"The World Without Us" by Alan Weisman; $24.95

If every human being in the world vanished tomorrow, New York City's subway system would last about 36 hours before flooding. Twenty years hence, Lexington Avenue would be a river. The Statue of Liberty would remain intact, though very possibly at the bottom of the harbor.

These are among journalist Alan Weisman's conclusions in "The World Without Us," in which he envisions the earth devoid of human life. It's a quick, absorbing read — a summer beach book with brains.

Weisman begins with a parable (a tiresome staple of environmental jeremiads) titled "A Monkey Koan," about an Amazonian tribe that slaughters the spider monkeys it considers its ancestors, for food. It's a forced, formulaic prelude about human effects on the surrounding world.

The rest of Weisman's tour of modern society minus society is enlightening without being pedantic or preachy. He's interested in the concrete: Will songbirds survive house cats whose owners no longer feed them? Will dogs turn into something like Australia's dingoes, or will the responsible ones go on protecting sheep?

Near the outset Weisman looks at the world before us, considering certain North American animals that may have been driven to extinction by human beings. This is the beginning of a theme he will carry through the book: Nature is weird and wild, and there's no accounting for what evolution will do.

There is, however, accounting for what the weather will do.

Take your house. The windows will shatter, both from kamikaze birds' inability to perceive them and from the surrounding walls' movement as water damage degrades them. In cold places, the pipes will burst.

The bathroom tile, however, will survive, at least if it's fired ceramic, which, Weisman says, is much like a fossil.

Though he begins at home, Weisman travels around the world to find out firsthand what will happen to it once human beings are no longer meddling. He stops in Panama, Ukraine, Hawai'i, South Korea, Texas, Turkey and elsewhere; at times the book is like an environmentalist's travel diary, a whirlwind tour of the planet.

A very few places — the Korean DMZ is one — show us what happens when people can no longer enter. In the 50 years since land mines have barred the area to human habitation, Asiatic black bears, endangered mountain goats and leopards have found new homes there.

Or take Chernobyl after the nuclear disaster that irradiated the countryside in 1986. The area's birds began returning to the site in a year. Now they act normal, though an abnormal number have odd patches of white feathers, and fewer make it back from their yearly migration than before. (The long-term effects of radiation on the region's animals are still unknown.)

The carvings on Mount Rushmore will be around for the next 7.2 million years, Weisman informs us. Our plastics may well be around forever. The newer, supposedly biodegradable plastics may seem to decompose, but they remain problematic on the molecular level: The polymers — molecular chains that form their base material — have yet to degrade.

Unlike many other books with ecological themes, "The World Without Us" argues that life will go on. In another 100,000 years, one expert tells Weisman, it's entirely possible that something will learn how to eat and digest plastics.

Weisman's thought experiment benefits from his thoroughness, his curiosity and his willingness to travel to the ends of the earth to find out exactly what does happen to previously inhabited land when it's abandoned.

Along the way he encounters groups insisting we ought to stop reproducing and go gentle into that good night; scientists convinced that the next technology we come up with will kill us; and "transhumanists," who think we can build circuitry to improve our minds and bodies so vastly that we can evade mortality.

The Dalai Lama may have the last word, though. Does the world go on without us? "Who knows?" he says.