The World Without Us: An Evening with Alan Weisman

The School of Extended Education, Lifelong Learning Institute, and North Bay International Studies Project, in collaboration with Associated Students Productions are proud to present The World Without Us, a lecture with Alan Weisman. The event will take place on Wednesday, May 7th at 7:30pm in the Sonoma State University Cooperage. The lecture is FREE to SSU Students, Staff, and Faculty, $10 for Lifelong Learning Students, and $15 general admission.

In a lecture discussing the premise of his best selling work of the same title, "The World Without Us", Alan Weisman offers an utterly original approach to questions of humanity's impact on the planet: he asks us to envision our Earth, without us. "The World Without Us" reached #6 on the New York Times Best sellers list and #1 for Time and Entertainment Weekly Magazines and has been called one of the grandest thought Experiments of our time. The book and lecture reveal how, just days after humans disappear, floods in New York's subways would start eroding the city's foundations, and how, as the world's cities crumble, asphalt jungles give way to real ones. It describes the distinct ways that organic and chemically-treated farms would revert to wild, how billions more birds would flourish, and how even cockroaches in unheated cities would perish without us. Drawing on the expertise of engineers, atmospheric scientists, art conservators, zoologists, oil refiners, marine biologists, astrophysicists, religious leaders from rabbis to the Dalai Lama, and paleontologists - who describe a pre-human world inhabited by mega-fauna like giant sloths that stood taller than mammoths - Weisman illustrates what the planet might be like today, if not for us.

Alan Weisman is an award-winning journalist whose reports have appeared in Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Discover, and on NPR, among others. A former contributing editor to The Los Angeles Times Magazine, he is a senior radio producer for Homelands Productions and teaches international journalism at the University of Arizona. His essay "Earth Without People" (Discover magazine, February 2005), on which The World Without Us expands, was selected for Best American Science Writing 2000 - 2007. For more information on Alan Weisman and "The World Without Us", please visit www.worldwithoutus.com.

Tickets are available at the Student Union front desk and by phone. For more information on this and other events and to purchase tickets please call 707-664-2382.

Last modified: 04.23.2008 JC