The World Without Us

I just finished reading The World Without Us by Alan Weisman.

This book was released a while back, late summer of 2007. I remember when it came out, the book tour generated a great deal of interest. One of my favorite shows, Science Friday had the author on for an extended interview.

What I remember about the coverage of the book was that it mostly focused on how quickly our achievements would decay or be erased. There was a kind of joyful interest in contemplating our homes and cities and factories crumbling and going back to nature.

It reminded me of the Gunslinger series by Stephen King. In those stories, the heroes have to navigate through a long dead New York City of the distant future. The eminent collapse of the Brooklyn bridge was a strong symbol of decay taking down the works of man.

This book was not just a fantasy for those that dream of a pre-human pristine earth, this book was a condemnation of our environmental legacy.

The reader that they got for the audiobook was annoying. He had a condescending sneer in his voice that dripped with scorn and seemed to be saying, "See what you did? You wrecked the planet, you stupid humans!" At first, I thought that this was inconguous with the intent of the author, but by the end of the book, I was thinking maybe it was not.

I'm more than willing to believe that we have not paid enough attention to the environment. I'm more than a little leery of launching new technologies before the impacts are fully understood. This book goes way beyond where I sit on the green spectrum. Weisman seems to both condemn humanity for the mess we have made, but also to offer no hope that the planet can ever completely recover from what we have done.

I believe in technology. I know its limits and its shortcomings, but I believe that if we continue to seek answers and continue to monitor our actions and the world around us, that our understanding will generate better answers to the problems posed by the interaction of technology and the world around us. The problem with Weisman's book is that the question he poses is, "What if we just quit right now?" The answer to that is the same answer you get for any problem. If you quit in the middle, you get a mess. What we need to do is commit ourselves to seeing through what we have started and making it right.