Irregular Books

Upon first seeing The World Without Us, written by Alan Weisman, I got a sense of deja vu. I really felt that I had seen this book somewhere before, but that wasn’t likely, as the book has only been available for sale for two weeks, and I seem to have a vague memory of seeing the book much longer ago than that.

I can’t explain the sense of deja vu I have about this book other than to note that the book is itself a sort on a deja vu project. It covers the territory of a world without humanity… once again, with investigations of what would happen if, all of a sudden, human beings disappeared from the face of the Earth? The deja vu comes from a return to a planet without people, because, though we forget it, Earth has only hosted humanity for a short amount of time.

I find myself drawn to the quickest changes: That, in two days, New York City’s subway tunnels would flood. In one week, the fuel needed to keep water flowing to cool the cores of nuclear power plants would run out. That one left me asking why nuclear power plants don’t use the power they themselves supply, with extra fuel as just a backup.

I’m just not as interested in reading that, in 250,000 years, the plutonium created by nuclear humanity will faded into an undetectable background of natural radiation. I suppose that, what I really want to know is what would happen to the Earth in my lifetime if I was not here, and fellow members of my species were gone too.

That’s the emotional power of the The World Without Us: It appeals to the reflex to question ourselves, to ask ourselves how much we really matter in the big scheme of things. That’s a useful project that makes this book well worth looking through.