Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us could have been called “The big f-ing mess that would be left for the Earth and her native species if all humans mysteriously disappeared tonight.” I suppose Weisman was wise to select his more press friendly, less-text-heavy title, but that’s a discussion for another time.

Weisman’s book is basically a thought experiment. What would happen if all humans vanished tomorrow, but nothing else? So all the buildings, cars, buried plastics, and nuclear waste would survive…just not us. What Weisman comes up with is fascinating and deeply disturbing. I could only read a few chapters of the book at a time, lest I become overwhelmed. And at one point, the book sat on top of my dresser—only half read—for two weeks. Every time I reached for it, I’d grab a different book instead. “I just can’t do it” was my shameful mantra during that period.

I think what disturbed me the most is that the book shook my misanthropic tendencies apart. I have on occasion been heard to say, “Just let the whole f-ing human race die out. The world would be better without us.” But Weisman’s book yelled back, “not necessarily.” See, we’ve made a big mess. Yes, plastics should degrade one day, but degrade down to particles that will still affect the ecosphere. Sure birds won’t fill their bellies with indigestible plastics that clog their systems, but some microscopic life form will. Maybe they’ll evolve to be able to digest these minute plastic particles, but that’ll take a really, really long time, and it’s not a given. And guess what…the nuclear material inside warheads won’t break apart nearly as fast as the surrounding rocket housings. I guess Bush’s “thousand points of light” referred to all the radioactive hot spots that will dot the globe when these nuclear materials are released into the environment.

I suppose that the moral of the story is that we’ve done this, now it’s time to clean it up. And Weisman has put across this message in an ingenious way. There’s something about reading apocalyptic scenarios that gets the energies going. The fantasy of it is captivating for many of us. We love the “what if” question. But Weisman has done a kind of bait and switch here. His “what if” is really mostly a question of “what’s going on…right now!” Brilliant stuff, if you can stomach it.