Steppin' Out Of Babylon: Radio Interviews

William H. Kötke is the author of The Final Empire, The Collapse of Civilization and the Seed of the Future and Garden Planet: The Present Phase Change of The Human Species, available in paperback and electronic form.These writings can be found on the internet at http://www.thefinalempirebook.com and http://www.gardenplanetbook.com.In this interview Kötke repeats from Program 1 that "civilization" (also called "empire") has swelled the social body by sucking the fertility out of the topsoil and causing the loss of our earth's fertility and therefore our ability to feed ourselves. Just in the 25 years from 1975 to 2000 we lost one fifth of the world's topsoil. (See the summary from William Kötke 1 for more info.) If we look back over 6000 years of this type of exploitation of our environment we see that we have lost the diversity we need. Presently the basic commercial crops in the world are only ten species which include rice, corn and potatoes. This is because, even though we can get more protein out of an a