"Brilliantly creative... An audacious intellectual adventure... His thought experiment is so intellectually fascinating, so oddly playful, that it escapes categorizing and cliches It sucks us in with a vision of what is, what has been, and what is yet to come It’s a trumpet call that sounds from the other end of the universe and from inside us all."

--Salon

"An astonishing mass of reportage that envisions a world suddenly bereft of humans."

--The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Prelude: A Monkey Koan

PART Ⅰ

1 A Lingering Scent of Eden

2 Unbuilding Our Home

3 The City Without Us

4 The World Just Before Us

5 The Lost Menagerie

6 The African Paradox

PART Ⅱ

7 What Falls Apart

8 What Lasts

9 Polymers Are Forever

10 The Petro Patch

11 The World Without Farms

PART Ⅲ

12 The Fate of Ancient and Modern Wonders of the World

13 The World Without War

14 Wings Without Us

15 Hot Legacy

16 Our Geologic Record

PART Ⅳ

17 Where Do We Go from Here?

18 Art Beyond Us

19 The Sea Cradle

Coda: Our Earth, Our Souls

Acknowledgments

Select Bibliography

Index