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"The Final Empire," by Wm. H. Kötke. Chap. 2: THE END OF CIVILIZATION

Originally posted on sciy.org by Ron Anastasia on Wed 30 Apr 2008 02:00 AM PDT  

[ This is Chapter 2 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 full support and permission, we're going to be serializing all 20 chapters here on SCIY (at an average rate of a chapter per week). -- To see the first chapter (including the Title Pages, Acknowledgements, Introduction & Table of Contents), go to Chapter 1: 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.


29
Chapter 2
THE END OF CIVILIZATION

If the planet and the human species are to survive
we must create paradise. We must restore the life of
the earth. The only way that the planet can heal itself
is for the soils of the earth to be restored along with
the ecosystems that will maintain those soils. To do
this, human culture must undergo transformation
from a culture of suicide and immediate gratification
of immature impulses for material goods into a culture
focused on life and wisdom, a culture of paradise.


We must get below the threshold of consciousness of
civilization and examine the real basis of the life of the
earth- the soil. All of us have to struggle to throw off the
mind conditioning that we have received in civilization.
Our reality molding would have us believe that there
are environmental problems such as toxic chemicals,
radiation and acid rain. The fact is that our life crisis
began with empire/civilization. The environmental crisis
began thousands of years ago, when the Han Chinese
began to destroy the vast forests of China and when the
Indo-Europeans began to overgraze the vegetation and
exhaust the soils of central Asia. For two to three million
years humans lived on the planet in a stable condition;
then suddenly with the cultural inversion to civilization,
the earth began to die. Civilization is the environmental


30
Wm. H. Kötke

crisis and the loss of topsoil is our measure of the etiology
of the disease.

The materialistic values of civilization teach us that
the accumulation of wealth is progress. The material
wealth of civilization is derived from the death of the
earth, the soils, the forests, the fish stocks, the “free
resources” of flora and fauna. The ultimate end of this
is for all of the human species to terminate in giant
parasitical cities of cement and metal while surrounded
by deserts of exhausted soils. The simple polar opposites
are the richness and wealth of the natural life of earth
versus the material wealth of people living out their lives
in artificial environments.

In order to accurately assess the planetary condition,
the ecological survey that follows will first focus on the
basic reality, the soil. It will then examine the health of the
planetary forests. Then will follow an examination of the
greatest ecological disaster, agriculture. We will focus on
these matters because these are the basic and enduring
damages and unless these are set right, there can be no
recovery. Then the focus will turn to the last phase of
civilization, the destruction caused by industrialization.
Industrialization poses dangers stretching from poisons
to planet-wide imbalances such as the greenhouse
effect. Here we will see in detail how the options are
rapidly narrowing for the human family as soil erosion,
overgrazing and deforestation continue their inexorable
spread throughout civilization. In the past few centuries,
industrial society has provided a swift push toward the
climax. The seminal study, The Limits to Growth: Report
For The Club Of Rome’s Project On The Predicament of
Mankind, shows how the dynamics of industrial society
point us toward the final paroxysm.1

The Limits to Growth study was done in the
early 1970’s by an international team of scholars at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The team,
which came from many diverse disciplines, isolated the


31
The Final Empire
 
dynamic and interactive movements of the five basic
factors of industrial society: resources, food per capita,
population, pollution and industrial output per person.
The standard- model computer run of all of these
factors show that industrial society will begin its swift
collapse sometime in the 2020’s. Here we quote the
authors statement concerning the “World Model Standard
Run:”

“The ‘standard’ world model run assumes
no major change in the physical, economic,
or social relationships that have historically
governed the development of the world
system. All variables plotted here follow
historical values from 1900 to 1970. Food,
industrial output, and population grow
exponentially until the rapidly diminishing
resource base forces a slowdown in
industrial growth. Because of natural
delays in the system, both population and
pollution continue to increase for some
time after the peak of industrialization.
Population growth is finally halted by a rise
in the death rate due to decreased food and
medical services.”2

The standard extrapolation of the growth curves since
the 1900’s can easily be drawn out to the end, though
chances are very good that war, depression, nuclear
disaster, or eco-catastrophe will occur sometime before
then. We live in a material civilization. We can count the
barrels of oil, we can count the acres of wheat fields,
and we can count the number of people. All the scholars
who created the MIT study did, was to put all of the
numbers from all of the scholarly fields on computers
and extrapolate. The thing the computer cannot do


32
Wm. H. Kötke

is anticipate unpredictable breakdowns in the world
system.

