Common Sense And Survival
By William H. Kötke
30 July,
2008
Countercurrents.org
The graph line of the global population explosion now goes upward almost vertically. The graph line of reserves of resources that fund that explosion falls precipitously. The point at which population crosses the food production line is the point of the beginning of the coming mass die-off of human population.
Since Babylon, the type of human culture that we live in has featured an emperor or surrogate who is surrounded by a handful of wealthy militarist/financiers. These people own and rule the realm. This class has historically gained their power and wealth by feeding off the people and by growth/conquest. This class has always urged growth as the means to increase their power and wealth. There were always new fertile lands to conquer and peoples to enslave. The configuration of the culture of empire which we call civilization, has not changed in six thousand years. Today in the U.S.A. less than one per cent of the population has more than three quarters of the wealth. Certainly they have enough wealth to buy and run the government and have a land ownership pattern that rivals the land barons of Guatamala.
This culture has increased its population by running a net deficit of the fertility of the earth. The soils, forests, fish stocks, pure water and over-grazed and desertified landscapes have been sacrificed to the god of growth. Now there are no more fertile lands to conquer and exploit, but the population continues to grow and the fossil fuel production reaches peak and begins to decline. The culture that has no vision of the future and no purpose other than material consumption hits the wall.
In the past few centuries the elites have gained a new method of growth/conquest. The lever of Science/technology has been used to further their power. Through the creation of industrialism, we now live in a manufactured environment. We civilized people have created machines and been conditioned by the machine world until we begin to act in a machine-like manner. Powerless, we are thoroughly dependent upon the machine for our food and shelter survival. Alienated and atomized, we move around trying to fit into a niche in order to obtain survival. The pressure to move to a job breaks nuclear families apart and certainly precludes the existence of extended families. We have become interchangeable ciphers in the industrial machine. We have been culturally conditioned from birth to have great regard for non-living manufactured items and have been alienated from living things. We have more regard for the dead wood of a church than for a living forest.
Today, when we look at the numbers and look back at those millions of acres of exhausted and eroded soils, common sense tells us that this is the end. The Patriarchs of empire have committed us to a fundamental biological error. Any organism that wantonly kills that which feeds it will not endure very long. The culture of empire does not have a political problem; it has a biological problem. It lives in a bubble of self-created definitions and has a dysfunctional relationship with the life of the earth. One might say that if the humans can't keep the planet alive, they certainly can't live here.
For several million years our successful ancestors maintained adaptation to the ecological energy flows of the earth. Now, humans have become so biologically maladapted that we are in the third mass species die-off, the last one being the dinosaurs.
It's just common sense that we throw out the whole of the culture of civilization. If even a small part of the human species is to endure, we must return to foundational principles.
The millenniums-old project of the imperial elites to control every thing in front of them and indeed, wishfully, the universe, has failed.
THE SHIFT
The human species is seriously out of balance with the natural world. The obvious answer to this is for the species to regain balance with the natural world. Simple common sense morality would say that first we need a society that agrees that each of us is alive and not a bio-robot and that each of our lives have intrinsic value. We shift from a war/competition – death focus to a principle that all life has value. Life is the growth system. Consuming living ecologies in order to amass piles of baubles is ultimately not a growth system.
Common sense morality would say that we humans should aid the living earth and that the simple morality would be that we humans aid in the complete ecological restoration of the earth back to its climax condition. This is the least that we could do given the grievous damage that has occurred. Of course this is also the pathway toward our survival.
A modern human normally enters the world in an austere hospital, possibly experiencing birth trauma. The child is baby-sat by a TV and then later turned over to a mass education institution for further conditioning. After graduating they get to work in a cubicle until they retire and die.
In a culture in which the growth of life is the paramount focus, the pregnant mother would become a center of community energy. Recent scholarship has shown us how important it is for both mother and baby to receive soothing and comforting energies. Great community energy would also be focused on the children. Just like all the other species around us, the "growing" of children would be a central activity. In a Life culture we would assume that the society would be formed in such a way as to encourage every possible talent of each individual. As we symbolically move out of the patriarchal/intellectual to the feminine/feeling mode the social dialog changes. The successful growing of life of all kinds requires a feeling for it and some application of the intellect. We would begin to follow perceptions and conclusions brought to us by our feelings rather than conclusions derived solely from intellection.
HUMANS ON THE CUTTING EDGE
It's just common sense. If humans want to live on this planet they will have to restore the life of the earth. This seems like a tall order but the imminent death of billions is also a large event.
Answers have come bubbling up out of our mass intuition. For decades skills have been building in the practice of Permaculture so that seed communities can restore ecosystems, build soil fertility and produce more food per acre than the industrial system. Hand-made houses with solar advantages built from local materials are scattered around the planet. There are examples of hand-made houses with solar advantages that can heat and cool themselves without outside energy. The world-wide move to ecovillages is well under way with Russia alone having now over eight hundred.
Bill Mollison, one of the co-originators of Permaculture says that, "Without permanent agriculture there is no possibility of a stable social order." The intuitively forming ideal is extended families occupying their own private permaculture design with a number of these families occupying a watershed. A number of watersheds constitute a bioregion. This is a natural social/political framework in which the needs of the earth are re-presented in human society because the humans are advocating for the life and gaining survival from that life. We might call this biological democracy.
Human/earth centered, rather than object centered, this new movement promises to become the next human culture. Human social institutions tend to form around food survival systems and be resonant with the morals and purpose of those different activities to gain food; we would expect the new culture to do the same. When some or all of the seed communities make it through the apocalypse, they will be the ancestors.
Many flail about trying to save the dying beast of empire by recycling their tin cans or inventing free energy machines but it is just common sense that if we want to aid the life of our great, great grandchildren we will ignore the dying beast and put our living energies into the new way of life
By
Wm. H. Kotke, author of the underground classic book: THE
FINAL EMPIRE: The Collapse of Civilization and the Seed of the
Future which can be viewed at: http://www.thefinalempirebook.com.
and Garden Planet: The Present Phase Change of the Human Species.
seen at: www.gardenplanetbook.com
. Telephone orders at 1-888-280-7715 or at bookstores everywhere.
