Written exlusively for Truth to Power

Read William Kotke's "Final Empire" series on Truth to Power

THE PARADISE IMPERATIVE

Humans must create paradise or they cannot live on the

planet Earth. Paradise here is described as a human community that

lives in perpetuity and in peace on one place on the earth, over many

generations. In the modern view, generated from the Alternative

Culture and Cultural Creatives, we have a permaculture design in a

valley that has been ecologically restored and has added additional

trees in different ecological niches to create a food forest of fruits

and nuts.  Under the forest canopy are tall bushes also of fruit and

nuts. Under this, the lower berry bushes and vining plants grow.

Lower, are the forbs: perennial vegetable plants that grow year after

year and require no disruption of the soil community. Below this are

the perennial tuber plants and also down in the soil are the edible

mushrooms. This is a perpetual food design that will produce more 

food per acre than the industrial agricultural system, without digging,

disrupting and damaging the thousands of species of the soil

community, and at the same time, continually building soil fertility

and preventing soil erosion.

Next, we add hand made housing of straw-bale, adobe, log, rammed

earth, or other local material, along with attached solar green houses

according to many successful contemporary designs. The humans, of

course, maintain a stable population and live with a stable biological

unit.

Then we add a new human culture based on aiding the life force rather

than its consumption and destruction.

Paradise is obviously not a new idea. Richard Heinberg in his book

Memories and Visions of Paradise says, “ We are faced with some

extraordinary facts. In virtually every culture on Earth we encounter

a myth telling how humankind originated in a time of peace, happiness, 

and miraculous power and, because of some mistake or failure, degenerated 

to its present condition. Moreover, nearly every tribe and nation reveres 

the sayings of some ancient prophet who foretold the corrupt human world 

will one day be consumed in a purifying cataclysm to make way for a renewed 

Golden Age. And, as if the similarities of these ancient myths and prophecies 

were not remarkable enough, we are confronted by the additional fact that 

much of our civilization’s greatest literature and many of its most inspiring theories 

and experiments seem to derive their vitality and appeal from these 

mysterious memories and visions of paradise.”

This paradise can be done now. All of these systems have been worked

out in the thousands of ecovillages around the planet and in many

other similar designs. The above permacultural design has the effect

of putting us in biological adaptation to the planet Earth. This is

the key and crux of the matter. We as a species must be biologically

adapted to the biological energy flows (food chains, biological webs)

or we as a species cannot live on the earth. This is not to say that

we must adopt a loin cloth and eat roots and berries such as the

incredibly successful two million years of our ancestors, but it does

mean that we somehow must biologically adapt to the earth. 

This means that the very foundations of our human culture of 

materialism must change.

THE CULTURE OF LOOTING

Human agriculture has been one of the most ecologically destructive

disasters to hit the planet. When agriculture began and the first plow

or digging stick was struck into the breast of Mother Earth, the

destruction began. Soil scientists say that it takes between three

hundred and a thousand years to accumulate each inch of topsoil in

optimum ecologies. This is what agriculture drains from the earth.

Surpluses from the life force of the earth is what the civilized are

after and have been after for eight thousand years, draining the

fertility of the earth through agriculture, overgrazing and

deforestation The more surpluses that members of the empire can 

haul to the capital city, the more their social stature, in a materialistic

society. Now that ninety per cent of the large fish in the ocean are

gone, we are down to ten per cent of the planetary forest and soil

erosion, exhaustion and desertification are racing ahead on all

continents, even the unconcerned can see the problem. “Civilization,”

since its inception has accomplished its growth by sucking the

fertility out of the life force of the planet.

The phrase, “survival of the fittest,” was taken up out of Charles

Darwin’s theory of evolution and made into a violent cultural norm by

the British Empire. “Social Darwinism” soon followed. Those who ruled

by violence, theft and lies, considered it obvious that they were the

‘best,” and on the forefront of evolution, since they ruled. Those who

ruled Babylon in the now ecologically destroyed “fertile crescent,”

the Han Chinese who ruled a country that was once half covered by a

fertile temperate zone forest and those imperial rulers who occupied

the once fertile Indus River Valley, no doubt thought they were the

“best” - eight thousand years ago. That human culture has descended

through the years to the point that “pioneers” on their way to loot

the U.S. west, killed thousands of buffalo, took their tongues to

market for money and left the carcasses to rot on the plains. This is

an appropriate image of the culture of civilization and its ten

thousand year project of killing the life force of our planet.

A CULTURE OF ADAPTATION

Another part of Darwin’s theory - that the English ruling class

neglected - is the value of biological adaptation. When the banker

leans on the farmer, the farmer leans on the soil, for more surpluses.

The city dweller eats some of the food and throws the scraps, along

with all other organic material in the landfill where its mass becomes

an ecological problem. This is a simplified version of the whole of

the culture of empire. There is no reward for the upstream supplier of

biological energy, there is simply looting.. The ecology that provided

the soil is not rewarded with the organic material so as to continue

its growth. In many cases the old growth forest that originally

provided the topsoil is gone.

In a great cultural turn-around, thousands of ecovillages have sprung

up around the planet, pointed toward reversing the civilized cultural

values and seeking adaptation to the planetary biology. Biological

adaptation is the only way that the human species can be on this

planet in perpetuity.

Much concern has been expressed recently about economic collapse, 

but the big collapse right behind it is what most people in the

materialistic society do not see. This is the biological collapse of

the life force of our planet. In this late stage of the “crisis of

empire,” the only beneficial act one can do is seek biological

adaptation in some manner. All other activities are frivolous and

pointless.

As the culture of looting crashes in flames, our hope is that some of

the thousands of ecovillages around the planet will survive the

cataclysm to thrust a new pattern of cultural values, and a new

adaptation to the life force, into the future.

By William H. Kotke, author of, The Final Empire: The Collapse of

Civilization and the Seed of the Future and Garden Planet, both books

available through the usual sources.