The scholars did examine the possibilities of averting
disaster (which assumes a very unlikely world society,
nimble enough to coordinate a survival strategy). The
scholars programmed the computers so as to double
the estimated resource base, they created a model that
assumed “unlimited” resources, pollution controls,
increased agricultural productivity and “perfect” birth
control. None of these or other aversion strategies could
take the world system past 2100.

The reason that the world system cannot go on with
unlimited growth is because each of the five factors
is interactive. If we assume unlimited fuels such as a
simple fusion process, this simply drives the growth
curves faster. There is more cheap fuel so the wheels
of industry churn faster and resource exhaustion
comes more quickly, population continues to climb
and pollution climbs. If there is more food production,
then population climbs and resources are exhausted
more rapidly. If population is stabilized, resources still
continue to decline and pollution increases because of
increased consumption. If the factors of resources, food,
and industrial output grow then population grows but
the resulting pollution creates the negative feedback of
having to maintain cancer hospitals and institutions for
the birth defected and mutations caused by pollution as
well as pollution damage to factors such as farm crops.

Growth had been the fundamental pattern of the
culture of civilization long before Alexander conquered
the “known world.” The difference now is that the growth
is approaching its outer limits and soon will have nothing
left to feed on. We have come to the final cycle in which
civilization will fall into entropy because it cannot any
longer be sustained. There are no more virgin continents
to exploit. There are few remaining forests to cut down
so that new soils can be exploited and exhausted. In


33
The Final Empire

addition to this, the world population is now counted
in the billions. The world has never before known this
kind of exponentially increasing volume of flow and
consumption of food, resources and industrial poisons.

Because of these interactive forces world society is
trapped within a system of cultural assumptions and
patterns of behavior from which it cannot extricate itself.
There is no way out. There will be a collapse of civilization.
There is no question that there will be future famines
in the ecologically devastated and desertified region of
Ethiopia with its exploding human population, just as
there is no question that civilization which eats up its
resources and poisons the earth, will collapse. We are
examining the process now in order to gain knowledge,
because we are the people who will be attempting to live
through the climax.

An Inheritance of Destruction

Life on earth has a long history. Bacterial microfossils

have been discovered associated with some of the oldest
unmetamorphosed rocks, which are 3.8 billion years
old. We know that at least twice in this history, life has
faced ecological catastrophe roughly equal to the one
that we now are in. The first massive die-off was when
cyanobacteria evolved, exhaling oxygen, and poisoned
vast numbers of creatures. The second die-off, 65 million
years ago, was the well known period when dinosaurs
became extinct.3 After immense periods of time in which
life proliferated, the human form appeared on earth.


The fossil record, as unearthed in the Oldavi Gorge in
Africa by the archeologist family, the Leakeys, goes back
three million years. According to anthropologists, for
that period of time, 99 per cent of human existence,
we have been forager/hunters. Suddenly, and only an
eyeblink in time of approximately ten thousand years, a
different social form irrupted among the humans. This
form is the monolithic and hierarchic social form known
as empire.


34
Wm. H. Kötke

We are now assembling information on a third
cataclysm to face life on earth, the age of human empire
and its final apocalypse.

The culture of empire, which also travels under the
euphemism, civilization, is the cause of the third event.
The culture of empire is characterized by ecological
imbalance caused by cities, centralization, hierarchy,
patriarchy, militarism and materialism. We find aspects of
this cultural form among the Aztecs and Mayans of Meso-
America, the Incas of Peru, Certain African kingdoms, the
Egyptian dynasties and a few other locations. The most
virulent strains of this cultural pathology developed in
China, the Indus River valley and in Central Asia among
the Indo-Europeans. It is the inheritance of this cultural
form that is destroying the earth.

