If I'm going to contemplate the collapse of civilization, I need to define what it is. I looked in some dictionaries. Webster's calls civilization a "High stage of social and cultural development". The Oxford English Dictionary describes it as "a developed or advanced state of human society". All the other dictionaries I checked were similarly laudatory. These definitions, no matter how broadly shared, did not help me in the slightest. They seemed to me hopelessly sloppy. After reading them, I still had no idea what the hell a civilization is: high, developed, or advanced...please. The definitions, it struck me, are also extremely self-serving: can you imagine writers of dictionaries willingly classifying themselves as members of "a low, undeveloped, or backward state of human society"?

I suddenly remembered that all writers, including writers of dictionaries, including myself even, are propagandists, and I realized that these definitions are in fact, bite-sized chunks of propaganda, concise articulations of the arrogance that has led those who believe they are living in the most advanced and the best culture to attempt to impose by force this way of being on all others.

I would define civilization more precisely than Oxford's dictionary and, I believe, more usefully, as a culture. That is, a complex cluster of stories, institutions, and artifacts - that both lead to and emerge from the growth of cities (civilization, see civil: from civis, meaning citizen, from Latin, civitatis, meaning city-state), with cities being defined so as to distinguish them from camps, villages and so on, as people living more or less permanently in one place in densities high enough to require the routine importation of food and other necessities of life. Thus a Tolowa village five hundred years ago in Tu'nes, now called Crescent City, California, would not have been a city, since the Tolowa ate native salmon, clams, deer, huckleberries, and so on, and had no need to bring in food from outside. Thus, under my definition, the Tolowa, because their way of living was not characterized by the growth of city-states like Istapalapa and Tenochtitlan, the latter of which was, when Europeans first encountered it, far larger than any city in Europe, with a population five times that of London or Seville.

Shortly before razing Tenochtitlan and slaughtering/enslaving its inhabitants, the explorer and conquistador Hernando Cortés remarked that it was easily the most beautiful city on Earth. Beautiful or not, Tenochtitlan required, as do all cities, the (often forced) importation of food and other resources. The story of any civilization is the story of the rise of city-states, which means it is the story of the funneling of resources toward these centers (in order to sustain them and cause them to grow), which means it is the story of an increasing region of lacking sustainability surrounded by an increasingly exploited countryside.

Cities don't arise in political, social, and ecological vacuums. Lewis Mumford, in the second book of his extraordinary two-volume Myth of the Machine, uses the term civilization "to denote the group of institutions that first took form under kingship. Its chief features, constant varying proportions throughout history, are the centralization of political power, the separation of classes, the lifetime division of labor, the mechanization of production, the magnification of military power, the economic exploitation of the sea, and the universal introduction of slavery and forced labor for both industrial and military purposes. The anthropologist/philosopher Stanley Diamond put this a bit succinctly when he noted, "Civilization originates in the conquest abroad and repression at home." These attributes are not just in this culture but in all civilizations.

We should admit to ourselves that from the beginning, this culture, civilization, has been a culture of occupation.

What do occupiers do? They seize territory by force or the threat of force. They take resources for use at the center of an empire. They degrade the landscape. They kill those who resist this theft. They enslave those whose labor is necessary for this theft, this degradation of the landscape. They eradicate those who are in the way, the humans and nonhumans whose land this is, and who must be removed so the occupiers can put the land "to better use." They force the remaining humans to live under the laws and moral code of the occupiers. They inculcate future generations to forget their non-occupied past and to aspire to join the ranks of their occupiers, to actually join in the degradation of the land-base that was once theirs.

Because exploitation is so central to any culture of occupation, that's part of what defines it, this exploitation infects and characterizes every part of the culture.

This means any civilized government, by all means including the United States, is a government of occupation, set up to facilitate resource extraction (to bring resources from the country to the city, from colony to empire), now referred to as production, and to prevent interference in this process by those whose lives are diminished or destroyed by the devastation of their land-base, and also by those whose lives are diminished or destroyed while laboring to serve this production.

Any civilized economics, by all means including capitalism, is an economics of occupation, set up to rationalize resource extraction, and to pre-empt reasonable discourse about non-exploitative community relations.

Any civilized religion, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Confucianism, and so on, is a religion of occupation. A religion is supposed to teach us how to live, which if we're to live in a sustainable way, means it must teach us how to live in a place. But people will live differently in different places, which means religions must be different in different places, and must emerge from the land itself, and not abstract themselves from it. It's absurd to think that people will need the same guidance to live in the Middle East as in Tibet or the Pacific Northwest. And a transposable religion means that it could not have emerged from the particularities of that landscape. A religion is also supposed to teach us how to connect with the divine. Yet if a religion is transposed over space, it won't, can't, be so quick to speak to the divine in that particular place. The bottom line is that civilized religions lead people away from their intimate connection to the divinity in the land that is their own home and toward the abstract principles of this distant religion.

Any science of civilization will be a science of occupation, aiming toward ever more control of the occupied world, and toward the creation of ever more destructive technologies. Imagine the technologies that would be invented by a culture of inhabitation, that is, a sustainable culture, that is, a culture planning on being in the same place for ten thousand years. That culture would create technologies that enhance the landscape. How about that? And this would decompose afterwards into components that help, not poison, the soil. The technologies would remind human inhabitants of their place in this landscape. The technologies would promote leisure, not production. The technologies would not be bombs and factory conveyor belts but perhaps stories, and dances, and nets to catch a sustainable number of salmon.