The Death
Of Civilization And The
Rebirth Of
The World
by
William H. Kotke
The human family existed in equilibrium for possibly a million years. As forager-hunters we were adapted to the planetary life. Our human culture reflected that adaptation. Our knowledge and ceremonies reflected the flow of life around us. Our seasonal migration patterns followed the cyclic flow. When the deer were fat in the mountains we were there; when the berries were ripe in the valley we were there.
When the horse was domesticated in Central Asia a new form of human culture began. This form reached its first zenith in the Han Empire of China and the Sumerian Empire of the "Fertile Crescent" in the Mid-East.
Rather than a matrilocal culture as was common in former times, this culture was a strict patriarchy and an inversion of the former. Where the former cultures of forager-hunters stressed cooperation, sharing, humility and adaptation to the life flows of the planet, the new patriarchy stressed the opposite. The new imperial culture was based in militarism, social hierarchy and an unlimited materialist accumulation. Thus the cycles of empire began in the human family.
The culture of empire, as it does to this day, sucks up the fertility of the earth in its various forms of wildlife, forests, grazing lands and soils to gain its excessive growth. It runs a net deficit of the life and fertility of the earth until there is no more.
Within the spread of the large eight thousand-year cycle of empire were many smaller cycles of boom and bust. The record of empire (a.k.a., "civilization") is that it swells itself based on the ecological fertility of the land until it is exhausted and then the empire implodes and ceases to function.
China, Sumeria And Babylon
We see this in China where before recorded history nearly half of that landmass was covered with a great Temperate Zone forest; now little is left. The famous floods of the major rivers caused by stripping the land, bring down the yellow loess soils. The erosion materials have caused the nearby ocean to be called the Yellow Sea.
In the area of Sumeria and Babylon, civilized agriculture and overgrazing by domesticated animals has created such erosion that the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers has extended itself one hundred and eighty-five miles into the gulf, all of this distance being filled in by erosion materials. One third of the arable land of Iraq is still so salinized by Babylonian irrigation of five thousand years ago that it cannot be used. Once the slave powered, military empire of Babylon fueled itself on the forest, grasslands and soils of that watershed but now if it were not for oil it would be a poor region subsisting on goats and camels which can eat the remaining thorn bushes. The ecological exhaustion of the empire caused it to implode.Greece And Rome
Both the empires of Rome and Greece stripped their native lands and both used the fertility of the former healthy ecology of North Africa to fuel their growth. As those African forests and soils were decimated those empires declined. Now the humans in that region subsist on the ecological poverty food of goats, grapes and olives, which can exist on eroded and rocky soils.
Following that, another cycle of empire developed00 that began to swell itself on the forests and soils of Europe. The worldwide colonialist empire that is now ending has followed that cycle.
The Mass Die Off Of Human Population
The social/ecological crisis of the planet really began five thousand years ago with the culture of empire and will end with the mass die-off and the end of that human culture.
The end of that culture and the mass die-off is insured by the fact that civilization has already greatly overshot its survival systems.
According to the World Watch Institute, the planet lost one fifth of its topsoil in the period between 1975 and 2000. The planet will lose another twenty percent in the following twenty five-year period ending in 2025. The continuing ability to feed the population of the planet is based upon the creation of artificial fertilizer directly from petroleum. This biological energy/petroleum energy trade off is done by injecting the artificial fertilizer into what are essentially exhausted soils. (Soil scientists calculate that one half of the topsoil has eroded from the Great Plains since the killing of the buffalo and the arrival of the plow). Nearly half of the world population is fed because of the added production of food created by artificial fertilizer.
This is not the only over-shoot factor with the food supply. When the Greenhouse Effect changes the climates to a radical degree, the food supply system will collapse because crops depend upon regular, dependable climates.
Out on that same limb also is the population of the Phoenix/Tucson Basin in Arizona. There the population continues to grow while non-replenishable fossil water is pumped out of the ground to support them. An even larger problem is the Ogalalla Aquifer in the western side of the Great Plains. That fossil water, deposited at the end of the ice age, supports one fifth of American agriculture and is due to run out in a few years. Similar situations exist in many areas of the earth.
As population and consumption explode, the health of the planet declines with increasing speed. Glaciers and icecaps are melting more rapidly. The permafrost in northern climes recedes north. True to the calculations of biologists in previous decades, the world's rainforest cover is nearly gone. The world's coral reefs, incubators of ocean life, continue to die.
The Past Thirty Years
One could go on with the details but a voluminous scientific report compiled over many years by the WorldWide Fund for Nature, the New Economics Foundation, and the World Conservation Monitoring Centre at Cambridge, England, sums up the big picture. They state that, "Humans have destroyed more than 30 per cent of the natural world since 1970 with serious depletion of the forest, freshwater and marine systems on which life depends." They further state that consumption pressure has doubled in the last twenty-five years and continues to accelerate.
