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The Final Empire

The Collapse of Civilization and
the Seed of the Future

by
Wm. H. Kötke

The spread of civilized agriculture is undoubtedly
the greatest catastrophe ever to strike the planet.
Previous disasters such as the die-off of the dinosaurs
are measured by the number of species lost. Since
the advent of agriculture we are beginning to count
the number of ecosystems destroyed. Each major
food gaining method of the imperial system —
herding, irrigation, plow agriculture, and industrial
agricultural— progressively depletes the ability of
the earth to sustain life. Civilized agriculture cannot
endure.

The incredible growth of food supply, which has
supported the huge populations of past and present
empire cultures, has been funded by extorting
fertility from the planetary life. Use of fossil fuels has
exponentially increased the damage. These very food
production systems have ravaged much of the earth
where empires have historically been based. Empire
food systems short-circuit the natural energy flow
systems of the earth, first by eliminating the natural
vegetation, then by draining the fertility of the soil with
alien crops species. The natural climax ecosystem’s
fundamental contribution to life on Earth is to build
soil. The exhaustion of the solar gain deposited in the
 

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planetary soil bank for our future life is ultimately the
most devastating effect of empire.

The most complex natural systems generate the
largest amount of energy and provide maximum
stability. One reason for this is because a complex
system includes a large number of sub-systems
(niches), which can be used as alternatives in case of
crisis. Complex ecosystems generate specialized plants
and animals uniquely suited to maximize the energy of
the system. Diversity creates stability.

Russell E. Anderson, a student of biological energy
flows and energy pathways explains the energetic
potential of the climax ecosystem in his book, Biological
Paths To Self-Reliance:


While the thrust of the life of the planet is to increase
complexity (diversity) and maximize energy circulation
(sharing), the thrust of Empire is to simplify. Even if
the agriculturist did nothing but clear away the climax
ecosystem, the planet’s life would eventually run down.
Because the soil is a perpetual flow system itself, it
must be fed so that it can continue to maintain. If
deprived of feed it will decline. Civilized development
of all types interferes with the creation of soil. The
climax ecosystem is the real planetary life. The whole

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living system we call the “natural world” functions
together as a unified whole. Every piece of vegetation
removed from the planet’s surface by freeways, housing
developments, logging, dams, airports, cities, estuary
destruction, and clearing for agriculture, represents
a decline in the planet’s life, a deficit in the solar
budget.

The following chart gives a general illustration of what
occurs in the drive of life toward maximum diversity
and energy flow. This is seen as a forest ecosystem
matures, by monitoring the increase of population and
number of species of one kind of life form through
the succeeding phases of development. Each living
thing contributes a number of different benefits to
the system. We see in the chart that the diversity of
species and also the general bird population increases
as the system moves toward climax. Rising populations
of plants and other animals necessarily support this
increase in the system.

STAGES IN ECOSYSTEM DEVELOPMENT AND
ASSOCIATED INCREASE IN BIRD POPULATIONS

ECOSYSTEM DEVELOPMENT	Grassland	Shrubs	Low Trees	High Trees
Years	1-10	10-25	25-100	100+
# of different species of birds	2	8	15	16
Density (pairs / 40 ha.)	27	123	113	233

 (From Human Impact on the Ecosystem, Joy Tivy and Grag O-Hare.) ²

Increased complexity potentiates life and life’s energy
pathways. Different species of birds disperse different
types of seeds, control various insect populations, and
become food for various predators who can then live
in the developing forest. The activities of each species

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can be looked upon as a specialized organ functioning
within the life of the earth. As each organ is added,
the life of the whole is multiplied because each organ
creates new paths for energy circulation, connecting
individual parts of the system in new ways. Each factor
performs more than one function.

Honeybees are an excellent example of this multiplier
effect. The energy which they expend pollinating the
flowering plants is far less than the energy created
by their activities. If a human helps the population of
honeybees, the multiplier effect goes up even more.
As the pollinated plants increase, the bees increase
and as both increase, the honey and plants available
to humans increase as well as other benefits to the
surrounding life.