China

J. Russell Smith, author of a classic permaculture

text, Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture; gives a
characteristic picture of the land occupied by the old
Asian empires:

“I stood on the Great Wall of China high
on a hill near the borders of Mongolia. Below
me in the valley, standing up square and
high, was a wall that had once surrounded
a city. Of the city, only a few mud houses
remained, scarcely enough to lead one’s
mind back to the time when people and
household industry teemed within the
protecting wall.
“The slope below the Great Wall was
cut with gullies, some of which were fifty
feet deep. As far as the eye could see were
gullies, gullies, gullies-a gashed and gutted
countryside. The little stream that once
ran past the city was now a wide waste of
coarse sand and gravels which the hillside


35
The Final Empire
 
gullies were bringing down faster than the
little stream had been able to carry them
away. Hence, the whole valley, once good
farmland, had become a desert of sand
and gravel, alternately wet and dry, always
fruitless. It was even more worthless than
the hills. Its sole harvest now is dust; picked
up by the bitter winds of winter that rips
across its dry surface in this land of rainy
summers and dry winters.
“Beside me was a tree, one lone tree.
That tree was locally famous because it
was the only tree anywhere in that vicinity;
yet its presence proved that once there had
been a forest over most of that land- now
treeless and waste.”4

At one time nearly half of China was forested. The
famous agricultural scholar, Georg Borgstrom estimates
that 670 million acres of China were once covered.5
This forest, with its complex ecosystem was gone almost
before written history. There is no doubt that it contained
many species that became extinct and of which we will
never know. One major consequence of the denudation
of the vegetation of China is that its major rivers now
carry more silt than any other river system in the world
and the stories of the floods in China are as old as the
Chinese empire.

Indus River Valley

The Indus River valley of western India once hosted

an empire. Some one thousand years before the Chinese
began the ecological destruction of China an empire
existed in this area that is dated between 2,500 BC and
1,500 BC Evidence suggests that this was a forested
region with an ecology that among other things contained
elephant, rhinoceros, water buffalo, tiger, crocodile,
bear, goose, lizard and tortoise.


36
Wm. H. Kötke
 

Edward Hyams, in his study, Soil and Civilization;
indicates that the forest was cleared for agriculture,
the fuel needed for the firing of mud bricks and the
smelting of metals. This plus soil exhaustion created
the destruction of the ecology and the implosion of the
empire. This means that much of the area of the former
empire of the Indus River valley was forest and it is now
semi-arid desert. While this seems at first like an unlikely
change, Hyams points to examples from Australia where
that change has happened in the past hundred years.
He says:

“The present vegetation of Sind is
tamarisk and scrub. In not dissimilar
climatic conditions in Australia in our
own times, such a vegetation has sprung
up upon soils rendered semi-arid by forest
clearance, by overstocking with cattle, or
by soil-fertility ‘mining’ with wheat.”6

The Indo-Europeans of Central Asia

Some seven thousand years before the present, the

origin culture of what we now call the Indo-European
language group, domesticated wheat and barley, which
were wild plants of the region of the Caucasus Mountains.
They also domesticated sheep and goats. This was the
beginning of the culture of empire in Central Asia. The
history of this culture along with the culture of the Han
Chinese leads right down to the present day.

From Afghanistan, through northern Persia to central
Turkey the mountain areas have been deforested and
eroded to the point that they are now simply bare, arid
ranges.7 Grazing, deforestation for smelting, heating and
cooking, and trees removed for agriculture are the chief
culprits that have destroyed the soils and the ecology.
The soils of Central Asia and the Mid-East have gone to
the ocean. Massive erosion of soils on the watersheds of


37
The Final Empire

the Tigris-Euphrates river system was created by at least
five thousand years of imperial abuse. Scholars calculate
that the erosion material from this watershed has filled
in the Persian Gulf for one hundred and eighty miles in
the last forty-five hundred years. An area of more than
2,000 square miles has been filled. Prior to the empires,
the Tigris and Euphrates had separate mouths that
emptied into the Persian Gulf.8 Throughout this region
we can see what will be the final stages of the whole of
civilization.

After the forests are cut and the grasslands overgrazed,
plant regimes from drier environments move in. Spiny
and thorny brush move in along with the hardier, tougher
grasses. As the region continues to be razed for firewood
and goat fodder, the harder layers of subsoil are exposed.
Finally, the hard surfaces of desert pavements form. As
hard subsoil and bedrock are reached a moonscape is
created from which no recovery is possible.

