The World Without Us
Suppose the human race were to just vanish? What would happen to our houses, our cities, our precious plastic novelty items? In The World Without Us, this pleasantly morbid parlor game becomes a grandly entertaining (and refreshingly unscreechy) study of the ways we meddling humans have perturbed our planet and of how blithely the earth would shrug off our departure. In the first few years, goosegrass will split our asphalt, and sunlight will crack our PVC piping. For the final coup de grace, glaciers will scrape Manhattan Island clean, leaving only a geological record behind, "an unnatural concentration of reddish metal which briefly had assumed the form of wiring and plumbing." It's shocking how little of man's works will remain and also how much: the CO2-laden atmosphere will rebalance and the Great Wall will crumble, while the Chunnel and stubbornly stable molecules like plastics and PCBs will abide.