Unsustainable Empires

Everywhere in Italy one is reminded of the origin of our civilisation.The Babylonian, Greek and Roman Empires all left some remnants behind, still visible today. What strikes me is they all ended in a similar way - those empires virtually imploded. As they grew and conquered new lands and people, used slave labour to mine their natural resources, overgrazed and deforested, eroded their topsoils and salinated their soils through irrigation, these Empires had little ecological energy left and they collapsed.

All these cultures profited and lived by exhausting the life of the earth. To me it looks like the very web of life is destroyed by civilisation - civilised society is unable to see its own problems and downfall. These empires all ended in the same way and pattern. Only now we have globalised this destruction. CIVIL - in Latin this refers to those who live in villages, towns and cities, hence civilisation. We now have more than half of the world's population in urban areas which is only possible with cheap fossil energy and not sustainable for much longer (oil peak?)

Soil exhaustion is happening in almost all places where civilisation has spread. It is very obvious in the Mediterranean countries; many areas can only maintain what I call ecological poverty crops, the olive, grape and goat. After the goat comes the desert as one can observe in many parts of Africa. It looks like civilisation equals aridity. We try to "fix" the symptoms, but we need to see the true cause of the problem - the destruction of natural resources.

The good news is that so many people I meet here in Italy - communities and farmers who still live on and from the land - are struggling to sustain their lives through innovation, diversification, cooperation and finding new ways and more sustainable systems, like the Slow Food and Slow Town movements and other NGO's. They resist globalisation that destroys their local economies. They understand there is no such thing as unlimited growth of numbers in the natural world.

I do my share by teaching Permaculture to raise an understanding of the carrying capacity of ecological systems.

Read "Final Empire" by W.M. Kotke.

Greetings from Italy, it's hot and dry, the middle of the European summer.
Abbazia Novacella, Italy