Book Review: Imagining a world without humans
September/October 2008
By Tara Dugan Kusumoto
What if humans were no longer around to run the Hydraulics Emergency Response system in Manhattan… would the 13 million gallons of water overpower the city’s subway tunnels? What about the Palo Verde, Ariz. nuclear generating station, which employs 2,000 people just to keep pumps and filters cooling the plant’s steam columns? 
In The World Without Us, author Alan Weisman travels the planet – across the U.S. to Africa to Greece to the border of North and South Korea – to answer those questions, among many others.
An exercise in “imaginative reporting,” Weisman’s book explores the reality that we as humans simply cannot rein in nature. Whether it’s the hardest concrete of Egypt’s pyramids, coffins interred deep in the earth or the man-made Panama Canal, nature will persist, with or without us.
While the premise of a lack of humans on earth may be too far-fetched for our modern thinking to grasp, the implications are immediate and relevant: the impact of El Nino, the state of our landfills, the more than one billion tons of plastic generated over the last half-century that continues to wash up on shores.
Weisman does not judge. Instead, he teases readers’ imaginations with hypothetical scenarios that are a direct result of our present-day innovation and consumption. sAt times prone to excessive scientific detail, The World Without Us can be a laborious read. However, read in small doses, it becomes a compelling dialogue on the struggle between humans and nature.
Like The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, or Freakonimcs by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, The World Without Us is a trove of intriguing social and environmental facts. With human population rising by one million every four days, and in a time when humans’ destructive tendencies can be disguised as progress, The World Without Us is a good reminder of where we sit in relation to our natural environment.
Based in Breckenridge, Colo., Tara is a writer and reader who appreciates the untouched, yet diminishing, havens that give a glimpse of nature’s world without us.
