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"The Final Empire," by Wm. H. Kötke. Chap. 1: PATTERN OF THE CRISIS

Originally posted on sciy.org by Ron Anastasia on Wed 23 Apr 2008 01:07 AM PDT  

[ This is Chapter 1 of SCIY Editor Wm. H. Kötke's recently reprinted "Final Empire: The Collapse of Civilization and the Seed of the Future. It's so relevant to SCIY's core concerns that, with William's permission, we're going to be serializing all 20 chapters here on SCIY (at an average rate of a chapter per week). The reprinting has been receiving excellent reviews:

Carolyn Baker in her national daily web site says: "Stunning" "A Masterpiece." "It was thirteen years ahead of its time. Now it is even more relevant. The book that explains the cultural basis of the present planetary crisis. William Kotke has brilliantly articulated what I would not only describe as an ‘encyclopedia of collapse’ but has skillfully depicted a vision of possibility imbedded within the core of apocalypse."

A review at Amazon.Com said: "This is an incredibly well documented and prophetic book. Prophetic in the sense that when I first read it over ten years ago, I was skeptical of many predictions. They have all turned out to come true. This book is indigenous and inspiring in the sense that it offers practical earth friendly strategies that affirm the possibility that man is part OF nature, not apart FROM it. Well written! Real history and facts, vitally relevant, and hence empowering! ..."

This first installment includes the Title Pages, Acknowledgements, Introduction, Table of Contents, and Chapter 1 (of 20): Pattern of the Crisis.
 
I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I have,

~ ronjon ]





To order this book, go to SCIY's Book Review at:

https://www.sciy.org/blog/_archives/2008/4/18/3647174.html

and click on the AuthorHouse ordering link there.

AuthorHouseâ„¢
1663 Liberty Drive, Suite 200
Bloomington, IN 47403
www.authorhouse.com
Phone: 1-800-839-8640

© 2007 Wm. H. Kötke. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 11/20/2007

ISBN: 978-1-4343-3131-1 (e)
ISBN: 978-1-4343-3130-4 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-4343-3129-8 (hc)

Printed in the United States of America
Bloomington, Indiana

This book is printed on acid-free paper.


THIS VISION OF THE FUTURE IS
DEDICATED TO THE GRAND CHILDREN
 
SHAUNA LYNN
AARON MICHAEL
BRADY ALAN
LEIGH  MICHAEL
JOHN POTTER
and to
SPARTACUS

vii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

One’s perspective of life is formed by all of the
experiences from birth and beyond. Though I am
responsible for each word, much of the focus of this
book comes from a wide variety of people and events.
Certainly the ranching culture of Central Oregon should
be acknowledged, where I gained an early experience as
a ranch hand. The years as a sawmill worker in Oregon
and California caused me to understand the point of
view of those people. The Civil Rights Movement, the
Viatnam War and the Summer of Love in Haight Ashbury
woke all of us up to the realities of the planet. Years as
a labor organizer and union business representative
allowed me to understand why it is so difficult for the
masses of us to make sudden beneficial changes. Living
in the mountains of Northern New Mexico I came to
understand how the four century old insular Spanish
culture there, established before the pilgrims reached
Plymouth Rock, had been able to endure as a self
sufficient society. The years spent chopping wood and
herding sheep for Katherine Smith, an elder of the
relocation-threatened, Big Mountain Navajos, instructed
me of the great strength of people who live with the earth.
In residing with the Jicarilla Apache  of New Mexico I
came to understand the functioning of a tribe. In living
in the Gila, in Catron County, New Mexico I personally
experienced the problems and insecurities of rural U.S.
viii

people as they face the chaotic future over which they
have little control.

A number of people assisted directly with the
production of this document. Lisa Pucci created the
beautiful illustrations and helped with early production.
Jay Scott of Silver City, New Mexico created the portaits
of the honored elders of the Gila who resisted empire.
Ellen Gellert, former instructor of Women’s Studies at
the University of Buffalo and later resident of the Gila,
provided valuable insights. Cecelia Ostrow, singer and
noted earth philosopher provided valuable editorial
work as did novelist Gary Stallings. To all who have
contributed, I thank you and hope that the effort meets
you approval.

