The world without us
Die Welt ohne Uns (Original title: The World Without Us ) is a non-fiction book by the American author Alan Weisman from 2007. In it he deals with the hypothetical question of what would happen on earth if all people suddenly disappeared. The book achieved high placements in the bestseller lists and has been translated into several languages.
The thought experiment
The hypothetical initial situation that runs through the book as a red thread is the disappearance of all people on the planet from one moment to the next. There is neither a concrete cause nor an announcement in the thought experiment . All systems created and maintained by humans continue to exist and interact with their environment in accordance with their regulatory mechanisms.
content
The world without us is divided into 19 chapters, which are supplemented by a prologue under the heading “Prelude” and an epilogue .
In the prologue, the author describes his impressions of the Zápara indigenous people in Ecuador , whose lives are threatened by modern agriculture and forestry. Ana María, a woman from this small people, asks a question in view of the consumption of monkey meat, which becomes the motto for the entire book: "If we are now ready to eat our ancestors, what is left to us?" ( Page 12)
Weisman examines places untouched or abandoned by people in order to draw conclusions about a future without people. In the first chapter of the book (“An Echo of Paradise”) he and the forest manager Andrzej Bobiec introduce the Puszcza Białowieska , the last primeval forest in Europe on the border between Poland and Belarus . While animals and plants can develop freely and undisturbed here, people in cities have significantly changed the appearance of the earth. The second chapter ("The Fall of Our Houses") is devoted to the question of how our houses fall apart without human control. Wood is eaten away, the frost bursts pipes and windows. Using New York City as an example , Weisman describes the various effects on cities in the third chapter (“The City Without Us”). In the original island of Manhattan , people have built shafts for the subway that will doom the city if the residents disappear. While the subsoil is filled with water, plants grow in the cracked asphalt . Lightning starts fires that cannot be stopped by anyone and the rust gradually weakens the bridges. The native flora has to defend itself against imported plants.
In the following chapter (“The World Immediately Before Us”) the author looks back and realizes that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased enormously due to human influence. A reduction to values as they existed before the appearance of mankind would take around 100,000 years. What effects this has on temperatures is controversial among researchers. Drill cores on Lake Tanganyika in Africa provide a picture of the time when humans and monkeys separated, while in the Gombe Stream National Park there are indications of a mixture of several species. The fifth chapter ("The submerged ark") examines the encounter between humans and the prehistoric megafauna , in which the overkill hypothesis plays an important role. This contrasts with “The African Paradox” (Chapter 6), because the animals on this continent adapted to the people.
With the seventh chapter (“What is falling apart”), Weisman returns to the present and introduces the Cypriot town of Varosha , which has degenerated into a ghost town due to its location on the Green Line as a result of the Cyprus conflict . Using Turkey , the author shows in chapter eight (“What remains”) that old and underground structures will survive longer than many modern buildings despite earthquakes and floods. As a particular example, he cites the underground city of Derinkuyu in Cappadocia .
Some of the toughest materials people leave behind include all types of plastic . Because of the long polymer chains, these are hardly biodegradable and pollute ecosystems such as the oceans. The situation is similar with other products made from petroleum . Refineries like the Goodyear facilities in Texas get out of control when people disappear and pollute nature for a long time. In the eleventh chapter, Weisman deals again in detail with the forest and vegetation . He describes how forests develop without humans and, with the help of the Rothamsted archive, shows what influence chemistry and genes could have.
How the ancient wonders of the world and new achievements such as the Panama Canal or the Mount Rushmore National Memorial will survive the future, readers will learn in Chapter 12. A negative human trait, war, left behind, among other things, the demilitarized zone in Korea , to which nature is gradually returning. A disappearance of mankind would also help the birds because they would be less likely to fall victim to power cables or domestic cats. People leave a “shining legacy” (Chapter 15) through the processing of radioactive materials in nuclear reactors . The great effort that goes into the final disposal of radioactive waste shows how complicated this topic is. Even so, life can re-emerge even in contaminated places like Chernobyl .
“Our geological traces” (Chapter 16) are left behind by people all over the world, the surface of which is not only changed by erosion . Weisman is also concerned with the question of whether not only the Maya , but all humans could actually become extinct one day . Following these thoughts is the question, “Where are we going?” (Chapter 17). What happens to our bodies and the organisms living in / on them after death can be determined relatively clearly. More difficult to answer is the question of whether it is even possible to completely wipe out humanity. Les Knight, founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement , has doubts: “No virus could ever hit every six billion people. […] In fact, epidemics serve to strengthen a species ”(page 328). In Chapter 18 (“Stardust”), Weisman describes the Voyager Golden Record plates of the Voyager space probes , with the Arecibo radio telescope sent melodies and other waves that people send into the vastness of space . In the last chapter, the author names the oceans as the most important factor for the long-term existence of earthly life. They are “haunted by humans, but still of limitless creativity”.