The now extinct dodo bird of the Mauritius Islands
in the Indian Ocean had a unique relationship with
the Calvaria tree. The tree fed the dodo and the dodo
transported seeds for the tree. The heavily coated seeds
of the Calvaria tree had to pass through the abrasive
digestive system of the Dodo in order to germinate.
Now that the dodo is gone the Calvaria trees are dying
out. None have germinated for three hundred years
since the last dodo died.3 It is probable that this tree
has vegetation, insects or other animals that lived in
association with it or the microclimate that it created.
Those connections are being severed also.

Howard T. Odum is perhaps the foremost student
of ecosystem energy flows. Odum points out that “loop
rewards” or “positive feedback loops” are necessary
in any energy flow system. Odum explains how this
energy sharing principle works:

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Odum propounds the rule that states; “That system
survives which maximizes the availability and use
efficiency of power from all sources.” This, the organs
of life do by establishing themselves in a way that they
potentiate the whole system so that other organs can
grow upon them to further continue the purposes of
life.

In order to clarify this further, by contrast, we
can look at the way in which the culture of empire
has replicated itself upon the Great Plains of North
America. When the invading Europeans broke up
the landmass with fences and private property, the
net photosynthetic production of the Great Plains
was degraded tremendously. Sixty million buffalo
and millions of individuals of other species were
eradicated because the European diet and system of
mass production could not utilize this ecosystem in
the way that the forager/hunters had for centuries. As
the buffalo were slaughtered, there was no adequate
market for all the buffalo meat or even all the hides.
The “sod busters” who plowed the prairie sod had less
usable product in terms of protein than the previous
tribes of “buffalo hunters” who utilized the buffalo,
deer, pronghorn, elk and other species. The present

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industrial agricultural system cannot produce the Net
Photosynthetic Production or the variety of life of the
original climax system. It is designed to interlock with
a greatly simplified, but massive, food system based
on bread, milk and meat eating, which lends itself to
mass production and sale to markets. To the industrial
agriculturist, biological energy efficiency is irrelevant.
The industrialists’ purpose is to provide production
and profit, not to be biologically efficient.

Industrial Agriculture

Pundits and propagandists of the Chamber of
Commerce and the “boomers” of the industrial system
are fond of claiming the great productivity of industrial
agriculture by pointing out how few farmers there are
in ratio to the population. In reality, the most efficient
systems are the most “primitive.” Industrial agriculture
is by far the most energy inefficient system of food
production.

Hundreds of industrial workers participate with
each industrial farmer. There are the oil field workers,
oil refinery workers, the truck drivers, the plastics
plant workers, the workers who create the packaging of
farm produce, the packagers, distributors, wholesalers,
delivery people and retail clerks. An enormous amount
of machinery is required for this process. All machinery
is produced by factories somewhere, by people who
must be counted in the food production network. All
the seed is dependent upon years of development
by cadres of technical workers. The drying, freezing,
canning, distribution and other processes rely upon
an infrastructure of transportation and industry. If the
food is from irrigated fields the input of effort stretches
back through the digging of canals, the building of
dams, laying out of the electrical systems to run the
pumps, the planning of these systems and often the
disruption of many lives that formerly occupied the
space where the dam and its accouterments now exist.

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The industrial agriculturist does not simply go out to
the swidden plot by his village and eat a fruit from the
tree. Industrial agriculture is not just a planting of
seed; it is a vast complex, expensive, energy intensive,
destructive system that will ultimately collapse without
possibility of recovery.

Like the imbalanced systems of grazing and
irrigation, the industrial agricultural system is simply
an extrapolation of the imbalance of the basic, time-
honored agriculture. The great difference is that with
so much energy invested in it the destructive results
are apparent much sooner. Industrial agriculture is
tremendously destructive of soils, of the nutritional
content of the food and of the environment. The water
borne runoff of manure, fertilizer and agricultural
poisons are unbalancing life on a continental scale.
The cost of this must be added to the already huge cost
of producing industrial food. Every deformed baby in
farming regions and every poisoned farm worker must
be added to the cost.

