BookBrowse Reviews The World Without Us: A penetrating, page-turning tour of a post-human Earth

According to the CIA Factbook, in 2007, for every 8 people who died 20 were born. Depending on who's estimating that means that the world's population is growing at the rate of about 1 million people every 4 days.

Let's stop for a moment to contemplate this mind-boggling figure. Each week, the global population is increasing by more people than live in the entire of Philadelphia. Each month, the global population increases by almost that of New York City.

Somewhere between when my father was born in the 1920s and today, the world's population has increased more than three-fold from less than 2 billion to 6.7 billion. Sheer numbers combined with "advances" in technology have changed humanity from an...