In the epilogue, Weisman presented some philosophical thoughts on the future of the world under the heading "Our Earth, Our Soul" . Finally, as a “draconian measure”, he proposes a consistent one-child policy . Then humanity would shrink to 1.6 billion copies by 2100 and resources could be better used without humanity completely disappearing.
Creation and publication
The English-language original The World Without Us was published on July 10, 2007 by the US publisher St. Martin's Thomas Dunne Books . It is based on the article Earth Without People , which Weisman published in the February 2005 science magazine Discover . The outstanding quality of this article was recognized with its inclusion in the anthology The Best American Science Writing 2006 . In 2003, editor Josie Glausiusz kicked it off after reading Journey through a Doomed Land . In this 1994 report for Harper's Magazine , Weisman described the state of Chernobyl eight years after the reactor accident .
The science journalist was so fascinated by the subject of a world without humans that he wanted to expand his article into a book. To this end, he visited many places on earth and spoke with scientific experts from various disciplines. He interviewed biologists , archaeologists , botanists , anthropologists and philosophers , among others . With the help of their information, he constructed a future world in a thought experiment. After the book reached high bestseller lists in the US, it was translated for publication in other countries. The German Piper Verlag published Die Welt ohne Uns , in France the Groupe Flammarion presented Homo disparitus ( ISBN 978-2-08-120493-5 ), in Portugal O Mundo Sem Nós ( ISBN 85-7665-302-8 ) by Estrela Polar published and the Polish edition was published by CKA under the title Świat bez nas ( ISBN 83-60206-90-2 ).
reception
After the book was published in the US, sales were very high. In September 2007 came The World Without Us first place in the San Francisco Chronicle and 6th place in the New York Times . In the rankings of the most successful non-fiction books in 2007, Weisman took the top position for Time and Entertainment Weekly .
In their analyzes, critics emphasized the creative and objective approach of the “thoroughly fascinating thought experiment”. Weisman's lively writing style received particular praise in the reviews. Alanna Mitchell of The Globe & Mail sees the book's relevance in warning people about being too passive about wasting natural resources ; the “passive dance with death” endangers the survival of the species. For Andreas Kilb from the FAZ it is “an unheard of future blueprint for the climate shock generation”, while Dr. Reiner Klingholz, the managing director of the Berlin Institute for Population and Development , sees the work as “a general accounting for our ecological atrocities”. The author himself justified his renunciation of people with the fact that he wanted to spare the readers the fear of failure and death; his book can be read as a fantasy. Nevertheless, he writes as a sober "scientific observer rather than an activist".
In cooperation with lunatiks produktion, the Schauspielhaus Hannover has been presenting the “botanical long-term theater ” since 2010, which uses artistic means to deal with the question of how the world develops without people in a 15-part series.
See also
literature
- Alan Weisman, The World Without Us. Travel across an unpopulated earth . Piper, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-492-05132-3 (German edition)
- Alan Weisman, The World without us . Thomas Dunne Books, New York 2007, ISBN 978-0-312-34729-1 (US edition)
- Alan Weisman, countdown . Little Brown, 2013, (German edition: Countdown. Does the earth have a future?. Piper, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-492-05431-7 ). Continuation of The World Without Us
Web links
- Official website for the book with background information and reviews
Individual evidence
- ↑ Alan Weisman, Earth Without People , Discover, February 2007 (English)
- ↑ Gawande, Atul & Cohen, Jesse, The Best American Science Writing (2006 ed.), New York: Harper Perennial, pp. 28–36, ISBN 978-0-06-072644-7 (English)
- ↑ San Francisco Chronicle Bestsellers (English)
- ↑ Hardcover Nonfiction , The New York Times (English)
- ↑ Top 10 Nonfiction Books , Time (English)
- ↑ The Best Books of 2007 , Entertainment Weekly (English)
- ↑ a b Derek Weiler, And the wild things shall inherit the Earth , thestar.com, August 12, 2007 (English)
- ↑ Samiha Shafy: World without people . In: Der Spiegel . No. 33 , 2007, p. 124 ( online ).
- ↑ Gary Kamiya, The World Without Us , salon.com, July 23, 2007 (English)
- ↑ Alanna Mitchell, Good riddance to us and our bad rubbish , The Globe & Mail, July 21, 2007 (English)
- ↑ Andreas Kilb, An unheard of future draft of the generation climate shock , FAZ, September 3, 2007
- ↑ Reiner Klingholz: Journey across an unpopulated earth Berlin Institute for Population and Development
- ↑ Dave Weich, With People out of the Picture, Alan Weisman Gets Creative , Powells Books, July 19, 2007 ( Memento of the original from December 28, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (English)
- ↑ withoutuns.org
