Introduction to
THE FINAL EMPIRE
The crisis of the planet Earth is so profound that all of our lives will be caught up in it. Our lives will change because of it. Our lives will change because of the apocalyptic events happening now and the even greater dislocations to come. We cannot avoid these great trends of history but we can exercise awareness and skill in action in dealing with them. The tumult will be environmental and it will also be within the social body of civilization.
Book I begins with a straight-forward examination of our ecological situation on the planet. This is not pleasant knowledge but it is imperative that we understand the full dimensions of the problem before we invest our lives in a solution. Book I also includes an explanation of how we humans have arrived at such a point of personal and planetary suicide. In this section the cultural dynamics, the psychology and the history of our culture is examined in order to gain insight for the future.
Book II is a plan of action for us to regain paradise. This section answers the question of how to live in balance with nature. This is not a theoretical answer. It involves an actual watershed, what its ecology is and what the food sources are. This section takes those much abused words, "sustainable" and "balance with nature," and puts them on the ground. We will be urged to immediately create a new ecologically sustainable land based culture that will take us through the future times. Those who can respond will be accepting an initiatory challenge such as has seldom happened to our kind. The challenge is to bring out of the greatest wave of death and destruction the earth has ever known, a new world of wholeness and relationship of all of the tribes that live in ecological sustainability. This era is the first time in two million years that all of the tribes can connect as a planetary whole in a geographical and material sense.
When our great, great, great grandchildren look back at the crisis that their ancestors had lived through they will understand why we changed ourselves, our culture, our relationship with our mother the earth and our relationship with the creative spirit of the cosmos.
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