Wm. H. Kötke
ix

CONTENTS
 

Acknowledgements - vii
Introduction - xi


Book One
The Collapse of Civilization

The History of Disintegration
Chapter 1
Pattern of the Crisis - 3
Chapter 2
The End of Civilization - 29

The Collapse of the Ecosystem
Chapter 3
Soil: The Basis of Life - 41
Chapter 4
The Forest - 81
Chapter 5
The Phantom Agriculture - 99
Chapter 6
The Dying Oceans - 131
Chapter 7
Extinction of Life by Species Increment - 141

The Exhaustion of the Industrial Empire
Chapter 8
Population, Poisons and Resources - 149

The Analysis of Empire Culture
Chapter 9
The Cultural Dynamics of Empire - 193
Chapter 10
The Psychology of Empire - 215

x

Chapter 11
The History of Modern Colonialism - 257
Chapter 12
Colonialism in the Modern World - 309


Book Two

The Seed of the Future

Creating A Whole Life
Chapter 13
The Principles of Life - 335
Chapter 14
Culture as Organism - 389

Living on the Earth
Chapter 15
The Life of the Tribe - 405
Chapter 16
The Restoration of the Life of the  Earth - 459
Chapter 17
Permanent Desert Culture - 485
Chapter 18
Choosing Reality - 507

On the Watershed
Chapter 19
The Natural History of the Watershed of the San Francisco River - 521
Chapter 20
Planetary Restoration-watershed Restoration - 589


xi

INTRODUCTION
 
The crisis of the planet Earth is so profound that
all of our lives will be caught up in it. Our lives will
change because of it. Our lives will change because
of the apocalyptic events happening now and the even
greater dislocations to come. We cannot avoid these
great trends of history but we can exercise awareness
and skill in action in dealing with them. The tumult will
be environmental and it will also be within the social
body of civilization.

Book I begins with a straight-forward examination of
our ecological situation on the planet. This is not pleasant
knowledge but it is imperative that we understand the
full dimensions of the problem before we invest our lives
in a solution. Book I also includes an explanation of how
we humans have arrived at such a point of personal and
planetary suicide. In this section the cultural dynamics,
the psychology and the history of our culture is examined
in order to gain insight for the future.

Book II is a plan of action for us to regain paradise.
This section answers the question of how to live in
balance with nature. This is not a theoretical answer.
It involves an actual watershed, what its ecology is and
what the food sources are. This section takes those
much abused words, “sustainable” and “balance with
nature,” and puts them on the ground. We will be urged
to immediately create a new ecologically sustainable land
based culture that will take us through the future times.
xii

Those who can respond will be accepting an initiatory
challenge such as has seldom happened to our kind. The
challenge is to bring out of the greatest wave of death
and destruction the earth has ever known, a new world
of wholeness and relationship of all of the tribes that live
in ecological sustainability. This era is the first time in
two million years that all of the tribes can connect as a
planetary whole in a geographical and material sense.
When our great, great, great grandchildren look back
at the crisis that their ancestors had lived through they
will understand why we changed ourselves, our culture,
our relationship with our mother the earth and our
relationship with the spirit of the cosmos.

xiii

BOOK ONE

THE COLLAPSE
OF
CIVILIZATION

3

Chapter 1
PATTERN OF THE CRISIS

Collapse on the Periphery

Individual empires have suffered cyclical collapse
since civilization began. The Babylonian, Greek and
Roman empires are classical examples. These civilized
empires initially expanded, funded by their base of
arable land, grazing areas and forests. As they reached
out, conquering new lands and peoples, their growth
was fueled by slave labor and appropriated resources.
Their growth continued until the ecological base of
the empire was exhausted. At that point, the empires
imploded. Sumeria and Babylonia stripped their lands
through overgrazing and deforestation. This brought
down huge amounts of erosion material that threatened
the irrigation works. They also inexorably salinized their
soil by irrigation. Early on, in the history of the Greek
Empire, Plato complained of the ecological devastation
in the area of Attica. By the end of that empire the
ecology of the whole of Greece was severely injured. Both
the Greek and Roman empires used North Africa as a
“breadbasket” and by the close of the Roman Empire it
was ecologically destroyed along with much of the rest
of the Roman territories.
 
4
Wm. H. Kötke

Though the standard political and social histories of
these empires do not stress an ecological view, there is
certainly no question that at the end of their cycles these
empires had little ecological energy remaining.
Anywhere the culture of empire (a.k.a., civilization)
has spread one finds devastated ecologies. The life is
literally “rubbed out,” the original life is gone. Much of
the living flesh of the planet does not now exist in those
places. But, we know that it did exist. The life in those
areas has suffered a die-back. The forests are gone, the
topsoil is depleted and the land is eroded. The richness
of the land has been used up. The wealth of the earth’s
life has been spent by the extortion of empire.

