52 pages • 1 hour read
Alan WeismanThe World Without Us
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Prelude-Part 1, Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prelude Summary: “A Monkey Koan”
Weisman describes a “barn raising” event among the Zápara, an Indigenous people of the Ecuadoran Amazon, at which everyone is drunk on cassava beer. After their 200,000-member society was nearly wiped out by the early 20th-century rubber-tapping industry, early 2000s government funding supported a cultural revival on a small portion of their ancestral land. Because the Zápara had abandoned their traditional hunting-and-gathering practices in favor of slash-and-burn farming of cassava, however, the denuded rain forest now supported much less wildlife, leading the Zápara to start hunting the spider monkeys from whom they believed themselves to be descended. “When we’re down to eating our ancestors,” a Zápara elder reflects, “what is left?” (3).
Weisman lays out the thought experiment that constitutes the premise of the book, questioning how the Earth would respond if the entire human species were instantaneously wiped out in a manner that left the rest of the natural world intact:
How soon would, or could, the climate return to where it was before we fired up all our engines? […] Could nature ever obliterate all our traces? How would it undo our monumental cities and public works, and reduce our myriad plastics and toxic synthetics back to benign, basic elements? Or are some so unnatural that they’re indestructible? (4).
Likewise, Weisman wonders whether anything would survive of humanity’s artistic creations. Most of all, he wants to know whether the Earth would merely benefit from humanity’s extinction, or whether it would miss at least some of humanity’s contributions.
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “A Lingering Scent of Eden”
The Białowieża Puszcza, on the border between Poland and Belarus, is a half-million-acre park encompassing the last remaining fragment of Europe’s “primeval” old-growth forest. The site was protected from logging by its designation as a royal hunting preserve since the 14th century and a national park since 1921. Today Białowieża is home to most of the 600 or so wild bison remaining in Europe, but their future survival is threatened by a Soviet-era fence along the Poland-Belarus border that bisects the population and thereby critically diminishes its gene pool. The authoritarian government of Belarus has refused to remove the fence.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary: “Unbuilding Our Home”
This chapter describes the processes by which uninhabited human homes would decay, beginning with water leaking through the roof and progressing through rotted wood, collapsed trusses, rusted-away pipes, and so on. Swimming pools and basements would be taken over by vegetation. Rainstorms would overwhelm large dams, flooding the former alluvial plains where many cities were built. After 500 years of decay, little evidence of human habitation would remain beyond aluminum appliance parts, stainless steel cookware, and wrought iron balconies.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary: “The City Without Us”
This chapter portrays the collapse of an entire city, using the example of New York. For clues to what the city might look like without people, Weisman describes the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Manhattan Project, in which landscape ecologists at the Bronx Zoo are seeking to virtually recreate the wildlife and landscapes of Manhattan Island as they might have appeared before European settlement in 1609.
The decay of an abandoned city begins with water. In New York, without the constant vigilance of maintenance crews staffing hundreds of pumps, the enormous subway system is quickly inundated by rainwater and the rising sea. Once the tunnels fill to capacity, streets start to cave in and become rivers. The repeated freezing and thawing of surface water cracks open the sidewalks and roads, allowing weeds to take root. With the sewers clogged, a layer of soil forms on top of the city’s hard shell. Lightning ignites fires in the deteriorating buildings, occasionally blowing up gas lines. Eventually water undermines the substructures of even those skyscrapers that were anchored to hard bedrock, and winds topple them. New York’s bridges last much longer, with the sturdiest arched railroad bridges enduring for up to 1,000 years (barring earthquakes), but corrosion and the endless heating-cooling cycle eventually topple them too. Heavy metals and other industrial toxins linger in the soil for centuries as vegetation gradually absorbs and dilutes them.
Within an estimated 200 years, mature trees have largely replaced pioneer weeds. In the absence of humans to tend them, non-native ornamental trees and cultivated gardens give way to hardier wild plants; other exotic species, such as the invasive Chinese ailanthus tree, thrive. Many native fish and animal species return to the island, and most human-adapted species die out—dogs succumb to wild predators, rats starve without garbage, and cockroaches freeze in unheated apartment buildings, though “a wily population of feral house cats persists, feeding on starlings” (37).
Prelude-Part 1, Chapter 3 Analysis
In the Prelude, Weisman invokes the apocalyptic dread many 21st-century humans feel when contemplating the long-term consequences of environmental despoliation. Readers may not share the Zápara people’s sense that they are literally cannibalizing their own ancestors, but Weisman banks on them being increasingly aware of the undesirable unintended consequences of anthropogenic change. Survival instincts, Weisman speculates, tend to discourage humans from taking the possibility of worst-case outcomes too seriously, however. Weisman therefore offers his thought experiment as a way to make reluctant minds engage seriously with that possibility.
In Chapter 1 Weisman uses the example of the Białowieża Puszcza to paint a picture of what a primeval European forest would have looked like and to suggest by way of contrast how diminished the version of nature is to which contemporary readers are likely accustomed. However, he also relates how this wilderness contains relics of centuries of human use (gravestones, crematorium mounds, former ornamental plantings), implying that humans still belong in nature and countering the notion of Humans as Innately Destructive. He concludes the chapter on an optimistic note, reporting that the forest is actually expanding on both sides of the border, taking over farmlands abandoned after the collapse of Soviet Communism. “The thought of rural Europe reverting one day to original forest is heartening” (14), he writes encouragingly in the last paragraph, but he then issues a final warning: “[U]nless the last humans remember to first remove Belarus’s iron curtain, its bison may wither away with them” (14). These concluding lines signal the book’s overall tone, which combines denunciations of humanity’s environmental follies with assurances of the resilience of nature and of life on Earth.
Chapters 2 and 3 describe the physical processes of decay that would consume homes and cities in a posthuman world. Chapter 2 opens by asserting the radical impermanence of humanity’s built environments: “On the day after humans disappear, nature takes over and immediately begins cleaning house—or houses, that is. Cleans them right off the face of the Earth. They all go” (15). It ends by evoking the incomprehensible vastness of geologic time. Relics of human habitation may be preserved indefinitely in alluvial sediments after our dams are overwhelmed, Weisman writes, but these will be hidden from view for millions of years: “Only eons later, when old mountains have worn away and new ones risen, will young streams cutting fresh canyons through sediments reveal what once, briefly, went on here” (20). This contrast points to one of the book’s underlying themes: that the entire human experience, however monumental it seems to us and however long it ultimately endures, will be infinitesimally brief in the context of Earth history. Nature Is Flux, and while humans can contribute to its changes, we cannot do so enduringly.
That message is reiterated in Chapter 3, which opens by speculating that most readers would overestimate the amount of time it would take nature to overrun an entire city. It ends with another reference to geologic time: After the landscape is crushed and scraped by glaciers during the next ice age, the only remaining evidence of human civilization in the underlying geologic strata might be “an unnatural concentration of a reddish metal, which briefly had assumed the form of wiring and plumbing” (38). Weisman asserts that, despite all of the environmental destruction humans have caused, plants and animals will have no trouble “rewilding” even the concrete jungle of New York City. However, he also observes that through the introduction of non-native plant and animal species, people have transformed the ecosystem in certain lasting ways, creating “a human artifact that will persist in our absence, a cosmopolitan botanical mixture that would never have occurred without us” (32). In other words, even a thoroughly rewilded Manhattan Island will retain the imprint of human influence, and not just in the form of industrial toxins lingering in the soil and water. This tension—the debate over just how persistent human-induced environmental changes are—underpins much of the book.
