What Right Do You Have to Be Here on Planet Earth?

At some point in our lives, most of us realized that there is no place that we could stand on the side of mother earth and not be asked, “by what right are you here?” Do we have a rent receipt, a park pass, a ticket, a passport? Even the rare humans in the Amazonian interior cannot get out of Brazil without a passport.

And when I do have a rent receipt, who is it that “benevolently” and tentatively extends those rights to me? An armed gang of thugs who call themselves “civilization” own mother earth. This loosely organized gang of thugs are composed, usually, into a male hierarchy, generally referred to as the planetary, military patriarchy. This gender imbalanced, group of fat bankers in business suits, with Generals at their side, owns the earth. These are the descendants of the original patriarchs who began the warfare — looting — death oriented, empire culture, who apparently believed that because males are larger and stronger, they should kill the opposition and loot the earth of material goods, which they call “wealth” and conflate with “power.”

Now, they have done it. They have looted the earth almost to its death. Babylon ecologically destroyed Iraq, the Indus Empire ecologically destroyed the Indus Valley, the Han Chinese ecologically destroyed China and the Greek and Roman empires ecologically destroyed North Africa and Italy and now the patriarchs are sucking the life force out of the whole earth. The patriarchs are not standing on the living earth, they exist in a mentally conditioned bubble that tells them that the more the earth dies, the better things get. They call it the sacred growth. They babble incessantly about economics, politics, and fast cars. At the universities they have answers to all questions, but the reality here on the earth is simple.

The Giant Vacuum Cleaner They Call Economics

They have set up a giant vacuum machine that can identify any valuable biological activity on the earth. Down here on the earth, the soil community of millions of members slowly builds up surpluses. In optimum ecologies, this community can produce one inch of topsoil in three hundred to nine hundred years. The giant machine identifies the biologically rich areas of soils, fish stocks, forests, grasslands and so forth in which to plug its tentacles. The sucking sound is

the life force leaving our planet. Of course, they babble on about their theories of economics and politics as they try to justify their methods of sharing the loot, which they have sucked out of the planet’s life force. In this culturally conditioned reality bubble, we have more regard for the house made of dead trees than we have for the living forest itself.

The industrialists prattle on about value. What is it that makes our loot valuable? The industrial Marxist, in his bubble, says that it is human labor that makes things valuable, the voice from the industrial capitalist bubble says it is whatever people will pay.

Back on the earth, the life force maintains a web of energy flows. The sunlight is consumed, photosynthesis increases biomass, the leaf falls from the tree, it becomes food for the soil community, which creates fertility for the tree. This exemplifies the vastly more manifold and complex web of life of the earth. No life form attempts to take over the whole. Each lives according to its nature in dynamic balance with the web of life.

Therefore, each life form that exists in dynamic balance within the web of life has a right to be here on earth because it’s part of the function. In addition, because the local conditions in the cosmos have created the environment for life to exist on earth, we can say that the life form has even cosmic rights. Therefore, if you are existing in dynamic balance with the web of life of the planet earth, YOU HAVE A RIGHT TO BE HERE ON THIS PLANET EARTH, otherwise you and I are biologically illegitimate criminals intent on murdering our mother.

When we examine, say, our own liver, we see a cell community happily cooperating with the body’s design in doing liver things. In some extreme case we might see a small group of cells cancerously declare that they don’t like the cosmic design and they commit to creating a (tumor) body of their own design. They then begin sucking the life force out of the larger body and growing their own tumor body until the larger body dies.

We are now at the crime scene. There are individual life forms loose on the planet that are cancerously sucking the life out of larger benign bodies. We call ourselves, “the civilized.” And how did this criminal enterprise begin?

For several million years our species lived very successfully on the earth, embedded in the ecological energy flows as forager/hunters. With our encyclopedic knowledge of the living earth, we knew plants come from seeds and also where the seeds should be planted. Many forager/hunters planted seeds along the foraging routes, to return later. But, at some point, some humans decided that they didn’t like the design of the larger body and began the practice of agriculture as a way of life. This was the fateful decision that has almost sealed the fate of our planet.

What happened on the ground? Those humans stopped the foraging migrations and became embedded in one spot. They began to suck biological surpluses from the soil with farming and grazing. They accumulated food and material objects in their buildings. Because they had “wealth” to protect, a male, military hierarchy was created. They were protecting material goods and thus materialism came into the new culture. The idea of linear increase, growth, progress became imbedded in the culture as the patriarchs began to envision “bigger barns and broader acres.” ((Chapter 9, The Cultural Dynamics of Empire. The Final Empire: The Collapse of Civilization and the Seed of the Future. Wm. H. Kötke.))

Steven Mithen, in his book, After the Ice, describes a neolithic village called Ain Ghazal, in the Mid-East. The archeologists, going down the layers find animal bones and pollen counts that indicate an original luxury of animals and plants, including farm produce. As time went on, the two thousand person town was reduced to zero as the wild game disappeared, the soils were exhausted and eroded and the trees cut down. ((After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000-5,000 BC. P. 87.)) In some “civilized” cultures the people didn’t disappear, but the problem metastasized. If one sucks the biological energy out of their area, they have to spread out and conquer new soils, forests and grasslands and get on the path toward empire.

From this mix we get “civilization,” a brutish mass of mutant, hyper-male killers who’s culture makes famous mass, serial killers such as Alexander the Great, Caligula, George Bush and Ted Bundy.

Our species made a terminal mistake. We did not observe the first principle of living on the earth: ECOLOGICAL BALANCE, and the second, LIFE HAS VALUE.