As humankind has deviated from the natural
balance, the energy cost and labor cost of feeding
populations has gone up. The tribal Tsembaga people
of the highlands in New Guinea raise sweet potatoes
at an expenditure of approximately one kilocalorie of
energy for each 16 kilocalories of food produced. Studies
of the industrial system indicate that approximately
20 kilocalories of energy are required to produce one
kilocalorie of food. The industrial system is obviously a
high-cost, energy intensive system when all production
factors are counted.5

The following table shows the true energy cost of
selected agricultural methods and foods. In this table,
rice grown in Indonesia is the most energy efficient
crop/method while feedlot mutton has the highest
energy input cost per unit of protein formed. For
example, to raise peanuts in Florida required 1,000

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kilocalories of energy for each pound of peanut protein
grown while it cost 10,000 kilocalories of energy to gain
a pound of egg protein in the factory egg raising system
of the U.S.A.

Energy Input Per Unit Protein Formed (Kcal/lb. Protein)

Peanuts, Florida	1,000
Eggs, USA	10,000
Feed lot mutton, USA	100,000

The above chart from the British
magazine Ecologist, shows relative inputs
of energy per pound of protein output for
selected food producing systems.⁶

The largest part of the industrial farming system is
the industrial infrastructure itself. If that infrastructure
falters and machines are not produced, the food
production system will not function. Within this general
support of agriculture by the industrial infrastructure
there are a few basic systems that support it directly.
Each of these is an unsustainable, disintegrating
system.

The first of these factors is the enormous energy
investment. Through the techniques of industry,
trade-offs have been made that replace the organic
cycles of soil and climate. No longer do soils need to be
replenished by organic feed. Now, fertilizer is injected

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into the soil that is directly translated from fossil fuel
energy or fertilizer created from ocean fish- itself a
part of the factory (fishing) system that is basically
dependent for fuel upon petroleum. Petroleum is the
base of artificial fertilizers. This is shown by one of the
three main components, Nitrogen. It is industrially
synthesized out of the atmosphere and requires five
tons of coal equivalent energy for one ton prepared
nitrogen. The industrial infrastructure relies upon oil
for transportation, research and it comes directly to
the field in terms of trucks, tractors, irrigation pumps,
fertilizer and poisons.

With a system of food production that is so energy
intensive, and is being spread to the Third World so
rapidly, we must ask about the energy to sustain this.
The myth in the imperial centers is that the First World
is assisting the “Under developed” countries to reach
the same standard of living as exists in the First World.
This notion which is generally held, does not involve
the reality of the petroleum resource base. The research
team that produced the study Limits To Growth, found
that if the whole world population had the standard of
consumption that exists in the USA, the basic reserve
of resources on the planet would be gone within ten
years.7  Similarly, “If every nation expended as much
oil per head in agriculture as the U.S., current world
oil reserves would be emptied in a dozen years.”8 But,
as this unsustainable survival system develops, it
becomes more energy intensive each year. There is a
definite law of diminishing returns in the industrial
agricultural system:

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The agricultural poisons that are a necessary part
of the system translate from petroleum. During World
War I, it was the oil industry that began to create the
poison gases for the war. After the war their market
began to wither until they realized a new market for the
nerve gases as bug killers on the farm. Although not
all farm poisons are now nerve gas related, the origins
of the pesticide industry lay in WWI and are still based
in the chemical-petroleum industry.

