"The World Without Us" (Alan Weisman)
[where: 11 N May St, Chicago, IL 60607]
I heard the author (Alan Weisman) discussing his book on a recent NPR podcast, quite fascinating.
Imagining a crumbling, rotting, ratless urban wasteland; the squirrels move in
Standing on Navy Pier, scanning the imposing forest of proud Loop towers, Alan Weisman envisions a Chicago without us.
He sees roofs leaking, frozen pipes bursting, basements flooding and falcons nesting in the former offices of corporate go-getters. He pictures Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks" and Georges Seurat's "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte -- 1884" covered with mold, ruined. Trees growing out of the State Street pavement. Bricks crumbling to dust. Fires. Vines crawling up the sides of buildings. And skyscrapers with weakened foundations tumbling down.
"If a building topples," he says, "it'll bring down other buildings, just like a big tree falling in the forest will bring down other big trees."
Weisman, an environmental journalist who lives in western Massachusetts, is the author of "The World Without Us." The book, based on interviews with scientists and other experts around the world, describes what would be likely to happen across the planet if, for some reason, human beings were suddenly to vanish all at once.
[From Chicago ... without us]
Plastic-devouring microbes would be useful already, if they weren't misused in some sci-fi terrorism plot.
