The World Without Us takes a familiar theme—the ongoing environmental havoc—and gives it a refreshing and readable twist. Alan Weisman succeeds in showing the villainy of humanity while making heroes of the human beings who catalogue and monitor the abuse of our planet.
What makes The World Without Us so readable is Weisman’s talent for the telling detail. He captures just the right physical, biographical or background detail to bring his characters—and the many fascinating places he visits—to life without diverting from the true task at hand: showing the monumental effect of humanity on the planet.
Bringing together different essays on varied topics from the role of fertilizer in agriculture and the increasing level of toxic metals in the soil to the persistence of plastic to the demise of thousands of species long before the industrial world began, Weisman has written a book that resembles James Gleick’s classic Chaos. Here we have the same loosely-related themes revolving around one big idea and the same talent for apt details and vivid scene-setting.
The World Without Us also makes one surprising and consistent point over and over again. Human beings have had a striking effect on the natural world for thousands of years. And the products of industrialization have had irreversible effects. Weisman shows this in unexpected places and ways. There is a discussion of resort on Cyprus that became a political pawn in that island’s civil war. The resort was abandoned so abruptly and completely, it shows the purest example of what Weisman’s “thought experiment” would mean. Nature reclaimed the resort rapidly. Seismic events, storms and animals exploiting new habitats were the first wave. Then came the flowers, yes, the flowers, that pushed the pavement apart. Soon, the town was beyond rehabilitation.
There is also a chilling description of the North Pacific Gyre, one of seven massive eddies in the ocean’s currents that have become filled with floating plastic, millions of tons of it. And the intricate descriptions of Houston’s oil refining complexes will leave you dazzled by their enormity and terrified by the forces they harness and barely tame.
The effect of reading this book is startling. Weisman’s even-handedness—he’s not afraid to scare the bejeezus out of you but also quick to show surprising details of the planet’s resiliency or man’s beneficial role—is what makes it so compelling. Throughout the litany of good and bad, Weisman makes man a species worth regarding but also one that needs to be tamed.
The World Without Us makes one of the most important environmental cases without resorting to hysteria. It’s cool-headedness will make it required reading.
Author Forum on Alan Weisman