Many millions of people in the world today are
fed by the increased food production produced by
petroleum based agriculture. Georg Borgstrom said
in 1969, “Close to 600 million people depend for
their survival upon artificial fertilizers. Without this
annually repeated supplementation of the soil with
man-extracted minerals, approximately that number of
humans would lack food.”10 By 1980 we see that this
system, even with added petroleum input, cannot keep
up with population increase and when the petroleum
runs out, the millions will be sitting perched on a
branch with no trunk. There is no going back to the
farmed out fields. We have already seen what these
artificial fertilizer fed soils will be- exhausted. At that
point, monstrous disasters will take place.

In addition to the petroleum base of the pesticide
industry becoming exhausted, there is another
unsustainable aspect of the pesticide industry and
that is that insects develop immunities to the poison
so that more is needed in greater strength, more often.
The number of insect, tick and mite species that are

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now immune to agricultural poison is set at 428. As
the pests develop resistance the industry turns out
new and more deadly poisons but the industry is now
hard pressed to keep up with insect resistance. The
best plan the industrialists can come up with- which
is costing them hundreds of millions of dollars- is to
create plants through biotechnology that can withstand
greater and greater amounts of poison.

In its war with nature the industrial system
literally kills the soil community with poisons and
the beneficial work of that ecological community
stops.

Dead also are the predatory insects that would
eat the pests that the agriculturist seeks to eradicate.
Dead also are birds, animals, and people. “In 1981,
OXFAM stated that there were 750,000 cases of
accidental pesticide poisonings a year. Third World
countries, accounting for less than 15% of world
pesticide consumption, suffered 50% of poisonings and
75% of the resulting deaths.”11

Agriculturists sell food by weight- not nutritional
content. Taxpayer financed research that is pointed
toward increasing yields and profits, has nothing to
do with taxpayer nutrition. As yields have increased
by weight, nutritional content has declined. The
authority, Georg Borgstrom states: “In modern high-
yielding rice strains the protein content is down to
between 5 and 7 percent, in high-yielding wheat strains
to 10 percent, in hybrid corn to 7 percent. A piece of
cheese or ham has to be added to the sandwich to
become equivalent in terms of nutritive value to the
same sandwich without any additions around the turn
of the century.” As a comparison, Borgstrom mentions
Russian wheat strains with 22% protein content.12 Even
as modern yields increase it has less meaning because
the nutritional content declines. This is another failing
subsystem of industrial agriculture.

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Living on Oil—The Green Revolution

The Green Revolution is simply the insertion of
petroleum based industrial agriculture into Third World
societies. Necessary factors of industrial agriculture
are: large acreage, specialized seed, adequate water-
on demand, artificial fertilizer in large amounts,
agricultural poisons, agricultural machinery, fuel, and
shipment of product. Industrial agriculture is the most
highly developed in the First World industrial nations.
It is simply the application of industrial technique to
agricultural mass production.

Given this intense focus, it is the most productive
system in gross terms. With the industrial system, huge
energy inputs, relatively good soils and a temperate
climate, the U.S. produces so much food that more than
half of the food on international markets originates
there. “American farmers produce 15 percent of
the world’s wheat, 21 percent of oats, 36 percent of
sorghum, and 46 percent of maize on only 11 percent
of the world’s croplands.”13

Empire culture and the industrial system are
inherently centralizing and simplifying forces. When
the Green Revolution moves into a country it must
have large acreages so that it can achieve “economies of
scale,” meaning simply that within the mass production
system it is cheaper, on a per unit basis, to produce
a large amount of one item, than it is to produce only
one of those items. This means that self-supporting,
subsistence agriculture families in the area must move
to the periphery, attempt to farm the hillsides and
gain occasional labor on the new industrial farm. This
means that the hold of the colonial elite grows stronger
on the population that is no longer self-sufficient. This
means also that the hold of the international political/
financial system grows on the colonial elite. Either large
loans or opening the country up to the transnational
corporations are necessary to start the industrial

