Reading The World Without Us is like being punched in the stomach, over and over again, and sort of liking it.

The premise is easy to understand. Most of us suspect, and some of us wish, the human race may one day disappear from this planet. Alan Weisman has taken that starting idea and carefully thought out what will happen once the power plants shut down, fences fall, agriculture ends, and we cease pumping water out of New York City's subway tunnels.

It's the kind of fantasy one ponders as 58,000 gallons of deadly bunker oil disperse around the San Francisco Bay. Before the white man, that bay had dolphins and whales disporting in it. Before the red man, you would also have found wooly mammoths and saber tooth tigers.

From our earliest days as homo sapiens we have wiped out species too numerous to list, and transformed every environment on earth. We are one powerful monkey.

On page after page Weisman hits the reader with another smack upside the head. "The problem is," he writes, "by tapping the Carboniferous Formation and spewing it up into the sky, we've become a volcano that hasn't stopped erupting since the 1700s."

I get it. Humans bad, environment good. Get rid of us, everything else flourishes. It's dangerously delicious fun to imagine ourselves wiped out -- especially when it all seems so discouraging. Like the contemplation of suicide, it can be an enticing thought: being simply, gone.

But life never is that simple, and Weisman has written a nuanced, deeply researched book that makes the subtleties plain. Yes, early hunters probably wiped out the mega-animals, but other large beasts have managed to evolve alongside humans. If we go, will they also go? Weisman calls that question the African Paradox.

Then there is the ocean. "...despite mechanized overharvesting, satellite fish-trackers, nitrate flooding, and prolonged butchery of sea mammals, the ocean is still bigger than we are," he writes. "Since prehistoric man had no way to pursue them, it's the one place on Earth besides Africa where big creatures eluded the intercontinental megafaunal extinction."

One eminent scientist reflects that even if the Great Barrier Reef succumbs "to global warming or ultraviolet radiation bleaching, (it is only) 7,000 years old. All reefs worldwide were knocked back over and over by the ice ages, and had to form again. If the Earth keeps getting warmer, new reefs will appear farther to the north and south. The world has always changed. It's not a constant place."

Consider how long our own houses would last if we were not present to repaint, re-roof, fight off insects and patch up varmint holes. Farmers know the most effective way to bring down a barn is to cut a hole in its roof. In New Orleans, neglected gardens have become thickets, while vines overrun former homes in the Lower Ninth Ward.

In the first year without humans all the nuclear power plants in the world would melt down or burn.

Without constant repainting, the great steel bridges of the world will corrode and fall. High rises will rust and eventually crash; stone buildings will last longer, but will eventually be home to wolves.

Bronze statues and cromium steel cookware may well outlast everything else. "...the intellectual development of whatever creature digs them up might be kicked abruptly to a higher evolutionary plane by the discovery of ready-made tools. Then again, lack of knowledge of how to duplicate them could be a demoralizing frustration -- or an awe-arousing mystery that ignites religious consciousness."

"One day, perhaps, we will learn to control our appetites, or our duplication rates," Weisman concludes. "If something implausible swoops in to do that for us... in far less time than it took us to run out of codfish and passenger pigeons every dam on Earth would silt up and spill over. Rivers would once again carry nutrients to the sea, where most life would still be, as it was long before we vertebrates first crawled onto these shores.

"Eventually, we'd try that again. Our world would start over."

Aired Sunday November 18, 2007 at 10:55 am and Wednesday November 21, 2007 at 1:00 pm

Orders/Information:

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. St. Martin's Press hardcover $24.95. ISBN 0312347294.

Visit www.worldwithoutus.com and don't skip the brief introduction. There also are some short animations depicting some of the changes enumerated in the book.

Weisman on the Daily Show: "The trouble with a lot of environmental writing these days is that a lot of people don't want to read it because they're all scared that we're gonna die. So I killed everybody off in the first couple pages (laughter). But we get to stick around and see what the future looks like. It seems to disarm the fear factor."

Interesting factoid from the same interview: "It took microbes millions of years to learn how to digest the stuff that trees are made out of, lignin and cellulose: so that's why the first trees and plants got simply buried over time, not decomposed, and that's why we have those coal deposits."

Jon Stewart: "Do we add anything to the earth? Will the earth miss us? At all?"

Nature has started to reclaim the flooded Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. Weisman describes this and USA Today has a beautiful slide show: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-10-31-wild-new-orleans_N.htm

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