“Most contemporary books about the environment end up being jeremiads. They may sing the praises of the natural world,
but mostly to draw attention to the ways we are destroying it. The goal
is to inspire social change, but that does not always result in
creative or compelling prose. How do you avoid putting readers to sleep
with yet another alarming tale when you’re dealing with a subject that
truly is alarming? One of the many virtues of Alan Weisman’s “The World
Without Us” is that it finds a brilliantly creative solution to this
problem.

Weisman
embarks on an audacious intellectual adventure: He tries to imagine
what the world would be like if humans suddenly disappeared. “How would
the rest of nature
respond if it were suddenly relieved of the relentless pressures we
heap on it and our fellow organisms? How soon would, or could, the
climate return to where it was before we fired up all our engines? How
long would it take to recover lost ground and restore Eden to the way it
must have gleamed and smelled the day before Adam, or homo habilis, appeared? Could nature ever obliterate all our traces?”“