The World Without Us

As a fan of post-apocalyptic novels, I’ve always wondered what the world would actually look like without us. Weisman provides the answer in this book. He visits places that appear to have successfully moved on from humanity, such as the Białowiea forest, the Korean Demilitarized Zone, and the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, showing nature thriving without us.

It’s both comforting and sobering, suggesting, yet again, that humans aren’t necessary to the world and, in fact, maybe the world is better off without us. The most jaw-dropping revelation for me was when a paleobiologist calmly stated that humans will go extinct eventually.… show more.

Much SF&F literature has explored the concept of what the world might look like with fewer (or no) humans.

Weisman’s well-researched book imagines how our environment would recover; how nature might take back control without humans around to continue wrecking it.

He imagines the primacy of nature in a fascinating way and manages to avoid the normative language that might be off-putting, drawing the reader into a place that might as well be 1000 light years away from Earth.

When trying to imagine what would happen if civilization collapsed, you run up against some really basic, logistical details. Like, what actually happens to all our stuff, if no one's around to take care of it? Turns out, it falls apart a lot quicker than you'd think. Anyone who's noticed the grass and saplings coming up through the pavement in an abandoned lot after just a couple of years understands this. Now expand that to everything. Weisman's book asks questions about this post-people world I didn't even know to ask and the answers are fascinating.

What would happen to the Earth if humans suddenly disappeared? Weisman shows that while some aspects of nature could recover surprisingly quickly, humans have managed to pollute so widely and in such remote pockets of the planet that our presence could still be traceable thousands of years from now.