The World Without Us Quotes

“Without us, Earth will abide and endure; without her, however, we could not even be.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“Nobility is expensive, nonproductive, and parasitic, siphoning away too much of society’s energy to satisfy its frivolous cravings.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“in the day after humans disappear, nature takes over and immediately begins cleaning house - our houses.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“All of us humans have myriad other species to thank. Without them, we couldn't exist. It's that simple, and we can't afford to ignore them, anymore than I can afford to neglect my precious wife--nor the sweet mother Earth that births and holds us all.

Without us, Earth will abide and endure; without her, however, we could not even be.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“Change is the hallmark of nature. Nothing remains the same.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“Paranormalists, however, insist that our minds are transmitters that, with special effort, can focus like lasers to communicate across great distances, and even make things happen. That may seem far-fetched, but it's also a definition of prayer.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“But the Earth holds ghosts, even of entire nations.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“...los PCB eran fluidos que nunca dejaban de lubricar; los PBDE, aislantes que nunca dejaban de evitar que el plástico se derritiera, y el DDT, un pesticida que nunca dejaba de matar. Como tales, ahora resultan difíciles de destruir; algunos, como los PCB, apenas muestran signo alguno de biodegradarse.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“You understand... just what the Taoists mean when they say that soft is stronger than hard.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“By 2005, Moore was referring to the gyrating Pacific dump as 10 million square miles—nearly the size of Africa. It wasn’t the only one: the planet has six other major tropical oceanic gyres, all of them swirling with ugly debris. It was as if plastic exploded upon the world from a tiny seed after World War II and, like the Big Bang, was still expanding. Even if all production suddenly ceased, an astounding amount of the astoundingly durable stuff was already out there. Plastic debris, Moore believed, was now the most common surface feature of the world’s oceans. How long would it last? Were there any benign, less-immortal substitutes that civilization could convert to, lest the world be”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“Puszcza, an old Polish word, means “forest primeval.” Straddling the border between Poland and Belarus, the half-million acres of the Białowieża Puszcza contain Europe’s last remaining fragment of old-growth, lowland wilderness.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“plastic-wrapped evermore?”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“The lesson of every extinction, says the Smithsonian’s Doug Erwin, is that we can’t predict what the world will be 5 million years later by looking at the survivors.

"There will be plenty of surprises. Let’s face it: who would’ve predicted the existence of turtles? Who would ever have imagined that an organism would essentially turn itself inside out, pulling its shoulder girdle inside its ribs to form a carapace? If turtles didn’t exist, no vertebrate biologist would’ve suggested that anything would do that: he’d have been laughed out of town. The only real prediction you can make is that life will go on. And that it will be interesting.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“...los nómadas y sus rebaños tomaban lo que necesitaban y luego se iban, dejando tras de sí una naturaleza aún más rica que antes.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“Missing, however, are nearly all fauna adapted to us. The seemingly invincible cockroach, a tropical import, long ago froze in unheated apartment buildings. Without garbage, rats starved or became lunch for the raptors nesting in burnt-out skyscrapers.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“In 1955, a little more than four years after leaving a TV studio in Hollywood, signals bearing the first sound and images of the I Love Lucy show passed Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our sun. A half-century later, a scene with Lucy disguised as a clown sneaking into Ricky’s Tropicana Night Club was 50-plus light-years, or about 300 trillion miles, away. Since the Milky Way is 100,000 light-years across and 1,000 light-years thick, and our solar system is near the middle of the galactic plane, this means in about AD 2450 the expanding sphere of radio waves bearing Lucy, Ricky, and their neighbors the Mertzes will emerge from the top and bottom of our galaxy and enter intergalactic space.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“We may be undermined by our survival instincts, honed over eons to help us deny, defy, or ignore catastrophic portents lest they paralyze us with fright.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“IT IS STARTLING to think that all Europe once looked like this Puszcza. To enter it is to realize that most of us were bred to a pale copy of what nature intended. Seeing elders with trunks seven feet wide, or walking through stands of the tallest trees here—gigantic Norway spruce, shaggy as Methuselah—should seem as exotic as the Amazon or Antarctica to someone raised among the comparatively puny, second-growth woodlands found throughout the Northern Hemisphere. Instead, what’s astonishing is how primally familiar it feels. And, on some cellular level, how complete.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“was a study on fulmar carcasses washed ashore on North Sea coastlines. Ninety-five percent had plastic in their stomachs—an average of 44 pieces per bird. A proportional amount in a human being would weigh nearly five pounds. There was no way of knowing if the plastic had killed them, although it was a safe bet that, in many, chunks of indigestible plastic had blocked their intestines. Thompson reasoned that if larger plastic pieces were breaking down into smaller particles, smaller organisms would likely be consuming them. He devised an aquarium experiment, using bottom-feeding lugworms that live on organic sediments, barnacles that filter organic matter suspended in water, and sand fleas that eat beach detritus. In the experiment, plastic particles and fibers were provided in proportionately bite-size quantities. Each creature promptly ingested them.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“Jefferson estaba convencido de que aquellos eran iguales. En 1796 recibió un envío, supuestamente de huesos de mamut, procedente del condado de Greenbriar, en Virginia; pero una enorme garra le alertó de inmediato de que se trataba de otra cosa, posiblemente de una especie de león inmensa. Tras consultar con diversos anatomistas, finalmente lo identificó, y a él se atribuye la primera descripción de un perezoso gigante norteamericano, hoy conocido como Megalonyx jeffersoni.”
― Alan Weisman, El mundo sin nosotros

