Ecotopia and the American Dream: Final Test Blog

One of the factors I ran into while writing my presentation on "My Ecotopia" was realizing that in many ways it cannot logically exist unless everyone thinks like I think. What fits in my Ecotopia may not be apart of Morgan's Ecotopia or Willie's Ecotopia. Perhaps in some ways this is why some parts of Callenbach's 70's-esk Ecotopia seem so jarring and incompatible to our mentality today. This why I would like to focus this blog on a much broader explanation of a eco-perfect world by designing a new scale of social consciousness. Actually this model is not my invention but merely a design from the hard questions that Van Jones asks in Rebuilding the American Dream. Perhaps this scale can make Ecotopia more in the realm or probability and provide a more progressive implementation without sexist assumptions and Ridiculous "Soul Cities." This scale would allow social memes to be reconsidered through a new type of social equation cutting out some of the excess of argument when it comes to environmental argument. The first part of this process would be 1) Allowing for little to no time spent on arguing against Climate Deniers. I believe that in science, minority or dissenting views are important to the integrity of science but when it comes to the science of climate control we cannot afford to up hold something for its own sake. In the words of scientist R.C. Lewontin, science is used in two major ways, to explain nature and to change it. We cannot afford to just explain the science of global warming, its time to change it. 2) We must turn our efforts for change from arguing with climate deniers to those who simply choose to ignore climate change. Although many might claim that overcoming denial is the first step to consciousness, I claim that the climate complacent are an even harder battle to win in the fight for environmental consciousness, not to mention that this category of thinkers represents the general population of thought. We must consider this train of thought as worse than those who simply deny the science of climate change. The lack of progressive change in the environmental movement has not been because of the lack of science by the lack of compassion. So how do we fix this problem? 3)(Not to get all Principe on you but...)We must begin to admit that mass consumerism, the birth of the corporation, and the modern concept of the American Dream has completely broken down our sympathy for our neighbor and the environment in which everyone resides. The breaking down of the meme of the American Dream is crucial to how progressive we will become as a society. We can no longer think in terms of the American dream as individualized comfort. Instead we must find ways to redirect the sense of success to personal character within a community and not social status through material possession. The scale for finding the dream of Ecotopia would be less jarring if we looked at these factors as well this last important factor. One of the places where Callenbach seems to fail is on the true belief that the citizens of Ecotopia perceived social issues and environmental issues of equal importance and one in the same. Although this sense of social freedom seems to be evident in the way that Ecotopians speak and fight with one another, it is contradictory in the explanations of Soul Cities, the War Games, and other gender reversals that occur throughout the book. Why would choosing to live in exclusive groups or act in exclusive ways be conducive to a world where the primary concern is the environment (an environment which also includes society) Just food for thought I suppose. In many ways this leads us to wonder whether or not our eco-perfect environment can exist as long as there is a distinct line between us and them, rich and poor, black and white, etc. Instead maybe there can only be one distinction in the human race, the willing and the unwilling, in order for us to achieve a sustainable world.