabbed my attention from the first page and didn't let me put it down until I reached the very last page. Even the acknowledgement section is interesting and shouldn¿t be passed up. When I first heard about this book (from a friend who passed along an advance reader copy) I was skeptical that it would be a cheap trick sort of book - with a catchy premise and the rest just fluff. But I was pleasantly surprised to find that this book is well researched, well written and full of data, history and insight. Any one who works with data knows that to predict the future requires a lot of data points from the past that one can extrapolate forward logically. So to understand what would happen to the Earth and its various flora and fauna, cities, farms and oceans if people would cease to exist, we first should look around to see what has already happened in places, which, for various reasons, have been abandoned by humankind. The visions and conclusions the author leads us to are both spirit lifting and unsettling. Spirit-lifting as we see that nature finds ways time and again to come back or to re-invent herself no matter what horror we may leave her with. And unsettling in that the longer humans go on with unchecked population growth, resource devastation and wars, the harder it is to believe that the world could recover back to something resembling our romantic notions of what earth should look like. I highly recommend this book and hope it becomes broadly read.

    1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted July 30, 2007

    A tremendously thought provoking book

    To be honest, before I purchased this book, I thought it would be a more step by step analysis of how long it would take for structures to fall apart and details such as how many pets would die within our vacant houses, etc. The book has a much more vast approach detailing all types of environments, species and human artifacts. It is more philosophical, fact filled and beautiful than I expected. The author does illuminate how subways, roads ,and houses will fare along with how nature will respond to our absence. That said, the chapters on plastics, toxins and nuclear waste were very disturbing. I've just finished reading this powerful work and am quite depressed regarding our past and present activities. Mr. Wiseman however ends with a positive note and as he is obviously more knowledgeable than myself, I'll rely on his prognosis. If you are at all interested in learning about human impact upon the earth and its creatures, you will not be disappointed.

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted May 18, 2010

    more from this reviewer

    Scary

    I don't know what is worse, learning how we have changed the planet, or how long it would take it to change back after we are gone. Believe what you will, but be certain, this world will be a very different place when we leave it compared to the way we found it.

    0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted July 30, 2009

    more from this reviewer

    I Also Recommend:

    Very informative and interesting

    This book fantasizes about a world without humans and takes a look at our lasting legacy while at the same time informing the reader of just how much we negatively effect the world with our day-to-day activities. Extremely engaging.

    0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted April 26, 2009

    Great book

    I had to read a book concerning climate change and the effects of it on the earth for a class in school. This book clearly depicts our Earth and the effect that we have on it. I highly recommend it to anyone who is remotely interested in this topic. It is truly eye-opening.

    0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted November 2, 2008

    more from this reviewer

    I Also Recommend:

    interesting, yet disturbing

    an interesting concept - what will physically happen to the planet when humans are gone? what will endure? what will crumble? what will thrive? some fascinating things, yet troubling to see how much damage the human race causes to everything else that lives on the planet. well researched, although it gets a little over technical at times. not for the faint of heart!

    0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted August 10, 2008

    LISTEN to this book

    I agree with the previous comments that this was a fascinating book. It appears to be based on sound research and science. It is also a great book for listening. The author's style of writing lends itself well to the audio format, and the reader is a good match for the material. I came to an even greater appreciation of our wondrous natural environments from listening to the book. I could just feel the beauty of the locales the author takes the listener to. I would have rated the book outstanding except that I thought some of the transitions between topics were a bit awkward. I don't believe the author sees humans as evil, just as fallible and right now on the wrong path. He uses the device of a 'world without us' to help set us on a saner course. Try the audio version--you'll enjoy it.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted June 7, 2008

    Must Have!!

    This book is fiction based on fact but that does not stop us from denying that this book definately explains why humans are so detrimental to the environment. It makes the reader ponder if leaving their lights on or water running still has no impact on anyone but their bills. All doubters about the climate concern must read this book but the facts are undenyable.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted April 16, 2008

    An INTERESTING science book? Is it possible?

    YES! Hey, I have no scientific or academic credentials, and this is not at ALL the kind of thing I'd normally read. But the concept intrigued me and I have to say, I'm VERY glad I bought it. The book never bored me and it never floored me. It was, indeed, an interesting read. Mr. Weisman entertains and educates but never intimidates.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted February 19, 2008

    A reviewer

    really interesting, well-written book on an original topic

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  • Anonymous

    Posted March 12, 2008

    Magnificent book!

    I have read other environmental books, but this has to be the most interesting book I have ever read. It describes the scenario of a world without humans, as the title says! And honestly, I do believe that a world without humans would be an interesting sight and a very beautiful scene. You must buy this book!

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  • Anonymous

    Posted January 7, 2008

    A reviewer

    This book has a few sections that drag, but overall is facinating. It is amazning to think of how quickly our very exsistence could be erased by the natural order we currently dominate.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted November 22, 2007

    More Than Fascinating

    I am a 68 year old investment advisor with no background in earth sciences etc. I enjoy reading and usually gravitate to popular genre of novels writen for the non-literary masses. This is the most fascinating book I have ever read. Probably the most mind-opening reading experience of my life. It was essential to have computer search engines available which I used close to 100 times. I cannot recommend this book too highly.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted August 18, 2007

    Rachel Carson redux

    This has to be the most convincing contemporary book about the environment since the 1960's. It's frightening yet somehow beautiful. We have a LOT to think about as human beings.

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