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Program Information
Steppin' Out of Babylon
Interview
William H. Kotke
 Sue Supriano  Contact Contributor
Feb. 16, 2008, 9 p.m.
Kotke believes that the hope for survival are seed communities-- "ecovillages" which are totally sustainable ... this core idea is explored in these two programs ...
Sue Supriano's Steppin' Out of Babylon is a radio interview series covering a broad range of important issues in today's world: peace and war, human and civil rights, communication, the media, the environment, food security, racism, globalization, immigration and matters of the spirit. Over 250 shows are available at this site!

http://www.suesupriano.com

Kotke's writings can be found on the internet at http://www.thefinalempirebook.com and http://www.gardenplanetbook.com.

William H. Kotke's origins were on a farm in Oregon. He has been a journalist, a radio script writer, a pamphleteer, a novelist, an essayist, and has had many articles published in periodicals. In these 2 half-hour interviews he speaks of how "civilization" is out of the flow of planetary energy. Although tribal people lived within the biological flows of the planet for a million years, "civilization" has meant that the farm was to export as much as farmers could grow from the soil. This practice has resulted in depleting the soil to the point where half the present world's population is fed with food fed by fossil fuel fertilizers. "Civilization" has been a suicidal denigration and using up of our earthly resources for the last 6000 years-- since Babylon. "Civilization" is also equivalent to "Empire" which consists of hierarchy, militarism, materialism and patriarchy. It exhausts and kills the soil, rivers, oceans, etc. while telling people they're making progress. In fact, it actually takes 500-1000 years to build each inch of topsoil. Since oil has "peaked" it won't be possible for people to continue to eat based on fossil-based fertilizers pumped into depleted soils, leading to a lot less available food. If you kill what feeds you it can't go on. And this is where we are today. It's looking like the end of the world as we know it. We have also gotten further and further away from ourselves to abstractions such as moving from "oral history" into writing, and from bartering into "money".
Kotke believes that the hope for survival is seed communities-- "ecovillages" which are totally sustainable. There are already at this time 710,000 villages in the "ecovillage" network in the US, Sri Lanka, Latin America, India and Africa. Some are newly developed and some are traditional, sustainable cultures. Check out the website at http://gen.ecovillage.org/

Link: http://www.thefinalempirebook.com

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