Garden Planet: The Present Phase Change of the Human Species

By William H. Kötke

Ktkes new book brilliantly integrates the best contemporary research into a compelling argument on the inevitable collapse of the consumer empire. The argument presented is not a fuzzy doomsday prophecy but rather a strong fact-based prediction that will leave the reader awestruck.

Equally brilliant, however, is the solution that is offered. The solution offered is not wedded to high tech fantasies that will invite further mindless consumption of scarce resources.

The author carefully outlines a new culture based on self-sufficient eco-villages, a concept that is gathering momentum and will allow a sustainable transition from the collapse of the consumer empire.

This book delivers an important message for anyone ready to come to grips with the impending industrial collapse.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Feb 14, 2005
• ISBN: 9781420823899

William H. Kötke

Author Wm. H. Kötke is widely traveled and published.  His most recent book, prior to Planet Garden, was the underground classic, The Final Empire: The Collapse of Civilization and the Seed of the Future. He has been a journalist, a radio script writer, a pamphleteer, a novelist, an essayist, and has had many articles published in periodicals.

Book preview

© 2005 William 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 01/31/05

ISBN: 1-4208-2389-2 (e)

ISBN: 1-4208-2388-4 (sc)

ISBN: 1-4208-2387-6 (dj)

ISBN: 978-1-4208-2389-9 (ebk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2005900030

Contents

CHAPTER ONE

THE NEW WORLD

CIVILIZED HUMANS ARE KILLING THE EARTH

PLANETARY CONSCIOUSNESS BY DEFAULT

THE CHALLENGE WE FACE

FACING THE ULTIMATE - THE NUCLEAR THREAT

THE THREATS PROLIFERATE

THE BLIND ALLEY

IS THERE ANY HOPE?

CHAPTER TWO

THE BIOREGIONAL PERMACULTURE

THE QUESTION OF BIOLOGICAL LEGITIMACY

THE RELATIONSHIP OF THE CULTURE OF EMPIRE TO THE EARTH

CREATION OF THE PATRIARCHY

FOOD FOR THE HUNGRY OR FOOD FOR PROFIT?

TECHNOLOGY ALLOWS THE EARTH’S FERTILITY TO BE EXTORTED MORE EFFICIENTLY

THE NEW CULTURE OF LIVING FROM THE INCREASE

PERMANENT AGRICULTURE

MODERN PERMACULTURE

CREATING A PERMACULTURE DESIGN

CHAPTER THREE

SHELTER

LOCATING THE STRUCTURE

WATER

CREATING SHELTER FROM LOCAL MATERIALS

THE SOLARIUM

THE SHAPE OF THE SHELTER

THE OTHER REASON WE WANT TO LIVE IN A HAND MADE HOUSE

CHAPTER FOUR

HUMAN CULTURE

THE CULTURAL DYNAMICS OF EMPIRE

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF EMPIRE

THE FEARFUL SEPARATION

DEFENDING AGAINST THE FEAR - WHEN POSSESSIONS BECOME ONE’S IDENTITY

CHAPTER FIVE

CREATING A CULTURE OF

HUMAN POTENTIATION

CREATING CULTURAL WEALTH

DEALING WITH THE FEAR

PROCREATING THE NEW WORLD

FLIGHT OR FIGHT

THE DAMAGED BABIES

THE RESOURCES IN THE NEW CULTURE

THE BIRTH EVENT

ENERGY MEDICINE

THE CULTURAL HOLOGRAM

SEXUAL LOVE

LIBERATING HUMAN ENERGY

GOOD GOVERNMENT

THE NEW POLITICS

THE POLITICS OF LOVE

THE CURRENCY OF LIFE

THE LANGUAGE OF LOVE

SPIRITUAL LOVE

OUR WAY OF LIFE IS A GRADUATION INTO A NEW WORLD

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DEDICATED TO THOSE WHO ARE

CREATING THE NEW WORLD

CHAPTER ONE

THE NEW WORLD

A new post-industrial, post-imperial world is forming under our feet. This is a wholistic reality that will serve as the seed pattern for future generations. This new culture represents the graduation of the species to maturity and biological legitimacy. This is the exciting direction into which we can all put our creative energies, without reservation. This is an answer to the fading industrial world. The sprouting seed patterns are miniature human communities that are intent on serving most human needs, locally, within their societies. These communities are loosely called eco-villages. These are intentional communities which are pointed toward self-sufficiency. These nascent institutions float on a tide of cultural creation that has been in motion for some fifty years.

The new culture of the post industrial world has intuitively come up out of the masses of us. No powerful group has organized projects to produce it; it is not the result of powerful backroom planners. Since the mid-twentieth century wholistic responses that constitute the framework of the new culture have been created as reactions to the failing institutions of industrial society. We are not inventing new culture from whole cloth. It’s basic pieces have already been road tested over several decades. What we do now is to pull all the pieces together and put them on the ground. In this book we will examine the imminent collapse of civilization, and we will outline the sprouts and buds of the new human culture that is arising.

