Kötke’s 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.
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.
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.