The World Without Us

I stayed up last night and finished The World Without Us. It's an odd book - he tries to figure out what would happen to the Earth if humans suddenly disappeared. Part of the book is about what would degrade and how the earth would taken down human creations (apparently most of civilization is kept up by repainting - it seemed like if nothing else got to man made structures - eventually the paint would peel allowing rust to form and from there everything collapses). Part of the book is describing various impacts we have had on the Earth so that he can then look at how that would continue to impact life if we left. One example that really struck me is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch - it's tough to buy plastic after his description. There are also non-pollution impacts, such as the spreading of different animals and plants between continents. And the other part of the book is him traveling to different areas that have been abandoned by humans to give clues about what would happen such as Chernobyl and The Korean DMZ.

I think one issue the book had is he would sometimes use words like long or short, but his discussion was covering anywhere from decades to billions of years so it was sometimes hard to have a grasp of what order of magnitude he was talking about. Overall the answer to the question of what will happen is that the planet will continue to be impacted by our presence for a long time, but life will go on and adapt to the changes we made. But much more interesting than the actual answer to the question is each story he tells to show different impacts of humans and the areas where humans have left.