After We Are Gone

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Article at MSNBC about the book The World Without Us.

The article starts: The Second Coming may be the most widely anticipated apocalypse ever, but it’s far from the only version of the end times. Environmentalists have their own eschatology—a vision of a world not consumed by holy fire but returned to ecological balance by the removal of the most disruptive species in history. That, of course, would be us, the 6 billion furiously metabolizing and reproducing human beings polluting its surface. There’s even a group trying to bring it about, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, whose Web site calls on people to stop having children altogether. And now the journalist Alan Weisman has produced, if not a bible, at least a Book of Revelation, “The World Without Us,” which conjures up a future something like … well, like the area around Chernobyl, the Russian nuclear reactor that blew off a cloud of radioactive steam in 1986. In a radius of 30 kilometers, there are no human settlements’just forests that have begun reclaiming fields and towns, home to birds, deer, wild boar and moose. Article continued here.