I first encountered his writing in a college
introductory philosophy course. The
professor was a committed environmental activist, a devotee of “deep
ecology.” So, instead of reading the works of Plato, Spinoza, or Sartre, we were assigned less hoary tomes such as The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey
and Steps to Inner Peace by Peace
Pilgrim. These weren’t bad books to
read, but they weren’t what I signed up for.
Adolescent wiseass that I was, I seldom
passed up an opportunity to make snarky comments or ask loaded questions
impugning the professor’s beliefs. My
bad attitude toward the class made me not fully appreciate its highlights, such
as the time Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss guest lectured. But the one thing I remember most from this class
I took more than twenty-five years ago was gritting my teeth through Ecotopia Emerging by Ernest Callenbach.
Ecotopia
Emerging, published in 1981, is the prequel to
Callenbach’s earlier novel Ecotopia
(1975). The premise of both books is
that northern California, Oregon, and Washington have seceded from the United
States to create a self-isolated green society.
In certain respects the novels were quite prescient. Some of Callenbach’s predictions have come to
pass, such as widespread recycling, car-free zones in some cities and planned
greenbelts in others, as well as a developing trend toward more sustainable
forms of transportation and agriculture.
On a darker note, the eco-anarchism embraced by his characters is a
premonition of the ELF and other spectral manifestations of the environmentalist movement.
Mr. Callenbach has a deserved reputation as
an environmentalist elder statesman whose principles are aptly summed in his
final published essay. I’ve retained a certain ambivalence about his
best known writings. As literature, as
with so many works of fiction meant to explicate a philosophic or ideological
stance, they simply don’t hold up. Probably
my main objection to both the Ecotopia novels, then and now, is their flakiness. Callenbach’s utopia is constructed from an
amalgam of green sci fi tech, New Age spiritualism, and 1960s free love. Ecotopia often says more about Callenbach’s personal
biases and private fantasies than it does any realistic vision for the
future.
Moreover, the novels betray a decided lack of
political correctness by today’s standards.
An aspect I find simultaneously amusing and cringe-inducing is the
promiscuous, syncretic appropriation of Native American cultural motifs by Ecotopia’s
blissful natives. Callenbach occasionally indulged in ethnic stereotyping, as seen in his description of urban enclaves dubbed
"Soul City" whose inhabitants seem to have been lifted directly from an early Seventies blaxploitation
movie. His answers to such perennial
social ills as violence are positively risible. In a memorable episode from the
first novel, two men, decked out in war paint and drugged on psychedelics, square
off in hand-to-hand combat, after which the winner carries off a maiden
spectator as his prize. This is supposed
to be Ecotopia’s placebo for war and aggressive team sports. Clearly, Callenbach was not above
objectifying minorities or women to illustrate his ideal world.
While the novels’ shortcomings often get in
the way of the message, many of Callenbach’s ideas are nonetheless worth
serious consideration. For instance,
Ecotopia’s correctional system is just that: Instead of large, industrial-style
prisons, we see small numbers of offenders housed in the community, with their partners
or family members if they so desire, gainfully employed in regular jobs but otherwise
confined until their sentences are up.
Another attractive aspect of Ecotopian life is its freedom from
electronic media and a return to more traditional amusements as music, poetry,
and storytelling. Ecotopia's city planning precepts are a harbinger of contemporary New Urbanism, with housing, schools, and shops contained
within communitarian, kid-friendly neighborhoods.
But by far the strongest theoretical element
is Ecotopia’s social, political, and economic decentralization. Capitalism hasn’t disappeared entirely;
instead, small enterprises make up the economy’s backbone. Worker self-management prevails, and even
small family businesses must allow hired employees to take part in
management decisions and profit sharing.
Because big corporations no longer exist, this obviates the need for a
large state bureaucracy to regulate (and protect) them. Ecotopia is politically devolved with as many
policies made at the community level as practicable. I’m
very sympathetic to the idea of subsidiarity as social order and this element
alone makes Ecotopia appealing (if only in an abstract sense).
Its virtues notwithstanding, there are better alternatives to Callenbach’s fictional paradise on
earth. The primary flaw of the Ecotopia
novels is that they are too simplistic. Callenbach to the contrary, we cannot simply compost,
meditate, and screw our way to a just and equitable world. For me, a more realistic view of an
environmentally sustainable future can be found in the novel Pacific Edge, part of the Three Californias trilogy by Kim Stanley
Robinson. (Robinson, incidentally, is
the editor of the anthology Future
Primitive: The New Ecotopias.) The
world of Pacific Edge is much different
from and yet quite the same as that of the present day. People have mostly embraced environmentalist
principles and green technology, but many contemporary evils persist: Avaricious
developers clash with anti-growth activists before town councils and zoning
boards, the profit motive continues to conflict with human need, and politics
remain the art of compromise.
Robinson’s future is more plausible because
it accounts for the truth that progress is almost always evolutionary, with few
instances of punctuational change. Even
the swiftest, most violent revolutions do not produce the rapid degree of
sociopolitical change that Callenbach appears to propose in the Ecotopia
series. Whatever victories are won by
the green movement, rest assured they will be incremental and none of us know
what the end state will look like. But
change must be imagined to be realized. The lesson of Ernest Callenbach’s writing is
that dreams of even an imperfect future are better than accepting an even more
flawed present.
© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar
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