Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Imagine a World Without Us



Sounds like a fascinating book, The World Without Us.

Related;
Daily Show interview
Your House Without You

The Fall of New York
NYT Review;
When it comes to antiquity Mr. Weisman can draw on tangible evidence to back up his speculation. He marvels at the scope and durability of the large underground city of Derinkuyu in Cappadocia, Turkey, especially in comparison to showier monuments with less staying power. There is also hope for the endurance of Mount Rushmore and for Egypt’s Khufu pyramid, although the latter “should not look very pyramidal at all” a million years from now.

“The Panama Canal,” on the other hand, “is like a wound that humans inflicted on the Earth — one that nature is trying to heal,” according to a superintendent of its locks on the Atlantic side. And a disintegrating coral reef in the Pacific is on “the slippery slope to slime.”

From the gyre that is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to the flower-growers of Kenya to the Rothamsted Research Archive in Britain, a repository for more than 300,000 soil samples, Mr. Weisman covers a huge amount of terrain...

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