Interface

It has been many weeks since Mr. Bear last strolled the neighborhood.

Mr. Bear is, well, a bear.  I didn’t name him; my neighbor did.  Each visit from Mr. Bear followed the same pattern.  About an hour after dusk, the neighbor’s dog would start barking.  The porch light would come on, and my neighbor would lean over her deck railing shouting, “No! No, Mr. Bear!  Go away!”  The name stuck in my mind.

Bur anthropomorphizing wildlife is problematic.  My mountain community is at the wildland-urban interface, a potential hazard to both existing ecosystems and the humans encroaching upon them.  My neighbors are bemused by the ursine incursions each autumn, and the foraging animals pose little immediate threat aside from the occasional ransacking of an unoccupied vacation cabin or car whose flatlander owners foolishly left food inside.  But the critters are just one cause for concern.

This region is deceptively picturesque.  The legions of tourists who arrive in the wake of every snowfall ski and snowboard with nary a thought of its occasionally brutal natural history.  Less than a mile from where I sit, a wagon train of settlers stranded by an especially harsh winter lost more than forty of their number to starvation and exposure nearly 175 years ago.  But increasingly it’s been the sparseness of snowfall around these parts that has become troublesome.

I’ve lived up here about twenty years.  The first ten winters were fairly predictable. We would get moderate snowfall from late October through late December, with a week or two to recover between storms.  As one might expect, January and February brought more frequent weather systems and heavier snowfall.  March and April would see a tapering off, though snow in May wasn’t unheard of.  We had to cancel final exams and postpone commencement at the end of one spring semester because a storm had made the roads impassable.

What constitutes a normal winter now is hard to describe.  The snowfalls of 2017-2019 were normal; every other year since 2011 has seen drought conditions.  Last winter was comparatively dry, and yet we had light snowfall the first week of June (the Sunday before summer session began).  Even the summers have brought atypical weather, with windstorms, lightning, and the occasional heavy downpour. 

And then there is fire season, which promises to become a year-round thing with the unusual number of dry winters we’ve had.  Even the good winters of late brought ample rainfall at the lower elevations, which in turn provided fuel in the form of vegetation growth.  The 2017 Napa Valley fire and the horrific 2018 Camp Fire are the shape of things to come.  Some of my neighbors’ insurers agree and have refused to renew their home insurance policies.

My town and the surrounding area haven’t experienced a large-scale wildfire in nearly a century.  We’re about due; it’s a matter of time.  The community’s prepared, at least according to plan. 

But plans seldom come off in an actual emergency.  If a wildfire of the scale and speed of that which ravaged Paradise struck my town, we would see a similar outcome.  My homeowner’s association has put together an evacuation plan in conjunction with the local authorities, which is undoubtedly doomed to failure if put to the test.

I know this from an incident a couple of years ago.  I was going out of town, and I intended to leave early ahead of a major snowstorm.  So did the hordes of flatlanders who had come up for the weekend without consulting the weather forecast.  I live on a side street just off the main drag, which in turn connects to the interstate.  As I loaded my luggage into my car, I noticed a very unusual sight for my lightly trafficked lane. 

It was a long line of stationary cars.  Walking to the end of the driveway, I saw that the traffic jam extended up the street for as far as I could see.  The highway patrol was metering westbound traffic entering the freeway.  The airport I was departing from was 40 miles in the opposite direction everyone else was going, so if I could just make to the main street I’d have it made.  Not having a choice, I got into the car and joined the line.

A half hour later, we had moved less than a hundred feet.  As the wait dragged on, I eventually lost patience.  I’m usually a cautious driver, but cautious wasn’t going to cut it in this situation.  I turned out of the idle line of cars and raced down the shoulder to the intersection.  As soon as I saw a momentary gap in the crosstraffic, I jackrabbited a quick left turn and was finally on my way. 

I later read that many of the out of towners spent that night in their cars, which brings me back to my hypothetical wildfire.  After what I saw during that winter storm, I’m skeptical that the authorities could successfully evacuate the town ahead of a fast-moving firestorm.  The egress routes are too few.  I foresee a repeat performance of the Camp Fire: Some will get away by car, others will flee on foot, and others will be fatally trapped. 

The prospect of disaster is not enough to motivate me to leave, though.  No place on earth is free of risk.  Climate change is making the magnitude of many of these hazards worse, however.  Our inaction on this crisis stems from the seemingly piecemeal, scattered nature of its attendant disasters.  A Florida hurricane causing many millions of dollars in damage is unfortunate, but I don’t experience its effects here on the West Coast any more than drought and wildfire here affect Floridians.  It’s hard to tie such geographically localized phenomena to a single cause, even to those of us who are not denialists.  Barring a sudden, single, widespread catastrophe, we are unlikely to see a concerted effort in this country to address the climate predicament in the foreseeable future. 

In the meantime, I wait at home on the edge of the wild warily watching a changing world.

 

 

© 2021 The Unassuming Scholar

Callenbach Considered

Ernest Callenbach passed on a couple of months ago.

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