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agricultural system because the factors of production
must be shipped in, the trucks, the seed, the irrigation
works, the fertilizers and the other components.
Because of the huge capital investments needed for
industrial agriculture, the chances are good that the
country will ultimately be forced into the hands of
the international bankers for loans. When the system
is well established and the indigenous population is
heavily in debt, (in the tradition of the more advanced
First World farmers), then the international banking
system will send in teams of bankers to administer
the government’s economic planning and will promote
austerity measures that milk the population for interest
money to send to the imperial capitals. As the farm
system centralizes and the profit making industrial
farmer takes more land, homelessness increases. The
phenomena of cities exploding as people are forced
out of the countryside is a familiar one in industrial
societies. This trend is now particularly serious in the
Third World where there is a low level of industrial
infrastructure in urban areas. As the “labor saving”
machinery is brought in, unemployment increases
and people are forced to work at a lower wage under
worse conditions. As the production of food increases
with the industrial system, the people grow hungrier
because much of the food is now in the international
system.

The food is grown for export to bring in hard
currencies to repay loans, purchase manufacturing
equipment for the industrial centers and consumer
items for the colonial elite - not to buy food for
the poor.

A major point must be emphasized, the
calculation of how much food a country grows has
nothing to do with how well fed the people of that
country are. The important question in the industrial
system is how much money people have to buy food.
The international flow of protein goes to the First World
countries; they have the money to bid for the food.

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The Monocultural Instability

There are at least 5,000 plants that have been used
for human consumption on the planet yet the civilized
diet is made up of less than ten types of plants. The
reason for this is the cultural style of using agriculture
itself, dietary habit, mass production and profits (or
quotas in the socialist industrial variant).

There are basically ten food plants grown in the
world today when looked at on a volume basis. Wheat,
rice and corn alone make up one half of the food
consumed on the planet, with barley, oats, sorghum,
and millet making up the next one quarter. “Ninety
five per cent of our global nutritional requirements are
derived from a mere 30 plant kinds and a full three
quarters of our diet is based upon only eight crops.”14

If we add beans and potatoes to the above eight plants,
these ten species of plants are the essential basis of
world agriculture. These varieties of plants are adapted
to mass production. Harvesting the tubers of cattails
or many other plants could grow much more protein
per acre, but the harvesting is difficult by machine
methods. The few plant varieties that are used are
given extraordinary chances of producing. The plant is
grown on vast acreages that are completely controlled.
The plant receives as much artificial fertilizer as its
roots can take up, it is given adequate water at all times
that it needs it and the area is sterilized by agricultural
poisons because the plants often have little natural
resistance. It is this optimum and energy/capital
intensive conditioning that allows the tremendous
production.

In the U.S. where we have the example of the most
advanced state of industrial agriculture, we also
have the example of its tremendous destruction. “An
astonishing 80 million hectares [193.36 million acres]
of U.S. croplands, an area almost twice the size of
California, have been rendered unproductive, if not

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ruined outright. The nation has lost at least one-
third of its best topsoils, and erosion rates are now
worse than ever, as much as five billion tons [4.45140
billion tons] per year.”15 Organic materials are carbon
compounds, and the level of carbon compounds in
the soil is the measure of soil health. Soil scientists
calculate that, “On a global basis, we have squandered
more soil carbon than the fossil fuel variety. Roughly
a third of our [world] soil carbon was lost with the
opening up of the North American continent.”16

Because we stand on top of the ground and look
at plants, it slips from our consciousness that by far
the largest volume of organic material normally lays in
the soil and the largest volume of living things are the
lives in the soil community- spread all over the whole
planet. This measure of carbon loss (most ultimately
translated to gases in the atmosphere) shows the
profound loss that has occurred.

The nitrates from fertilizers and agricultural poisons
now pollute many underground aquifers in agricultural
regions. Where it does not kill them, the runoff of
poisons makes the fish and shellfish in inland and
coastal waters dangerous to eat.

