The World Without Us

[DWill]

Anyone happen to have read this book by the journalist Alan Weisman? Pub date was 2007, and I've had it for a while, just started reading it. It's a fascinating thought experiment asking the question: what would become of the world if we, our entire species, were to suddenly disappear? He starts off by picturing the slow (but not that slow) ruin of our buildings and other built things, many of which are not built to last, anyway. He's now going into whether our closest relatives, the chimps, would start to undergo a speeded-up evolutionary development without our controlling presence.

He tells us something of interest to our pets. While cats might be able to adapt as feral animals, our dogs would quickly be picked off by more aggressive animals.

His other books sound worth looking at. He wrote An Echo in My Blood; Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World; and La Frontera: The United States Border with Mexico

[ant]

Yes! I have this book. Read it several years ago and just dug it up from under some pile a few days ago.
I'd like to read it again.

I clearly remember part of the discussion being about NY City and its subway systems deteriorating. Is that correct?
Also, I do remember that cats would be able to hold their own for the most part but that dogs would eventually die off quickly.

He's now going into whether our closest relatives, the chimps, would start to undergo a speeded-up evolutionary development without our controlling presence.

I don't remember the above.
Can you encapsulate that here?

Great book!
Thanks for posting this.

[Chris OConnor]

This book should be on the next poll.

[DWill]

Right, good idea. I also suggested it to Mountain State Freethinkers, who are having a meeting devoted to the proposed designation of a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene.

Ant, Weisman uses the supposition that it was moving out onto the open savannahs that spurred the evolution of our distant ancestors. With us gone, would another animal maybe take advantage and fill this niche? It would be the chimps out of all the primates, because the gorillas have a diet more specialized to the forest, and the baboons are greatly outnumbered by the chimps. But it all depends, says Weisman, on the savannahs remaining. Since they were created by humans, it's possible that without humans, the forests would return. And then we'd expect a huge increase in the chimp population, but whether the species would then evolve in ways that mimicked our own is doubtful. There wouldn't seem to be the same pressure to do so. It might take another ice age to create create conditions that would exert that pressure.

As you know from having read it, some parts of the book are speculative, but in a good way.

[sonoman]

Judaism is basically an atheist theology where a god that demanded so much never provided protection so what's the point? Because I wasn't raised in a Jewish household I missed the atheist mindset that underlies most Jews today. My mother was an atheist. I took care of her when she was dying and it was hard for her. I couldn't share my security with her, only my love for her. God did touch her once but she sort of rejected it but not really, a not so strange case where she saw three angels, three women come into the room while she was in hospital from aspirin poisoning. We're both super-sensitive to aspirin and she found this out after taking too many too many days in a row for some tooth problem, I can't remember now. Tylenol poisoning almost sent me to the hospital last year. Had to learn the hard way about that one too. Anyway, my mom later painted a picture showing the angels, vague shapes in a hall. Closest she got to spiritual consciousness and the lack of it showed up in her end days as a kind of despair. How do you share the experience of spiritual reality to someone who's never felt a shiver of spiritual contact that is akin to the shiver one feels when one hears really good music. But music doesn't have a personal touch that coming from Other. Music can be reduced to marks on a page, numbers in a data stream, but it can't speak to you personally anymore than any recording can do. The shivers of spiritual contact that accompany a lot of my religious visions and revelations are personal in the way that I'm in a two-way relationship that's alive and not myself generating an interior dialogue projecting it out and then hearing it again. This is problem with most personal gnosis. It is an interior dialogue projected out. But when your interior dialogue is putting this new information into it, I mean, really, whoever heard of a Christian peace-sign sword being baptized by a California hippie from Humboldt County to sanctify it for an eventual home in the Holy Land? Crazy idea. Yet two days after the sword of peace undergoes its final consecration baptism in the Jordan river in Israel, it becomes a religious icon that is honored all the way through the annual Easter procession through Nazareth, Israel, and at the end of it Paxcalibur and I the baptizer, are honored by over 500 of these Nazarean Christians in the courtyard of the Church of St. John. Ok, is this personal gnosis now? Where do you draw the line between personal religious visions and all the crazy visions loose in the world at any given time? For me, in service to God Most High and the Spirit of Christ, I do what I'm told to do and trust God knows what They're about because I could never for the life of me foreseen the result of my following God's will and directions for making a Sword of Peace, one not like Isaiah's famous one, which I actually thought was going to be Paxcalibur's role at the beginning and most all the way through the steps until Pax was confiscated by Israeli customs and kept for a month before being returned to me. That was when Pax was still a regular sword, the vision call to change the blade came a couple of weeks before I had to somehow get Pax back into Israel through customs. And the new meaning came along with it that surpasses the swords into plowshares which even in the Bible was taken back by God telling Joel I think it was to change the plowshares and pruning hooks back into swords and spears. Not so Paxcalibur. New spiritual meaning for a New Age. And this New Age hippie peace sign sword has been in the Keepership of the highest ranking Christian priest in Nazareth for ten years now. A Palestinian peace organization is set to become Pax's next Keeper. They've hosted talks between PA and Hamas and are a promoter of Palestinian women's rights. Is this personal gnosis?

