Title: The World Without Us
Author: Alan Weisman
Publisher: Virgin Books
Pages: 311
ISBN: 978-0-7535-1357-6

Here is an interesting thought experiment: if humans are suddenly removed from the Earth somehow while leaving everything else intact, how will the artifacts of our civilization fare? The author of this title, Mr. Alan Weisman, takes this thought experiment and runs with it.

We have built a globe girdling civilization with massive and seemingly permanent monuments to our ingenuity. We are pushing materials and structures to their very limits. Witness the current race in building the tallest skyscraper in the world. No sooner has one behemoth been built, then another even bigger one starts construction. We have thrown a network of roads and wires and pipes around the world and built personal transportation devices by the millions to take advantage of this infrastructure. Whole mountains have been leveled in our quest for the raw materials that lie at the foundation of our civilization. Countless ships crisscross the oceans carrying the goods of our commerce within them while in the air, countless airplanes do the same carrying us to and fro across the globe.

Yet according to Mr. Weisman, with us gone nearly all these achievements will be undone in short order by nature. Some of our most impressive and advanced works will be the first to go. In a surprisingly short time, nature will reclaim her own. However, our impact will still be felt far into the future. Our civilization has a dark underside to it; that is the pollution that we have (often inadvertently) caused. This pollution can be seen as a necessary accompaniment to our progress and often it is assumed that over time, even the most durable of substances will break down. However this is not necessarily true. We have introduced substances that have never before been seen in nature. As a result, no organism has adapted itself to break them down. In a sense, these will remain in the environment essentially forever or atleast until some organism learns the trick of breaking them down. The biggest culprit in this regard is the now ubiquitous plastic which breaks down into finer and finer parts until finally there is a microscopic part left that simply remains in the environment. Other pollutants include radioactive substances which have extremely long half lives. This is something that nature will have to cope with somehow after we are gone.

One answer to the thought experiment raised above is that with us gone, the world will revert to the pristine state in which it was before we came. However, as Mr. Weisman has shown, this is simply not the case. We have made an impact (and a massive one) on our environment. The consquences of this impact will be felt far far into the future.

This is a very good book to read. It raises important questions about the consequences of our actions on the planet. Perhaps these questions can stimulate us into better behavior vis a vis our environment than we have done in the past.