The World Without Us

This morning, my brother, his wife, my wife and I went to breakfast at a nearby deli. It was late morning, so it's understandable that some of us had breakfast and others (my wife and I) had lunch. During the ambiguous meal, our converation turned to a book that my brother and his wife read recently: The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman. The book responds, apparently in extraordinarily researched and legitimate detail to the question: if Earth were suddenly to be devoid of human inhabitants (name your reason: disease, nuclear war, religious rapture, etc.), how long before it reverted to its natural state, with no trace of humankind?

I won't go into the details they shared with us, bt suffice it to say that I was extremely interested in the premise of the book and in the meticulously researched answers.

Here, from the Amazon.com website, is a snippet of a review from Publishers Weekly:

Days after our disappearance, pumps keeping Manhattan's subways dry would fail, tunnels would flood, soil under streets would sluice away and the foundations of towering skyscrapers built to last for centuries would start to crumble. At the other end of the chronological spectrum, anything made of bronze might survive in recognizable form for millions of years—along with one billion pounds of degraded but almost indestructible plastics manufactured since the mid-20th century. Meanwhile, land freed from mankind's environmentally poisonous footprint would quickly reconstitute itself, as in Chernobyl, where animal life has returned after 1986's deadly radiation leak, and in the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, a refuge since 1953 for the almost-extinct goral mountain goat and Amur leopard. From a patch of primeval forest in Poland to monumental underground villages in Turkey, Weisman's enthralling tour of the world of tomorrow explores what little will remain of ancient times while anticipating, often poetically, what a planet without us would be like.

I want to read this book!

My brother and his wife left shortly after lunch, taking with them the 1995 Mercedes E320 Cabriolet. They're on their way on a cross country adventure, to New Mexico, Arizona, California, and Oregon! Would that I could make the trip with them.