Another "crazy" vision. This one with a real visual Vision, a Native American Spirit Woman, comes with a name, Josephine. She will bear the Spirit of Christ. Christ Josephine. Like the Pax vision, it comes as a first great vision, then there are follow up additions, more information, more directions, that come in through the years, because both the Paxcalibur and the Christ Josephine visions are in spiritual motion. They are alive and affecting people. And like the Pax vision is strange for Catholic and Greek Orthodox Christians to accept, the Josephine one is filled with foreign to Native American religious ideas. But there is now a Northern Cheyenne Keeper of the Josephine Bundle that awaits Christ Josephine when She shows up to claim. She fulfills the Return of White Buffalo Calf Woman, which I found out five years later after I had the original vision. In the last few years a very strong Egyptian spiritual connection has come into the Christ Josephine vision and there is a most beautiful ankh awaiting Josephine in Her Bundle. In a couple of weeks I'm going to meet a Northern Cheyenne young woman who contacted me about a month and half ago now because she a glass sculptor and discovered strange healing properties to this glass ankh she had made, healing that happened at dawn and she Googled ankhs and found the Vision of Christ Josephine and was quite astounded at the synchronicity. Now is this personal gnosis? Outside of me. Now are these "personal gnosis" and only my imagination? Did I imagine 500+ people, that's half a thousand people, feeling something special about a strange sword? And it is obviously wasn't a one-time deal either, not when Pax is kept in a special room for meeting dignitaries for ten years and will become the logo and icon for another Holy Land special to Christianity community. Is this personal gnosis and all imagination? Did I see a Paxcalibur movie or read a Paxcalibur book. Did the makers of Peter Potter do a remake of King Arthur and Excalibur that I saw somewhere where they went all modern and became hippies and made Excalibur into a peace sign as said "Peace, brother, no more war"? And did I then go round up all these Israelis and Pals hiring them to oh and ah over Pax because I told them to, me the aging hippie from America who doesn't speak their language or know anyone there? Did I arrange to have this Cheyenne woman be closeted away learning esoteric Egyptian lore so she could appear out of nowhere to show spiritual energy coming through the Josephine vision? If you read the Story of Paxcalibur you will know that the vision called for Pax to be gold-plated at some point to become the "Golden Ruler". I've built up a Pax fund for having Pax gold-plated and had only been waiting to finish my website updating (a very long process, lot's and lot's of pages and images to link together) to get going with making arrangement for Pax's gold-plating. So I've been Googling gold-plating procedures this past week or so and guess what. My new N. Cheyenne friend has been seriously doing alchemy gold transmutation experiments using both Kabbalah and Egyptian alchemy formulaes and she mentioned some of the chemicals involved and they seem to match the gold-plating ones. Are these personal gnosis events? Each of us imagining these connections to each other's worlds?

Is our world without purpose and just a place, "topia", a ball of water and rock and dirt and much nitrogen in the air but enough oxygen to make chemical reactions happen to propel the expansion of carbon-base living organisms, each without purpose other than to reproduce. And a human collective of individuals without any more purpose than to procreate, get that shiny new car and down payment on a house 30 Ethiopians could easily find spaciously comfortable, and then leave a good report card or bad one at the end of the day, pack up and step in front of the nearest bus because why bother to wait because more Ethiopians or Mexicans or the bank wants the space? What is the point of a purposeless existence, a purposeless cosmos? My mother, the atheist, was not comfortable with passing on. It didn't sit right with her. She didn't feel Their love directly. I have. For years. And the idea of a world without human beings is as absurd to me as a world without God. We made Creation for Us to evolve eventually into God and that is our purpose on earth, in the universe. This is truth from Us in the future embedding experiences of future knowledge into messengers able to receive the spiritual embeddings and pass on the information to generations down the time line, each one to add to the next to develop humanity and humanity's material technological advancement to higher knowledge and powers to change things. Willy-nilly we are evolving into our destiny; to become one with God. The Christ paradigm models the way it comes about through the development of the Humanitarian Model, as only humane beings have the knowledge and will to create the harmonic balances needed to evolve Life into God.

I went to the Gaviotas link and saw their "eutopia", the "good place" as I've been using the term since making my bumpersticker "Eutopia or Bust" back in 1968. We live in Dystopia, but "utopia" is no place while Gaviotas is Eutopia, a Good Place. Were that my fellow Jews had the Christ experience I did. They wouldn't write books about a world without God or people.