The World Without Us

by By Alan Weisman

St. Martin’s Press. 324p $24.95

I beheld, cried the prophet Jeremiah, and lo, there was no man, and all the birds of the heavens had fled (4:25, KJV). One part of the Bible that has gained in heft thanks to the technological horrors of modernity is the apocalyptic genre. When visionaries in either testament describe a global cataclysm, we know, much better than our forebears, just how feasible that would be. We have had lots of practice lately. But what if, for whatever reason, only the human race were erased from the scene?

That is the question posed by Alan Weisman, a science writer and professor of journalism at the University of Arizona, in This article appears in November 19 2007.