The industrial agricultural system is contrary to
“family farming” in many ways. Contrary to the image
most of us have of the family farm, modern industrial
agriculture is a complex technical pursuit that requires
many exotic inputs. Many of these inputs are highly
dangerous such as hormones, antibiotics, and poisons.
One might say that these factors are also part of the
failure of industrial agriculture in that they maim and
kill the customers from whom they seek to make a
profit. There are cases such as in Puerto Rico where
the use of hormones, apparently in excess of the levels
used on the mainland, have created the maturation of
sexual organs, breasts and the growth of pubic hair
in human babies. The hormones in dairy and meat

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products spread over the civilized population certainly
have some effect on the sexual health of the population,
just as in selected cases it can be shown that these
“agricultural” hormones cause the development of
sexual organs in babies one and two years old and
create female sexual development in boys.17

Because of the crowded and unsanitary conditions
in which chicken, pigs and cattle are raised, the
animals are subject to many diseases. Because of this
the animals and their feed must be subjected to many
drugs. Antibiotics are one class that is used in large
volume. These are passed on in the tissues of the
animals to the top of the food chain- the consumers-
and alter micro-organic communities within the human
body.18

As of 1995, one-half of male U.S. citizens and two
fifths of females will have cancer in their lifetime (but
not necessarily die). “In 1900, cancer was the tenth
leading cause of death in the United States, and was
responsible for only three percent of all deaths. Today
it ranks second, and causes about twenty percent of
all deaths.”19 Many agricultural chemicals are proven
carcinogens. These toxins come to the animal through
their feed. Fish, poultry, dairy and meat products
contain high levels of toxics. Even a Reagan era
Environmental Protection Agency publication reports
that: “Foods of animal origin [are] the major source of...
pesticide residues in the diet.”20

With 99% of the mother’s milk from every part of
the country containing significant concentrations of
DDT and PCB’s, we know that the entire ecosystem is
also saturated with it. Human mother’s milk we know
from tests also contains dieldrin, heptachlor, dioxin
and many other toxic substances ingested from food,
air and water.21

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The Seeds of Monoculture

One other serious matter for the human family is
the seed system of industrial agriculture. (It will become
serious indeed when civilization collapses and we try to
grow our own food). The plant varieties of each species
of the “ten plants” of industrial agriculture, as well as
a few others, developed with empire culture. They are
basically the grains that were originally developed when
agriculture started and have been spread by various
empires to conquered territories. The origins of the ten
plants are primarily the temperate regions where empire
developed; though a few items have come from tropical
rainforest cultures (tomatoes, chocolate). These regions
are called Vavilov centers after the Russian botanist
N.I. Vavilov. They are: Chile, the Amazon, the Andes,
Central America, the Mediterranean, Ethiopia, Anatolia-
Caucasus, Central Asia, India, Northern China and
Southeast Asia.

At least until recently, these regions
contained many strains of primary plants. These strains
were held and selected over thousands of years by native
and peasant cultures that lived an agrarian lifestyle. In
older times there were hundreds of varieties of each of
these plants in each region. For example, in each small
valley in Afghanistan, farmers might develop their own
strains by selection over long periods of time. These
selections would be appropriate to that specific soil, the
specific pests that are in the area, the specific amount
of rainfall and the climatic temperature variations. From
this inventory, modern agriculture has selected the best
producers and after manipulations in research stations,
spread these worldwide. Because of the techniques of
the industrial agricultural system (ordinarily, only the
most productive variety will be used) only a handful
of varieties of each species is spread worldwide. The
following table gives some examples of: 1. crops, 2. the
number of dominant varieties and 3. the percentage of
the whole crop that those mass production varieties
represent, in the U.S. 22.

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CROP	%	VARIETIES
millet	100	3
cotton	53	3
soybeans	56	6
dry beans	60	2
snap beans	76	3
peas	96	2
corn	71	6
potatoes	72	4
sweet potatoes	69	1

Any large acreage of any single variety is extremely
vulnerable to pests because any species of pest successful
in feeding off the variety will have a population explosion
of many descendants that will do the same. When only
a few varieties are spread worldwide, the vulnerability is
spread accordingly.

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