I’ll just say this straight out, so there’s no confusion: The World Without Us is not a depressing book.

Well, not entirely.

Called “one of the grandest thought experiments of our time” by revered nature/place writer Bill McKibben, The World Without Us sidesteps the calls to action over issues such as global warming and chemical manufacturing, and instead takes us to a place that no human will ever visit: a world in which the entire species has simply disappeared. Not done ourselves in through boiling the place or nuking one another or ingesting too many miniscule plastic grocery bag particles, but just gone.

What would happen? To answer the question, Weisman travels to places that represent the forefront of Industrial Revolution technology, and to places that are the last preserves of what the world looked like without our insatiable need to dominate nature and create waste.

Weisman walks into the Bialowieza Puszcza forest in Poland, virtually the only original ancient forest left in Europe, under constant threat from development. There, he asks how the forests would recover and reclaim their land without humans to constantly cut them back. He flies over Gambe Stream National Park in Tanzania, tracking the paths of elephants whose territory is shrinking in the face of housing development and an explosion of rose farming (note to self: being a person who prefers animals to people, I am never buying flower shop roses again).

He crosses Europe, notes the return of wildlife to the Chernobyl region, pokes around the miles of chemical and gasoline refining plants near Houston (awesome in their massiveness and arrogance), plans out the demise of the Panama Canal without people to maintain its locks, gives readers a glimpse of the precarious and unkown battle of New York City’s workers to keep the megalopolis’s head above water every time it rains, and floats to the great whirlpool of the Pacific where the planet’s millions of plastic grocery sacks, Styrofoam containers, Ziplock sandwich bags, and snippets of clingfilm end up — in short, the Earth’s plastic sewer.

Weisman did not intend this book to be a travel book. It is, as Bill McKibben described, a thought experiment. What will happen to balance out wildlife without the constant sprawl of human suburbs? How long will evolution take to develop a microbe that eats the plastic grocery bags that we each use by the thousands every year with abandon? What happens to a human body in a hermetically sealed, decay-proof coffin? (Answer: I’d rather rot under a tree, thanks.) But it succeeds in doing what the best of travel stories have always done. That is, to make us look at specks of our world in a different light — in this case, the light of what our wasteful natures hath wrought, and how long it would take to unwrought it if nobody were here to shoot the endangered tigers or fix our roofs.

The World Without Us is superbly written and endlessly fascinating. It takes us to corners of the world with little to tell but stories of past existence and the destruction unfettered wilfullness leads to. And how futile our industrial energy becomes when set against our own existence.

It’s a pity that the wilderness it ultimately shows us is one that will never appear in a glossy travel magazine.

(On the book’s website, Weisman has set up a GoogleEarth tour to virtually visit most of the places he traveled to. Along with the usual GoogleEarth perspective, the links give a little history and information about each location.)

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 at 5:35 am and is filed under Africa travel, Antonia projects, Europe travel, Latin America travel, travel books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.