The Empires of Greece and Rome

As we follow the denudation of the Mediterranean

area, we see that Greece was well advanced toward
ecological destruction early in that country’s imperial
career. Many of the wars of conquest were simply to gain
new forests for use in building warships. Author David
Attenborough describes the type of effects caused by the
denudation of the Greek mainland:

“Thermopylae, on the Greek coast, was
the site in 480 BC of one of the most heroic
battles in ancient history. A tiny detachment
of Greek soldiers, commanded by the king of
Sparta, held a narrow pass between the sea
for three days against a huge Persian army.
Today, that pass no longer exists. The soil
from the hills above has been washed down
by the rivers and deposited at the edge of


38
Wm. H. Kötke

the sea in such quantities that the pass has
been transformed into a wide plain.”9

One of the colonies used to gain shipbuilding lumber
was Ephesus on the western coast of Turkey. By the
fourth century, BC the harbor was so silted because
of deforestation and soil abuse in the uplands that the
harbor had to be moved farther along the coast. The
new harbor quickly filled in and the location now is
three miles from the Mediterranean.10 In Italy and Sicily
soil destruction has been epidemic. “The Italian coast
from south of Ravenna; north and eastward almost to
Trieste has been extending itself into the Adriatic Sea
for at least twenty centuries,” one scholar reports. The
city of Ravenna, once on the coastline is now six miles
inland.11

The impact of the successive empires on the
“breadbasket” of North Africa has been to destroy it. Both
Greece and Rome used the luxuriant North Africa as a
mainstay of empire. Finally the Arab, Ottoman Turks
and other minor empires destroyed the last shreds of the
ecology. At one time six hundred colonial cities stretched
from Egypt to Morocco and the area provided Rome with
two-thirds of its wheat budget. Now much of the area is
barren, eroded and can hardly support goats.12

It is no accident that now the diet of these former
empires is based on goats, grapes and olives. This is
ecological poverty food. As these cultures have destroyed
their lands, the plants and animals that remain such
as goats, grapes and olives are ones that can subsist on
denuded and dry soils.

This brief review of the original areas of civilization
can help us visualize what the earth will eventually
look like in most areas where that human culture has
spread. But, because of our massive modern population
and technology, the destruction that took place over
thousands of years is now being accomplished in very


39
The Final Empire

brief time spans. The ecological destruction has not
stopped even now, but in the present continues on,
headed for bedrock.


40
 NOTES

1.  The Limits to Growth: A Report For The Club Of Rome’s
Project On The Predicament Of Mankind. Donella H.
Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers and
William W. Behrens III. New American Library. New
York. 1974.
2.  ibid. p. 129.
3.  1990 Catalog of Seeds. A.M. Kapular, PhD. Peace
Seeds, A Planetary Gene Pool Resource and Service.
2385 SE Thompson St., Corvallis, Oregon 97333. P.1.
4.  Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture. J. Russell
Smith. Devin-Adair Co., Old Greenwich. 1977. P.3.
5.  The Hungry Planet: The Modern World at the Edge of
Famine. Georg Borgstrom. Collier Books. New York.
1972. P. 106.
6.  Soil and Civilization. Edward Hyams. Harper & Row.
New York. 1976. P. 69.
7.  ibid. pp. 55-64.
8.  Man’s Role In Changing The Face Of The Earth.
William L. Thomas, Jr., Ed. U.of Chicago Press.
Chicago, Ill. Vol. 2. P. 510.
9.  The First Eden: The Mediterranean World and Man.
David Attenborough. Little, Brown & Co. Boston.
1987. P. 169.
10.  ibid. p. 118.
11.  Thomas, op. cit. P. 511.
12.  Attenborough, op. Cit. P.116.

See also:

Man and the Mediterranean Forest: A History of
Resource Depletion. J. V. Thirgood. Academic Press.
New York. 1981. P. 62.
And
Losing Ground: Environmental Stress and World
Food Prospects. Erik P. Eckholm. W. W. Norton &
Co. New York. 1976. P. 94.

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