Reddit reviews World Without Us

Hi there, and welcome back.

I would very much like this book, please. It talks about the world without us and how Mother Nature will take back the planet from us.

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

Thank you.

This makes a good read.

It is, white people very quickly took buffalo killing to a whole other level.

Jarring as this picture is, however, I don't think the correct lesson to draw is that Europeans were the only ones to drive species extinct. It's quite possible that Native Americans helped to kill off all sorts of species. About 10,000 years ago, when humans are thought to have first arrived in North America, there was a massive die-off of large animals in North America which may have been caused to some degree by those people. It wouldn't have happened as quickly as Europeans wiped species out over the past few centuries, but over hundreds or thousands of years Native Americans may have done comparable or greater damage to the world's collection of large creatures.

In fact, in The World Without Us, Alan Weisman argues that buffalo themselves may have been headed in the direction of extinction from overhunting by Natives (Chapter 6), but the buffalo got a reprieve when European diseases decimated the Native population, allowing buffalo to spread across the continent again. Of course if that was the case, the reprieve was short-lived since Europeans quickly kicked into buffalo killing gear and more or less snuffed them out over the course of a few decades.