Alan Weisman (b. 1947) is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Vanity Fair, Mother Jones, and Discover, among others. He has published five books in addition to The World Without Us. He has taught writing and journalism at Prescott College and Williams College, as well as journalism and Latin American studies at the University of Arizona, where he led an annual field program in international field journalism. He is a senior producer of radio documentaries at Homelands Productions.

Weisman’s career as a globe-trotting international journalist—including terms as a Fulbright Scholar in Colombia and a writer-in-residence in the Dominican Republic—prepared him well to tackle the globe-spanning subjects of The World Without Us. Weisman recounts on the book’s website:

For a long time I’ve sought some fresh, non-threatening approach to disarm readers’ apprehensions about environmental destruction long enough that they might consider the impacts of unbridled human activity on the rest of nature—and on our own fate (“About the Author.” The World Without Us, 2007).

In the Acknowledgments for The World Without Us, Weisman explains that he had been intrigued by science since he was a child, making the research and interviews he conducted for the work a labor of love.