Empires implode. They collapse from within. This is
beginning now on the edges of world civilization where the
ecology has been stripped, the population is exploding
and the resultant social turmoil  insures further decline.
These implosions of the colonies will eventually become
general throughout the cultural system.

Islands such as Madagascar, the Canaries, the
islands of the Caribbean, many south sea islands and
others have been ecologically stripped. In areas like Peru,
whole mountainsides fall off because of the ecological
devastation caused by deforestation and hillside farming.
In Brazil’s Northeast, the coastal rain forest and the
fertile areas further inland have been replaced by desert.
In some areas of the former fertile southern interior
of Brazil, coffee plantations have reduced the land to
such eroded conditions that cows cannot even graze
it for fear that they will fall into the canyons created
by soil erosion. In Central Asia, many bodies of water
such as the Azov, Caspian, Black Sea and Baikal are
severely injured. The supply of caviar there has almost
ceased because the waters are so polluted that the fish
die. In Tibet where the Chinese Empire has invaded,
devastation is spreading as trees are cut, steep areas are
plowed and mines are begun.

5 
The Final Empire

The story of the brief empire of Venice is instructive
as to how the ecological base of empire injures the earth
and how the culture of empire uses up the life of the
earth to generate its ephemeral power. By the end of the
fifteenth century the City of Venice was emerging as a
sea-power. Venice traded all the way from the eastern
Mediterranean to England. Galley ships were the power
behind the merchant fleet. The oar-powered galleys
ultimately depended upon slave labor. They were fast
and could navigate where sailing ships could not. The
whole arrangement was based on wood for ships, and
in turn depended upon forests, which in the beginning
were abundant near Venice. As the power of Venice
was coming to an end, the City was obtaining ships in
Barcelona built with lumber from the forests of northern
Spain and finally from the Baltic region of northern
Europe, which had not yet been stripped. By this time
there were no forests anywhere in the Mediterranean
that could fund a sea-faring empire.

This phenomenon of implosion is occurring now in
the present World Empire. The country of Bangladesh
shows us one type of implosion. In the distant past the
whole of the area was populated by forager/hunters
such as those threatened tribes who live now in the
Bangladeshi hills. As the waves of empire culture came,
first with the Indo-Aryans thousands of years ago, the
life of the area was progressively degraded. Bengal as it
was formerly called, was conquered by the English early
in the colonial period. Prior to the conquest it had been a
fertile and self-sufficient area. When the English moved
in they began to put heavy pressure on the organic
fertility. They established the plantation system and
mined the agricultural land to ship valuables to the
“mother country.” Later, in the Twentieth Century when
England was severed from its colonies on the Indian
subcontinent, the region became part of Pakistan and
finally an independent country. In the later years,
 
6 
Wm. H. Kötke

Bangladesh has suffered flooding, a constant population
explosion and periodic drought.

Bangladesh is located on the delta of the Ganges River
that drains the Himalayan range. With the Chinese now
stripping Tibet, floods and erosion material race down out
of central Tibet borne by the Bramaputra River that joins
the Ganges and comes through countries that are being
stripped along the southern tier of the range: Bhutan,
India and in particular Nepal. Because the forests are
being stripped, the land no longer can absorb water and
the floods grow larger. The State of India’s Environment:
1982, a report by non-governmental groups, states:

“From Kashmir (far west) to Assam (far
east) the story is the same. Below 2,000
meters (6,500 feet) there are literally no
forests left. In the middle Himalayan belt,
which rises to an average height of 3,000
meters (9,800 feet), the forest area, originally
estimated at being a third of the total area,
has reduced to a mere 6-8 per cent.”1

A global environmental study, Gaia: An Atlas Of
Planet Management, says that the erosion is so bad
that an island of five million hectares (12,355,000
acres) of erosion material is beginning to surface in
the Bay of Bengal. “Around one-quarter of a million
tonnes (255,325 U.S. tons) of topsoil are washed off the
deforested mountain slopes of Nepal each year, and a
further sizable amount from the Himalayan foothills in
India’s sector of the Ganges catchment zone.” The study
notes that the countries of India and Bangladesh are
geared up to contest possession of the island when it
surfaces.2

Due to the periodic catastrophes of flood and drought
the society of Bangladesh is beginning to disintegrate
into a low-level warlord society where even the central
government cannot exert control much distance from the

7 
The Final Empire

capital city. One effort that the government is making
to alleviate its population crush is an attempt to settle
a relatively small “hill country” area with lowlanders.
These hill areas contain remnant tribes of non-civilized
people. The Bangladesh government has warred against
these people for some years, attacking them with modern
armies and rounding up the survivors into concentration
camps. As the lowlanders invade into the vacuum, they
level the forest and attempt to raise crops.