Anyone still skeptical can look at the reports of paleontologists who say that we have already reached the point that this is the third mass die-off of species on the planet since life began here. The last mass die off of this magnitude occurred millions of years ago when the dinosaurs were eliminated.
Civilization with its exponentially exploding population and increasing consumption of material goods is based upon dwindling resources and a dying planet.
Young children can understand that this will not work but world leaders and everyone else profiting by the situation seem not to be able to figure it out.
The Psycho-Social Problem of Civilization
All human cultures mentally condition its members from birth with their unique picture of reality. All cultures teach their version of the meaning of human existence and the value of items and events in the world. The culture of empire being a materialist enterprise, mentally conditions its members to identify with material possessions. That is, they mentally think of their possessions as being part of their personal identity. The test of this is to observe a member of the consumer society when they are stripped of all possessions. Some degree of mental disintegration usually follows.
The planetary dimension of this syndrome is that there are billions of people in the world who are mentally dependent upon the continued and increased consumption of the living world in order to maintain their ego structure. The other side of this problem is that we have been mentally conditioned in a mechanical world and have spent our lives in artificial environments. Thus, concerns about the living world are below our threshold of consciousness.
The spiritual dimension of this is that people are conditioned to believe themselves to be something other than what they actually are. When they experience internal emptiness they are conditioned to believe that this can be filled by increasing their trips to the shopping mall.
Like a mass of lemmings, world society heads for the cliff. Some believe that recycling their tin cans will avoid the disaster. Others counsel that we should not point out the obvious because this is being negative and is disturbing to many.
The logic of the situation says that if we cannot honestly look at the whole situation then we cannot formulate an appropriate response and thus our opportunity will be lost.
The Birth Of The New World
In this era of history we stand on the edge of fantastic opportunity. From the ashes can rise a cosmic and human creation. Humans cannot run as fast as a cheetah or be as powerful as elephants but they do have one tremendous capacity- creativity. It is within our ability to create a new human culture, a culture created to foster human development and human creativity. We can have exciting lives that are released from the boring compulsions of civilization. We can have lives that are in alignment with the cosmic creation. We do have all the resources to create small human seed cultures that can survive through the culmination of civilization and become the next cycle.
We must have a human culture that can keep the planet alive or we, as a species cannot live here. To do this we need to create a culture that can teach each person to be responsible for themselves and for the life of the planet. This would need to be an emotionally positive culture stressing cooperation, compassion, joy and creativity. To do this we need to raise our youth without emotional damage in a positive emotional environment. In truth, as the crisis deepens it is they who will face even more challenge and they need stand on the shoulders that we provide.
We Now Have Abundant Creative Resources
We now have the opportunity to cease contributing our energy to the old cycle and invest it in the creation of the new cycle.
Small seed communities established on watersheds can create islands of biological stability. These islands of life can in the future become the seedbeds for the replenishment of the earth. Species conservation is an important feature of these communities already in existence.
Combined with ancient and contemporary patterns of adaptation, we now have the creative work of the past thirty years. Permaculture is one of the new resources that can allow us to ecologically restore watersheds and at the same time, using perennial plants, produce more food per acre than modern agriculture. If we need extreme measures of food production the Bio-Intensive Gardening center near Willits, California teaches groups from all over the world how to grow enough food for one person on one thousand square feet of space, in perpetuity, without depleting the soil or robbing any other ecosystem for compost. This program in itself could solve the world food problem right now.
To create habitation we have all of the alternative methods of strawbale, cob, adobe, stone and these can be combined with all of the developed techniques of solar heating such as combining habitation with greenhouse structures. The field of alternative technologies has developed many astonishing strategies.
The Birth Of The New World Has Already Begun
The Permaculture movement has already spread worldwide. There are Centers as well as many individual practitioners on all continents. The Directory of Intentional Communities lists over five hundred intentional communities in the United States as well as hundreds outside. Many of these groups are, or are in the process of, setting up on an ecological basis. In the U.S. the are a number of rural regions where there are concentrations of populations with ecological awareness and ongoing creation of the New World. The Global Ecovillage Network (HYPERLINK http://www.gaia.org) now has more than forty Ecovillage members worldwide.
We have all the resources necessary. We have all the knowledge of the alternative healing movement, diet, health and spirituality. We have all the resources necessary to reconstitute the extended human family in community.
Responding to the same cultural patterns and expecting different results will not work. We must change our lives and change our cultural environment. Creating biologically stable, positive emotion based, human communities is an answer. Most of us are searching for a complete, wholistic existence; these communities offer that alternative. Wm. H. Kotke is the author of THE FINAL EMPIRE: THE COLLAPSE OF CIVILIZATION AND THE SEED OF THE FUTURE. Pub. By Arrow Point Press. It is presently out of print but available at the SLO County Library or through Interlibrary Loan.