“What did this mean for the ocean, the ecosystem, the future? All this plastic had appeared in barely more than 50 years. Would its chemical constituents or additives—for instance, colorants such as metallic copper— concentrate as they ascended the food chain, and alter evolution? Would it last long enough to enter the fossil record? Would geologists millions of years hence find Barbie doll parts embedded in conglomerates formed in seabed depositions? Would they be intact enough to be pieced together like dinosaur bones? Or would they decompose first, expelling hydrocarbons that would seep out of a vast plastic Neptune’s graveyard for eons to come, leaving fossilized imprints of Barbie and Ken hardened in stone for eons beyond?”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“The largest, most conspicuous items bobbing in the surf were slowly getting smaller. At the same time, there was no sign that any of the plastic was biodegrading, even when reduced to tiny fragments. “We imagined it was being ground down smaller and smaller, into a kind of powder. And we realized that smaller and smaller could lead to bigger and bigger problems.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“The Panama Canal,' says Abdiel Perez, 'is like a wound that humans inflicted on the Earth--one that nature is trying to heal.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“En un mundo sin humanos, las luces rojas dejarán de parpadear al cesar las emisiones de radio y de televisión; dejarán de producirse millones de conversaciones diarias a través de teléfono móvil, y al cabo de un año habrá varios miles de millones más de pájaros vivos.
Pero mientras sigamos aquí, las torres de transmisión representan solo el principio de la involuntaria matanza que la civilización humana está perpetrando con unas criaturas con plumas a las que ni siquiera nos comemos.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“Casi el 12 por ciento de la masa continental del planeta está cultivada, mientras que solo el 3 por ciento está ocupado por ciudades grandes o pequeñas. Si incluimos también los pastizales, la cantidad de tierra del planeta dedicada a la producción de alimento humano es más de la tercera parte de su superficie terrestre.”
― Alan Weisman, El mundo sin nosotros

“In the 1930s, with no computers to precisely calculate tolerances of construction materials, cautious engineers simply heaped on excess mass and redundancy. “We’re living off the overcapacity of our forefathers.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“Arsenic turned out to work even better, and was cheaper. Until it was banned in the 1890s, it was used widely, and heavy arsenic levels are sometimes a problem for archaeologists examining some old U.S. graveyards. What they generally find is that the bodies decomposed anyway, but the arsenic stayed.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“Today’s amount of plastic will take hundreds of thousands of years to consume, but, eventually, it will all biodegrade. Lignin is far more complex, and it biodegrades. It’s just a matter of waiting for evolution to catch up with the materials we are making.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“Este equilibrio entre humanos, flora y fauna empezó a tambalearse cuando los primeros se convirtieron ellos mismos en presa; o, mejor dicho, en mercancía.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“practical time scale. There is no mechanism in the marine environment to biodegrade that long a molecule.” Even if photodegradable nets helped marine mammals live, he concluded, their powdery residue remains in the sea, where the filter feeders will find it. “Except for a small amount that’s been incinerated,” says Tony Andrady the oracle, “every bit of plastic manufactured in the world for the last 50 years or so still remains. It’s somewhere in the environment.” That half-century’s total production now surpasses 1 billion tons. It includes hundreds of different plastics, with untold permutations involving added plasticizers, opacifiers, colors, fillers, strengtheners, and light stabilizers. The longevity of each can vary enormously. Thus far, none has disappeared. Researchers have attempted to find out how long it will take polyethylene to biodegrade by incubating a sample in a live bacteria culture”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us