On the lowlands, a large share of the population lives
in the delta. Here the impoverished people fight each
other for small plots of land. As the floods come and
go, the islands and marshes change continually. As the
above-water areas dry out following a flood, the people
rush in to claim small plots on which they attempt to
grow food before the next flood or drought.

The combination of exploding population and
ecologically based disasters is causing the society to
disintegrate. This process which began years back in
Bangladesh is one of the effects that we can expect to see
in the years ahead in other parts of civilization.

Writer Mohiuddin Alamgir, researching his report,
Famine in South Asia; Political Economy of Mass
Starvation, asked villagers in Bangladesh during a
famine in 1974, about the reasons why people were
dying around them. He found that the villagers had
only a vague notion about the true cause. The villagers
could see that people were dying of disease and that
they had various symptoms but few villagers could see
or admit that people were starving. The villagers were
in a weakened condition, which allowed them to die of
the first disease that came around. Death was the end
result of the steady social deterioration that they had
experienced. “Once people ran out of resources to buy
food grains, they sold or mortgaged land, sold cattle and
agricultural implements, sold household utensils and

8 
Wm. H. Kötke

other valuables (such as ornaments), and, finally their
homesteads,” says Alamgir.3

When there is nothing left and people are starving,
they leave and wander aimlessly about the country of
Bangladesh. Many of the uprooted households that
Alamgir studied had begun to disintegrate, with members
of the same household wandering off in different directions
toward separate areas of the country. Deserted children,
deserted wives, deserted husbands and deserted elders
are becoming commonplace. Bangladesh society has gone
over the brink. The centralized control by the wealthy
elite and the military has broken down. The population
is destined to continue as a wandering, increasingly
hungry mass until, sometime in the future, all coherent
human society and culture dies and human cooperation
and optimistic effort disintegrates. It is this condition,
as shown by Bangladesh, which is the ultimate end of a
culture that eats up its survival systems.

We need keep in mind that forager/hunter populations
lived in stability in this area for hundreds of thousands
and perhaps millions of years because they did not
destroy that which sustained them.

Alamgir states that after previous famines in
Bangladesh, the society returned to near normal social
relationships, but he reports:

“Both separation of families and
desertion represent a breakdown of the
system of security provided by family and
kinship ties under traditional social bonds.
This is, of course, not unique in the 1974
Bangladesh famine, as reference to erosion
of social ties can be found in almost all
preceding famines. However, two points
should be noted: First, a slow process
of disintegration of traditional ties had
already set in and famine only accelerated
 
9
The Final Empire

it. Second, manifestations of breakdown of
kinship and family bonds were reversible in
the past in the sense that old relationships
were restored through the normal process
of post famine societal adjustment. This is
no longer true in the Bangladesh scenario
today where such processes seem to be
irreversible, which is reflected in the rate of
permanent destitution.”4

The horn of Africa region where the country of Ethiopia
is located represents another example of implosion.
Ethiopia is hit with periodic drought. If the region were
in its primordial climax ecological condition the droughts
would likely have minimal impact but like Bangladesh,
the region’s ecology is so ravaged that any perturbation
of climate becomes a disaster and the human created
situation is called an “act of God.”

Ethiopia originally had a stable population of forager/
hunter people but it became one of the “cradles of
civilization.” The life of Ethiopia is now almost gone.
Almost all of Ethiopia is high, mountainous country with
good rainfall, but there is little vegetative life left. The
ancient empires were nourished on it and the vitality
has evaporated. It is estimated that three quarters of the
country was originally forested yet at present only four
percent of the country has forest. One study estimates
that the volume of live trees now, is 800 million cubic
meters and then goes on to say that the annual fuel
wood consumption is 20 million cubic meters and rising
rapidly.5  Even if the remaining forests were only used to
heat houses and cook food they would not last long.

