The World Without Us

When I told people I was reading this non-fiction book and that the premise was “What would happen to the earth if the human race suddenly vanished?” the usual response was to say something like, “So it's fiction?”

Ugh. NO.

First of all, to understand what could happen, we have to understand what has already happened so far. And then, backed up by scientific knowledge from various experts in various fields, the author explains a very likely outcome of what would happen if we were just – poof – gone. This book is absolutely fascinating. So much so, that I was routinely ignoring the fantasy fiction I was concurrently reading and kept heading back to this book. I don't often find non-fiction page-turners but this one qualifies. And along with fascinating, this book is frequently alarming – but not in a strident, self-righteous tone or anything like that. This book presented me with many facts about the earth and our impact on it in a straightforward manner that just makes your proverbial jaw drop. The two most alarming chapters for me were Chapter 9: Polymers Are Forever and Chapter 15: Hot Legacy. In the former I learned all about the plastic refuse that is currently clogging our oceans. A LOT of plastic, mind-boggling... the Great Pacific Garbage Patch was mentioned and then I learned that there are at least six other large plastic-strewn gyres. So. That's bad. But then along comes Chapter 15 which goes into detail about radioactive waste, how much of it we have, what we're doing with it, and just how bad it is. HOLY CRAP. Take Uranium-238, for example. This “depleted” version of U-235 has a half-life of 4.5 billion years. In the United States alone, there's at least a half-million tons of it. U-238 is an unusually dense metal, so we've been making armor-piercing bullets out of it. (They can pierce tank armor.) There's enough concentrated U-238 in the bullet points that radioactivity in the ashen debris can exceed 1,000 times the normal background level. They'll emit radiation for more years than the planet likely has left. (That is, this stuff will still be radioactive when 4 or 5 billion years from now our sun expands to a red giant and incinerates the inner planets in our solar system. Nice.) I could go on but suffice it to say that this book should be required reading. An excellent book. Oceanography. a ringlike system of ocean currents rotating clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and counterclockwise in the Southern Hemisphere.