A review by lakecake
The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

4.0

Much different than the show it inspired. This is kind of like An Inconvenient Truth, but with less pictures. It's a thought experiment taking the world we currently live in and removing humans--Weisman doesn't really say what would happen to us, and also that it's unlikely that anything could happen to us and leave everything else perfectly intact--and seeing what happens. The scariest things about it are obviously the environmental impact that we've made on the planet and how long it will take the planet to recover from us, even though we've only been here for a short time. Perfect example--plastic. Plastic doesn't break down. Maybe ever. We have no knowledge of anything that can eat or break down plastic reliably. So we have no idea what will happen to all that plastic once we're no longer here. Creepy, right? It could be a big empty world full of giant piles of plastic trash in the ocean. I really liked this approach to the environmental crisis because it's never sensational. Weisman isn't trying to scare us into changing, he's just calmly explaining how the world will be affected even when we're no longer here, and the evidence is scary. I think it would really change people's perspectives on what we're doing and what will happen to us.