Despite having one of the highest death rates in the
world, the country’s population continues to rise. One
would think it would decline but unlike our former forager/
hunter culture, which sought to keep their population
within the carrying capacity of the environment, people

10 
Wm. H. Kötke

of the culture of empire do not. The people of civilization
have many motives, other than simply lack of awareness
that propels population growth. One important reason
is that civilized people work at exploiting the land and
the more hands the more production. Agrarians, for
example, traditionally have large families to help with
farm work and hard times call for more hands to force
the land to produce more. There is also motive for large
families so that one will be cared for in old age. There is
the motive of the pride of the patriarch in large families.
Though there are a number of basic motives, there is a
functional reason also why population is not responsive
immediately to food supply. If there is a famine or
drought, the children already born will have children.
Demographers say that population responsiveness has a
time lag of seventy years to social/environmental events
and even this responsiveness is only a momentary blip
on the over-all graph line of exponential growth.

One researcher highlights the continued drama of
destruction in Ethiopia partially attributed to population
growth:

“A dramatic alteration in environmental
quality has been visible within a single
lifetime in the hills surrounding Addis
Ababa. When the capital was founded in
1883 by the Emperor Memelik II, it was
still surrounded by remnants of rich cedar
forests and reasonably clear streams.
Deforestation and erosion were immediately
spurred by the influx of humans. In the
ensuing nine decades, virtually all the
available land in the region has been
cultivated, while charcoal producers cut
trees within a 160-kilometer radius for sale
in the city. Now the waters of the nearby
Awash River and its tributaries are thick

11
The Final Empire
 
with mud, and waterways are shifting their
courses more markedly and frequently than
in the past.”6

Addis Ababa sits in the high mountains of central
Ethiopia. It is near the headwaters of the Awash River.
From Addis Ababa, the river courses northeast into a
rapidly widening valley that eventually reaches the coast
at Djibouti on the Red Sea. UN researchers expect the
whole Awash Basin to soon become rocky desert; but the
eye of civilization sees only war, ideology and revolution.
The problem is ecological but the cultural attention and
media-focus emphasize war. As civilization fixates on
war and violence in Eritrea, Somalia and Ethiopia, in the
Horn of Africa, the life of the earth dwindles in that area
and starvation spreads. Although the destruction of the
life of the earth is caused by civilization, civilized society
is unable to see its own problem because the organic life
of the earth is below its threshold of consciousness.

El Salvador, in Central America, is another country
that is imploding on the periphery of the Empire of
Civilization. The Spanish Empire invaded the area that
is now El Salvador early in the sixteenth century. They
immediately began to enslave the stable and sustainable
cultures of the region as factors of imperial production.
At that time, the western two-thirds of the country was
inhabited by a Nahuatl speaking culture. The Nahuatl
language group includes Aztec, Hopi and Ute. In the
eastern one-third of the country, across the Lenca River
lived the tribes named Lenca, Jinca, Pokomám, Chortí and
Matagalpa. There are now some half-million “invisible”
Indians in El Salvador, in a country of five million. They
are invisible because they have been forced to abandon
their native dress and language. The first census from the
years 1769-1798 listed 83,010 Indians in a population of
161,035. Initially, the native people of the lowlands were
enslaved into the Spanish estates. These original estates

12
Wm. H. Kötke

exported cacao and balsam. By the end of that century,
indigo plantations were spreading out further into the
last Indian communal lands in the higher elevations.
Soon cattle ranching moved into the northern tier of
the country and masses of Indian people, who were not
among the indentured workers, were wandering through
the area in a detribalized condition. The native people’s
habitat had been destroyed. Inasmuch as their cultural
knowledge and skills were related to the living world, the
native people became powerless and dependent upon
the invading culture. By the middle of the Nineteenth
Century, coffee began to be the major export crop and
this agriculture with its need for the last available higher
elevation land, began to finish the remaining communal
Indian lands as well as their forest habitat. By 1930,
coffee was more than ninety percent of El Salvador’s
exports.7

In 1932, in the midst of the world depression, Indians
in the highlands around Sonsonate revolted against
both the imperial conquerors and their latino subjects,
the mestizos. The army of the oligarchy was unleashed
against the unarmed Indians. The virulent anti-Indian
racism of “latinos” was also unleashed as they, also,
began to participate. By the time the massacres were over,
somewhere variously estimated at between 15,000 and
50,000 children, women and men had been murdered
and the native land base was occupied by the aliens.8