We Are Now Ready To Overthrow The Pathological Patriarch

Millions of us are now ready. They call us “alternatives,” “cultural creatives,” “hippies,” “radicals,” un-Russian, un-British and un-American. Out of the intuition of the masses has come the new culture. The new culture emphasizes gender balance and consensus government. The new culture of non- industrial medical care points to herbal medicine, energy medicine, Reiki, nutrition, naturopathic, yoga, homeopathic, yoga, and much more.

Many have thought we are trying to wear loin cloths and eat roots and berries. Although our forager/hunter ancestors were successful, there have been many human cultures that have existed in ecological balance. It is ecological balance, not loin cloths that we are discussing. The Nabateans of the Negev Desert in the Mid-East, from 200 b.c. to 100 a.d. created a superlative civilization out of a barren desert with human creativity. Anthropologist D.A. Posey describes the Kayapo´ of the Amazon who grow well over 100 different species in their rainforest gardens (which to the uninitiated look like more rainforest) of an acre or less. ((Indigenous Peoples and Tropical Rainforests: Models of Land Use. Cultural Survival Report #27. Jason W. Clay. 1988.)) The Inca Civilization existed without ecological destruction.

We now have Permaculture as a balanced way of getting our nutrition from the earth. Permaculture is a wholistic body of strategies that seeks to mimic ecological processes and can grow more food per acre than the industrial system while building the soil and providing homes for other creatures.

We now have a huge alternative building movement of straw bale, cob, rammed earth, earth bag, adobe, and much more that rely on local materials. We now have alternative solar homes that can heat and cool themselves without outside energy.

We have the Global Ecovillage Network which has thousands of ecovillage members around the planet all pointed toward self-sufficiency and Balance with the life force.

We have “alternative” people who are expanding the human potential by perceiving and communicating with the life force of the planet. ((Plant Spirit Healing: A Guide to Working With Plant Consciousness. Pam Montgomery. Bear & Co. 2008. The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Direct Perception of Nature. Stephen Harrod Buhner. Bear & Co. 2004.))

We even have new wave economists who lay out a plan for a new cooperative economy.

People living with nature, on the land, in ecovillages with an artisan economy are the picture of social stability and self-sufficiency. With this means we can establish a culture that can prevent hierarchy and can prevent the creation of surpluses that would support militaries, dictators, emperors, shopping mall addicts and centralized governments.

We are now living out the last gasps of materialistic, industrial civilization and the dying away of the flesh of our planet, with its exploding population and dwindling resources. If there were any maturity in the human societies they would be glad to sponsor experimental communities such as ecovillages. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the death culture could push through a few surviving ecologically balanced human communities past the apocalypse to become the seeds of the new human culture based on the principles of life?

Wm. H. Kötke is author of The Final Empire: The Collapse of Civilization and the Seed of the Future, and Garden Planet, both available from the usual sources. Read other articles by William, or visit William's website.

5 comments on this article so far ...

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  1. mary said on February 2nd, 2011 at 8:13am #

    Some more food for thought here in this good piece from John Pilger on the desecration of his country, Australia.

    http://www.newstatesman.com/australasia/2011/01/pilger-australia-flood

  2. mary said on February 2nd, 2011 at 9:13am #

    Must be pretty scary. Not attributable to La Nina so this says.

    Australia Cyclone Yasi roars into Queensland coast

    This image provided by Nasa shows Cyclone Yasi as it approaches Queensland

    Fierce winds and driving rains, brought by the most powerful storm ever to hit Queensland, are lashing northern coastal areas of the Australian state.

    With winds forecast to reach up to 300km/h (190mph) Cyclone Yasi is ripping roofs off buildings and has cut power to at least 90,000 people.

    The destructive core hit south of Cairns, with forecasters warning of substantial damage and likely deaths.

    Queensland’s premier has warned of devastation on an unprecedented scale.

    Anna Bligh described the weather system as the “most catastrophic storm ever seen” in the state, and it has been classed as a “Category Five” typhoon – the highest grade in the scale used to measure such storms.

    Queenslanders are being told to brace for the most catastrophic storm ever to hit their shores. State Premier Anna Bligh said she did not think Australia had ever seen a storm of this intensity in an area as thickly populated.

    She predicted it would be a very frightening time, with 24 hours of terrifying winds, torrential rains, and the likely loss of electricity and mobile phones.

    Meteorologists upgraded Cyclone Yasi to a category five storm. With winds of almost 300km/h (186mph), they are warning it poses an extremely serious threat to life and property, especially around the cities of Cairns and Townsville.

    She warned that it could cause a tidal surge as high as nine metres (nearly 30ft), overwhelming low-lying coastal areas.

    /….

    {http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12342031}

  3. Vic Anderson said on February 2nd, 2011 at 9:29pm #

    By inalienable right(s) and my desiderata.

  4. jayn0t said on February 2nd, 2011 at 10:07pm #

    There is something suspicious about claiming that one culture among others is ‘pathological’. The perspective defended by Kötke and others isn’t as ‘culturally relativist’ as it appears. Does Western society today exhibit less, or more, gender equality than most of its predecessors? Freud and the Frankfurt School tried to tell the inhabitants of Western societies they are uniquely sick. Kötke is among their heirs, claiming we are “biologically illegitimate criminals intent on murdering our mother”. Whose interests does this serve?

  5. AGnostic said on February 3rd, 2011 at 1:19pm #

    Good stuff.

    In response to jaynot: Never mind Freud and the Frankfurters! The same observation about the pathology of Western societies has been made by many indigenous people all over the globe.

    The only interest there is to serve is that of ecology, survival and evolution.

    Perhaps the successor to homo sapiens is already among us and some are very scared, as they’re used to the law of the selfish gene, and a bigger-fish-eat-the-smaller kind of reality. The NWO can be likened to the final days of Rome. They and their cowardly supporters among the masses are lashing out blindly in a desperate attempt to protect and consolidate their power, destroying themselves in the process.

    They have no right to be here, and they have no future.