You've probably heard of it. This book has gotton lots of press - on Oprah, on NPR. It was #1 on a bunch of best seller lists for awhile. As of this writing, its still
#37 on Amazon.
Basically, it's a climate change book wrapped in a thought experiement. What would happen to the world - to everything from buildings to species to ecosystems to nuclear power plants - if all humans simply vanished, quietly, instantly, without nuclear bombs or leaving behind dead bodies?
It's well written, well researched and quite informative in places. It's quite interesting to learn how long concrete lasts, that it would be only hours or days before New York's subways flooded, that the copper Statue of Liberty will be intact long after all the modern buildings made of steel and concrete have corroded away.
It's a good read, highly recommended. Its also totally, completely, utterly, thouroughly depressing - not because all the humans are gone, but because in order to understand what the world might revert to without us, Weisman must first take us through what the world was like before us, or at least before we gained sufficiently in population to wreak environmental havoc and in so doing, he makes it incredibly clear what has already been lost to human activity, how few poeple realize what has been lost and how those losses will continue even if we vanished tomorrow due to the environmental changes we have already set in motion. Depressing, so very very depressing.
It's depressing to learn how Clovis Man devastated the North American mega fauna. It's depressing to learn how dire the situation is today with the majority of coral reefs dead or dying and that nothing can really be done to stop it. Its depressing to learn how elephants evolved to migrate and cover great distances and how those few left today in the wild are confined behind fences in areas a fraction the size of their former territory.
There are bright spots. Wildlife has returned with a vengence to the area around Chernobel now that (most) humans have vacated the area, even though mutations are rampant. Generation times have dropped, selection is in operation. Ecosystems can recover - in a hurry it seems if the necessary organisms arn't already extinct - but only if human activity stops or is greatly diminshed. One finds oneself wishing at the end of the book that humans could indeed be magically vaporized somehow.
The book concludes with a look at what things could possibly wipe us out while leaving the rest of the world in tact. Experts conclude there is nothing that could do it today short of aliens spiriting us away, not even a homo-specific pandemic - nothing viralent enough exists - too many would survive, it would not spread sufficiently, etc.. (Nulcear war and asteroids aren't considerred as they would take out other things besides us.) AIDS isn't even a blip on world population growth, which has a current run rate of 1 million people every 4 days. That's net increase - 250k more people are born than die every day. Surprisingly, nano tech gone amuck in the future appears to be the most possible means for a nice clinical human demise experts conclude.
There is a brief attempt by the author to put a shiny face on his conclusions, to look for possible answers to our head-long rush towards further overpopulation and the conversion of the Earth into a radioactive parking lot. But it's half hearted. That there is really nothing good to say is evident in how few paragraphs the author devotes to this. It is difficult to postulate a good outcome from the case the author presents. Unlike Gore's 'Incoveinant Truth', there are no calls to recycle, buy hybrids or stop using plastics. The author appears to have already concluded that such measures are fruitless luxeries only developed nations can even consider and unlikely to make any real difference in any event. About the only possible thing that could reverse the trends he concludes would be a world-wide ban, strongly enforced, on women having more than a single child. Unlikely to happen to put it mildly.
One is left with a feeling of despair, that the world is on track to be bleaker and less diverse, generation after generation, for many generations to come and that we stupid humans, mired in our pathetic little self-centered worlds have no clue (or don't care) what has already been lost and have no hope to act collectivly to stop the inevitable decline, even if it could be stopped.
Highly recommended, but be prepared to be depressed.