It’s All In How You Look At It.

I recently read a book by Alan Weisman called ‘The World Without Us.’ In it Mr. Weisman uses his observations of what has gone on in the world once humans have left an area to explain what would happen if we all disappeared tomorrow.

He takes us into a setting in which New York’s subways would be reclaimed by nature within days. We also see what happened to a portion of a city in Cyprus that has been abandoned for close to thirty years due to politics, where plants have begun to take hold in the middle of the streets and the beach is reclaiming the coastal hotels. After talking to engineers and people in the know Alan Weisman has discovered that the earth will take over with little effort.

I know that the author intended to make us think that we are in fact destroying the planet with factories and cars and just plain living. However, after reading this book it simply made me realize that there is pretty much nothing we could do to prevent the earth from retaking our cities. In fact we are constantly fighting daily to keep buildings from falling over, roads from cracking and bridges from falling down(recently unsuccessfully).

It truly is amazing how two people can see things so differently.