The story of El Salvador is of native tribes who
lived stably with their habitat, the forests and other
ecosystems of the isthmus. The events since that time
have been created by the far different culture of empire,
which invaded, to extort valuables from the area. The
pattern displayed has been consistent since empire
culture began. The industrial revolution and markets
have added a few new wrinkles. The pattern is that
of a small powerful elite taking land and labor from
the colony for free or at very low price. The extorted

13
The Final Empire
 
valuables are then exported in exchange for currency
that supports the elite of the colony who, in return, keep
the native populations in control. This is the classic
picture of third world colonies and is the picture of El
Salvador. This pattern has persisted in El Salvador and
is largely the reason for its environmental destruction.
The oligarchy runs the country on a feudal basis little
changed from the days of the conquistadors. This means
that in the pursuit of their profits they need observe
no environmental laws. They may take any land they
need, they may use any type and amount of agricultural
chemicals on their crops and they may dump toxins in
any manner that they please. One group that researches
Central America’s environmental problems says that as
of 1990, “75 per cent of pesticides exported to Central
America from the U.S. are either banned or severely
restricted for use in the U.S.”9 This elimination of the cost
of environmental protection controls makes El Salvador a
high-profit enclave for its rulers and for the transnational
corporations located there. They are provided with an
impoverished and cheap labor pool, which is unable to
organize effectively because of military repression and
death squads. They do not have the expense of meeting
environmental standards so this gives them a decided
competitive advantage over other countries.

Since the arrival of civilized culture, 95 per cent of
the country’s original tropical, deciduous forest has
disappeared. Twenty mammal species and eighteen bird
species are gone. Serious soil erosion affects 77 per cent
of the country. Following deforestation, groundwater is
disappearing, sediments are beginning to fill the dams
and stop the hydroelectric supply and the United Nations
Food and Agriculture Organization says the country is
undergoing a process of desertification.10

In the familiar pattern, particularly since World War
II, the alliance between the domestic oligarchy, U.S. aid
agencies and transnational corporations have increased

14
Wm. H. Kötke
 
exports which has led to the clearing of the last viable
stands of old-growth ebony, cedar, mahogany and
granadilla trees. Where the country was once food self-
sufficient it now exports cash crops of food items and
even flowers to the industrial countries (for the profit of
the oligarchy) and imports food.

The Environmental Project On Central America
(EPOCA) says that: “Today unequal control of resources
remains at the root of poverty and environmental
destruction in El Salvador. A small elite, referred to as
the ‘Fourteen Families,’ comprises less than 2 per cent
of the population yet enriches itself from ownership of
more than 60 per cent of the country’s arable land. The
poorest 20 per cent of the Salvadoran people own no
land and receive only 2 per cent of the national income.”
In the countryside, the report says that: “two-fifths of
the population cannot afford a basic diet of corn and
beans.”11

The EPOCA report says that one in ten have access
to safe drinking water. “Look at a body of water in El
Salvador and you will see a reflection of almost every
major environmental problem in the country: pesticide
and fertilizer contamination; industrial pollution;
municipal waste and sewage; sedimentation from
deforestation and soil erosion; and waterborne diseases.
All the major waterways in El Salvador are contaminated
by raw sewage and a variety of toxic chemicals, according
to a 1982 report by the U.S. Agency for International
Development.”12

With the oligarchy occupying the land that an
agriculturist would call “arable,” the poor are forced up
onto the mountainsides where they use slash and burn
agriculture. Because the people are overcrowded and
there is not enough land, the fallow periods on the slash
and burn plots are too short. This quickly erodes the
topsoil and leaves the mountains denuded of all vegetation
except for hardy brush. In 1974 there were 400 people for

15 
The Final Empire

each square mile of El Salvador. The population doubling
time in El Salvador is now twenty-two years.13

These three countries, Bangladesh, El Salvador and
Ethiopia, with their varying histories and varying types
of impact from civilization characterize the periphery
of what we may term the industrial empire. These are
the conquered and colonized resource and labor areas
and their societies are collapsing under the pressure of
environmental degradation, population explosion, and
militarism and export economies. If the oligarchy of El
Salvador were to suddenly depart for Miami, the country
would still be in a state of disintegration. The soil, water
and air are poisoned. There are few natural resources left
and importantly for our analysis, the civilized culture of
the people of El Salvador would not be disposed to restore
the land mass to the climax ecosystem, even if that were
possible.

This is the beginning of the end for the Final Empire
of civilization. Here we see in these examples that there
is little remaining to take out and the populations are
exploding. When two people have five chil

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