For as many as two million years our species has been incredibly successful on the earth. As primarily forager hunters we traveled in bands of an average of twenty eight people gathering our food with the seasons and living in balance with nature such that we did not eradicate the living world. Obviously, these groups wandering in their traditional, seasonal migration patterns would need to work together to survive. And such it was. Our elders over a vast amount of time counseled the youth to cooperate, work together, be humble, share, and generally de-emphasize the individual in view of the group importance and survival. It is important that we are not admiring our ancient ancestors because of nostalgia or some romantic notions. Rather, we are looking at how they managed to live in balance with the natural world. At this point in history studying how humans have managed to live in balance with the earth is important to our own survival. We are not concerned, for our present purposes, whether we like their diets, social practices or other factors when looked at through the lens of values of late industrial western culture.

When the cultural inversion occurred from forager/hunter to agriculture and the beginnings of imperial society, sharing inverted to material accumulation, greed was socially condoned and the living earth was turned into private property. Cooperation was sacrificed to individualism and selfishness. Individual success, wealth and dominance became central values over concern for the group. We might call this the era of baubles and beads which saw the human accumulation of wealth to extreme degrees. The culture of civilization has accumulated vast wealth and massive ability to destroy life through military means but its social institutions are stunted and its psychology is warped. Any human culture that destroys life so wantonly could not be otherwise.

Our next unfoldment as a species will be to graduate from our educational fling with the self-centered, and selfish things that our ancient elders suggested we not do - to legitimacy as a planetary organism. Our species has gone through the matrilineal or feminine cycle and through the male dominated patriarchy; now we stand on the equalization onset of the next phase.

Our new culture must take responsibility for person and planet. By default, because the destruction is so vast and has endured so long, we are now in a position that we must manage an ecological restoration of our planet’s life, or we as a species will not be here. Fortunately we as a species are responding to the planetary plight with self-regulating intuitive responses.

These responses encompass most of the important elements of our human existence. Our view of our occupancy of the earth has changed tremendously. We now have the bioregional view. Peter Berg and his publication Raise the Stakes was an early leader of this movement.

Bioregionalism views our planet as a spotted fawn. It is dappled by watersheds. A watershed is the smallest natural form of human social, political, economic, and biological unit. A bioregion on the other hand could be a large watershed such as the Amazon or Colombia River drainages. As a political and social unit it comprises an area which unifies all of the water that falls on it and unifies the inter-related concerns of that place.

Bioregionalists talk of living in place. This orientation accepts the fact that we really do live on the earth and we live in a certain place with relationship to all of the other living things that exist there. A bioregionalist would ask us about all of the necessities of life and where they come from. We would first want to know where our water comes from, where the food comes from and then where the water goes and where the excrement goes. The bioregionalist looks for a lifestyle that produces one’s needs from their own watershed or at least bioregion.

The bioregion is the place where the stability of human culture is being created that can supercede the present view of land as a commodity that any industrial person can do with as they want. The history of earth abuse since the beginning of agriculture and imperial culture has been to treat the earth as a commodity. As imperial cultures biologically exhaust each area, they move on to other more pristine areas to continue their extraction of biological fertility in order to support the imperial masses and the projects of their emperors and financial/military elites.

For a hundred centuries, since the beginnings of agriculture this has been an acute problem. It is obvious to us now in the twenty-first century that humans cannot live on the planet unless they can keep it alive. It is well demonstrated that the extractive, commodity culture cannot do this. Commodity culture buys a piece of the earth or takes it by force in imperial conquest and then uses that place, its topsoil, its timber, its mineral resources or whatever exists there that can be turned into a profit in the imperial culture, and then walks away when the source of that wealth is exhausted. In contrast, we must create a human culture that can live in stability on the earth in the same bioregion over many generations. In this way humans who have created a secure, self-sufficient, biological basis that cares for the earth and keeps it alive can develop the cultural intelligence to assist the living earth over time. This new human culture is one that increases the life of the earth and lives from that increase rather than the existing pattern that lives from the decline of the life and fertility of the earth. This is a necessity. If humans can’t do this they can’t live here. If we cannot become biologically legitimate organisms we’re not going to make it on this planet.

The exciting part is that we are creating a culture that is at home in its place on the earth. In general, life looks out for its progeny. Birds raise their young and try to give them the best chance for life. Plants use all kinds of sophisticated strategies to give their seeds the best chance but the humans organized into imperial/industrial culture have little sense of preserving life for their offspring or, seemingly, even caring about the progeny. Our new cultural creation will return us to that capacity of thinking toward the seventh generation.

We are creating a new culture that humans, except in small groups in isolated times and places, have not known. We have graduated from the monkey level where we collect bright objects and indulge in the primitive politics of who gets to be the alpha in the herd. We are creating a society of human maturity that serves each member of the society rather than being organized for