Ethan Casey's Blog - Posts Tagged "biology"

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Bill McKibben calls The World Without Us "one of the grandest thought experiments of our time, a tremendous feat of imaginative reporting," and I can hardly improve on that description. An important book, profoundly challenging - but accessible and, as BusinessWeek rightly said, oddly hopeful. Published in 2007, it's excellent journalism and absolutely a book for our times. What would the world be like without the human race? Would it be better off? What would that be like? What would it mean?

Near the end of The World Without Us, author Alan Weisman quotes marine biologist Enric Sala, speaking on a remote atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean: "I'm so amazed by the ability of life to hang on to anything. Given the opportunity, it goes everywhere. A species as creative and arguably intelligent as our own should somehow find a way to achieve a balance. ... Even if we don't: if the planet can recover from the Permian [extinction], it can recover from the human."

Sala's colleague Jeremy Jackson adds: "The great majority of sea species are badly depleted, but they still exist. If people actually went away, most could recover. ... All these reefs were knocked back over and over by the ice ages, and had to form again. If the Earth keeps getting warmer, new reefs will appear farther to the north and south. The world has always changed. It's not a constant place."

Weisman ends with an argument for managed reduction of human numbers that presages his more recent book Countdown (2013). "At such far-more-manageable numbers [a posited human population of only 1.6 billion by the year 2100], we would have the benefit of all our progress plus the wisdom to keep our presence under control."



View all my reviews