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Thomas Dunne Books
July 2007
On Sale: July 10, 2007
336 pages ISBN: 0312347294 EAN: 9780312347291 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
In The World Without Us, Alan Weisman offers
an utterly original approach to questions of humanity's
impact on the planet: he asks us to envision our Earth,
without us.
In this far-reaching narrative, Weisman explains how our
massive infrastructure would collapse and finally vanish
without human presence; which everyday items may become
immortalized as fossils; how copper pipes and wiring would
be crushed into mere seams of reddish rock; why some of our
earliest buildings might be the last architecture left; and
how plastic, bronze sculpture, radio waves, and some man-
made molecules may be our most lasting gifts to the
universe. The World Without Us reveals how, just days after humans
disappear, floods in New York's subways would start eroding
the city's foundations, and how, as the world's cities
crumble, asphalt jungles would give way to real ones. It
describes the distinct ways that organic and chemically
treated farms would revert to wild, how billions more birds
would flourish, and how cockroaches in unheated cities
would perish without us. Drawing on the expertise of
engineers, atmospheric scientists, art conservators,
zoologists, oil refiners, marine biologists,
astrophysicists, religious leaders from rabbis to the Dali
Lama, and paleontologists--who describe a prehuman world
inhabited by megafauna like giant sloths that stood taller
than mammoths--Weisman illustrates what the planet might be
like today, if not for us. From places already devoid of humans (a last fragment of
primeval European forest; the Korean DMZ; Chernobyl),
Weisman reveals Earth's tremendous capacity for self-
healing. As he shows which human devastations are
indelible, and which examples of our highest art and
culture would endure longest, Weisman's narrative
ultimately drives toward a radical but persuasive solution
that needn't depend on our demise. It is narrative
nonfiction at its finest, and in posing an irresistible
concept with both gravity and a highly readable touch, it
looks deeply at our effects on the planet in a way that no
other book has.
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