of Jared Diamond, Tim Flannery and E.O. Wilson, and writes that The World Without Us "narrowly avoids engendering the gloom-and-doom ennui that tends to engulf the poor reader after reading a catalogue of human rapacity". Mark Lynas in the New Statesman noted that "whereas most environmental books sag under the weight of their accumulated bad news, The World Without Us seems refreshingly positive". Demonstrating the optimism on the grim subject matter Appleton quotes an ecologist from the book saying "if the planet can recover from the Permian, it can recover from the human". In popular culture The Earth After Us explores the geological legacy of the human species. There Will Come Soft Rains, a 1920 poem by Sara Teasdale. After Man: A Zoology of the Future considers the evolution of life on Earth 50 million years after the extinction of human beings. The plot of Foundation and Earth by Isaac Asimov (a continuation of his Foundation Trilogy), includes Aurora, a habitable planet which was abandoned by people for thousands of years. That planet, however, was settled by people, and its limited ecology was maintained by them, leading to its deterioration in the absence of human beings. There have been several TV specials relating to the same topic: Life After People shows what would happen if humans disappeared instantly. Aftermath: Population Zero is the same as the above, but gives more detail into certain things. The Future Is Wild, while not seeking to explain our disappearance, shows how life on Earth (without humans) would evolve 5, 100 and 200 million years in the future. The 2009 hip-hop song "The High Line" by Kinetics & One Love, inspired by The World Without Us, is a pro-green, anti-deforestation song that paints the picture of trees and plants reclaiming the buildings of New York City long after the presence of humans. Like author Alan Weisman, rapper Kinetics uses the High Line railway in Manhattan as an example of nature’s potential for reclamation of manmade structures. The 2013 video game The Last of Us, which takes place twenty years after an apocalyptic event, uses The World Without Us as inspiration for the look of the city settings. The 2017 video game NieR: Automata, which considers the Earth devoid of humanity for several hundreds of years, draws heavy inspiration from The World Without Uss depictions of cities and former civilisation habitats in its level design. In