Hey folks! I am a newcomer at BeGreenMinded and I’m starting EcoProse, a green literature review column. I’m happy to hear from you about your opinions on the books I review and any reading suggestions you have for me. For my first post, I reviewed The World Without Us by Alan Wiesman. Enjoy!

In the first few pages of The World Without Us, Alan Wiesman identifies a significant obstacle to large scale acceptance and effort to combat climate change:

We don’t want to believe that we will be single handedly responsible for our own destruction.

Wiesman’s unique perspective on environmentalism centers on the fact that the earth will ultimately recover from any harm humans can inflict upon it. In The World Without Us, Wiesman paints a vivid picture of what will happen to the planet after humanity is wiped out. With its regenerative capabilities, the earth will return to a completely natural pre-human state within a few hundred thousand years, with only stainless steel pots and plastic bottles remaining as a meager shrine to human existence.

While the book occasionally becomes bogged down in anthropological details, it is an interesting, informative, and sometimes appalling read. It’s rich with jaw dropping details about humanity’s transitory accomplishments:

• New York City without humans? Its subway tunnels will fill with water within hours of human disappearance, weakening infrastructure and ultimately causing city streets to collapse and buildings to topple within decades.
• The typical wood frame house, the most common type of residence in the U.S, will be gone without a trace in 50 years or less.
• The Panama Canal, the product of decades of labor by thousands of workers, will disappear completely after several rainy seasons without humans to divert the flow of rainwater.

Such concrete examples of the destruction of everything humanity has created are hard to ignore. Every chapter focuses on a different topic, each more disturbing than the last. As the baffled reader, you want to put the book down, knowing you’ll sleep better if you do, but you can’t stop reading.

Overall, The World Without Us is definitely a worthy read. Unsettling, but brilliantly researched, the book reveals environmentalism for what it really is – not a “save the earth” movement, but a “save the people movement”. When all is said and done, changing our destructive environmental behavior will be a survivalist effort to save ourselves, while the planet, indifferent to our existence, will persist unmolested.

My one critique of the author is that he occasionally resorts to shock-value, overemphasizing examples rather than forming the examples into a larger picture.

Bearing in mind that the exact pattern of decay discussed in the book is unlikely to occur and the suggestions offered by the author come from the perspective of a journalist rather than an environmental scientist, I recommend this book to anyone who isn’t afraid to face the reality of the world without us.

Photo courtesy of smiteme on Flickr