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S'està carregant… The World Without Us (edició 2007)de Alan Weisman
Informació de l'obraThe World Without Us de Alan Weisman
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Apunta't a LibraryThing per saber si aquest llibre et pot agradar. No hi ha cap discussió a Converses sobre aquesta obra. This book was not what I thought it was going to be, and I was mightily disappointed. What did I think it would be? Well, I thought it would look at what would become of the planet Earth if tomorrow the human species simply vanished; basically, what it says on the tin. What the book spends an extraordinary amount of time actually discussing is what existed before humans evolved and what horrible things we have done since then. I fail to see what the Mau Mau Uprising or what killed off the woolly mammoths have to do with this book, and yet there they are, gobbling up space and too much of my time. I made it a handful of pages past 100, and in that space there were about two chapters in the book that actually talked about what would happen to human-made and natural spaces once humans were gone. That's it, just two! They were fantastic chapters, very informative and easy to read, but the off-topic junk is taking up too much space and I find myself actually angry at the prospect of reading this book. I remember being interested when first published, so I could not resist a paperback reissue. A fresh reminder that geologically, we are all just a lingering breath. The surface of the earth has been made and remade nearly endless times. Lightly touches on another point I usually make in these discussion, which is that speciation will certainly happen again once we are gone - so our focus on endangered species sort of misses the point. Of course we should be better stewards, but we will quickly be forgotten as multiple new species burst forth from our demise.
That said, the science and factual stuff is, almost invariably, mind-boggling. I did not know, for instance, that ships the length of three football pitches entering the locks of the Panama Canal have only two feet of clearance on each side; that there may well be at least one billion annual bird deaths from flying into glass in the United States alone; or that graphic designers have been called in to imagine what warnings against coming too close to nuclear waste containers will be comprehensible 10,000 or more years from now. PremisDistincionsLlistes notables
Referències a aquesta obra en fonts externes. Wikipedia en anglès (13)Journalist Weisman offers an original approach to questions of humanity's impact on the planet. Drawing on the expertise of engineers, atmospheric scientists, art conservators, zoologists, oil refiners, marine biologists, astrophysicists, religious leaders, and paleontologists, he illustrates what the planet might be like today if humans disappeared. He explains how our massive infrastructure would collapse and finally vanish without human presence; which everyday items may become immortalized as fossils; how copper pipes and wiring would be crushed into mere seams of reddish rock; why some of our earliest buildings might be the last architecture left; and how plastic, bronze sculpture, radio waves, and some man-made molecules may be our most lasting gifts to the universe. As he shows which human devastations are indelible, and which examples of our highest art and culture would endure longest, Weisman's narrative ultimately drives toward a radical but persuasive solution that needn't depend on our demise.--From publisher description. No s'han trobat descripcions de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — S'està carregant… GèneresClassificació Decimal de Dewey (DDC)304.2Social sciences Social Sciences; Sociology and anthropology Factors affecting social behavior Human ecologyLCC (Clas. Bibl. Congrés EUA)ValoracióMitjana:
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The answer turns this into a fairly hopeful book: not very long. For most things, anyway. Plastics will be here long after any signs of us are entirely wiped from the planet. But, out cities will be gone in a geological blink of the eye: a few hundred years. ( )