The World Without Us

My favorite chapter was the first one, where the narration sweeps in a gods-eye view across a world where human-made artifacts slowly crumble, buildings collapse, pipes leak, asphalt breaks, and where nature reclaims its rightful space. There is something so haunting and breath-taking in this vision of us and our artifacts and our toxic and invasive remnants slowly being erased from the planet. Gladly would have stayed in this detached meditative vision.

But then Weisman gets more practical, we learn from experts how our chemicals, our gardens, our tunnels and radio waves will fare in this thought experiment of a world, where all humanity will suddenly go poof.