Weisman asks what happens if every human disappears tomorrow, and reports it out with the engineers and biologists who know. New York floods in two days once the pumps stop; the subways go first, then the streets collapse into rivers. Houses go in fifty years, bridges in a few hundred. Farm fields return to forest, Manhattan back to hardwood. Plastics and PCBs last essentially forever, and the ceramic and bronze and the Chunnel outlast everything. He uses the Korean DMZ, Chernobyl, and Białowieża as places where a version of this is already running. I know it’s weird, but as I imagined a world turning to a post-human state, I found the book strangely comforting. I’m not anti-human, but if we can’t clean up this mess, we don’t deserve to be here.