1. Name a couple of "glimpses" of 60s-era Berkeley the Foreword author finds in Ecotopia.
2. Ecotopia was born out of Ernest "Chick" Callenbach's attempt to do what?
3. Political organization in Ecotopia is led by who?
4. Ecotopia poses a challenge to what underlying national philosophy of America?
5. What "standard garb" in New York is not permitted in Ecotopia?
6. What occupies the space formerly taken by converted auto lanes in Ecotopia?
7. Where do most Ecotopians live?
8. What "zones" cover all densely settled areas in Ecotopia?
9. Why would American sports fans be miserable in Ecotopia? [HINT: No "Go Seahawks/Mariners"!]
10. What term is not used in polite conversation in Ecotopia?
[Hoping your questions will focus more than mine on the latter half of today's reading.]
DQ
- Free association: what do you think of when you hear "Berkeley"?
- Is there anything "environmental" about hedonism or "free love"?
- Is it surprising to learn that Ecotopia inspired significant environmental movements in Germany, Japan, and Denmark?
- Is the time right for a renewal of "visionary optimism," or do most millennials already embrace a fatalism about the future?
- Should we choose our leaders by lottery? (This is a good day to ask that question, right?)
- Is it hopeful to "embrace decay"?
- COMMENT: "If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own." (Also timely, no?)
- Is eco-revolution more likely to possess any particular gender pedigree?
- Is GNP capable of measuring environmental health? How ought we to measure that?
- What kind of bicycle infrastructure would you like to see? What would it take to get you out of your car and onto a bike (and/or mass transit) more frequently?
- Which will come first, walkable/bike-able cities or urban re-migration?
A novel both timely and prophetic, Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia is a hopeful antidote to the environmental concerns of today, set in an ecologically sound future society. Hailed by the Los Angeles Times as the “newest name after Wells, Verne, Huxley, and Orwell,” Callenbach offers a visionary blueprint for the survival of our planet . . . and our future.
Ecotopia was founded when northern California, Oregon, and Washington seceded from the Union to create a “stable-state” ecosystem: the perfect balance between human beings and the environment. Now, twenty years later, this isolated, mysterious nation is welcoming its first officially sanctioned American visitor: New York Times-Post reporter Will Weston.Skeptical yet curious about this green new world, Weston is determined to report his findings objectively. But from the start, he’s alternately impressed and unsettled by the laws governing Ecotopia’s earth-friendly agenda: energy-efficient “mini-cities” to eliminate urban sprawl, zero-tolerance pollution control, tree worship, ritual war games, and a woman-dominated government that has instituted such peaceful revolutions as the twenty-hour workweek and employee ownership of farms and businesses. His old beliefs challenged, his cynicism replaced by hope, Weston meets a sexually forthright Ecotopian woman and undertakes a relationship whose intensity will lead him to a critical choice between two worlds. Goodreads
==
“It is so hard to imagine anything fundamentally different from what we have now.
But without these alternate visions, we get stuck on dead center.”
"If you don’t save us, nobody will.”
Ernest Callenbach, Author of ‘Ecotopia,’ Dies at 83
By DENNIS HEVESI APRIL 27, 2012
Ernest Callenbach, the author of the 1975 novel “Ecotopia,” the tale of an awakening paradise in the Pacific Northwest that developed a cult following as a harbinger of the environmental movement, died on April 16 at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 83.
The cause was cancer, said his wife, Christine Leefeldt.
Written in the throes of the Vietnam War, “Ecotopia” tells of a secessionist nation — carved from what was once Oregon, Washington and Northern California — that by 1999 has evolved toward a “stable state” of bioregionalism, in which each territory cultivates its distinct ecological character.
Mr. Callenbach, the founding editor of Film Quarterly, originally published the novel himself after 25 publishing houses had rejected the manuscript. It has now sold nearly one million copies and been translated into a dozen languages, most recently Chinese. Its readership has included hippies and New Agers, environmental activists and college and high school science students, as well as evangelical Christians increasingly concerned about the global environment. It was reprinted by Bantam Books in 1977, two years after Bantam rejected it, asserting, Mr. Callenbach recalled, that “the ecological fad is over.”
The novel is told through the accounts of a newspaper reporter who is sent to Ecotopia two decades after it seceded from an economically collapsing United States. Ecotopians realized just in time, the reporter writes, that “financial panic could be turned to advantage if the new nation could be organized to devote its real resources of energy, knowledge, skills and materials to the basic necessities of survival.”
The book describes a society in which recycling is a way of life, gas-powered cars are replaced by electric cars (although most people walk or commute on high-speed magnetic-levitation trains) and bicycles are placed in public spaces to be borrowed at will. In Ecotopia, solar energyis commonplace, organic food is locally grown and, instead of petrochemical fertilizers, processed sewage is used to cultivate crops.
Mr. Callenbach mixed his communal change-or-perish message with the free-love attitudes of the 1960s and ’70s. Ecotopian couples are “generally monogamous,” the reporter writes, “except for four holidays each year, at the solstices and equinoxes, when sexual promiscuity is widespread.” Marijuana is legal.
While long considered a cult novel, “Ecotopia” gained recognition for addressing issues that have since come to the fore as the environmental movement has grown.
Ernest Callenbach told of a land of free bikes and free love.
“People may look at it and say, ‘These are familiar ideas,’ ” Scott Slovic, a professor of environmental literature at the University of Nevada, Reno, told The New York Times in 2008, “not even quite realizing that Callenbach launched much of our thinking about these things.”
“We’ve absorbed it,” he added, “through osmosis.”
The book, Mr. Callenbach told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1989, “does seem to offer at least some people a sense of hope that we can work through the messes we have gotten our society into and actually arrive at some kind of decent way to inhabit our precious little planet.”
That hope was instilled in him while growing up in rural Boalsburg, Pa., where his father, a professor of poultry science at Pennsylvania State University, raised chickens. Ernest William Callenbach — known since he was a baby as Chick — was born on April 3, 1929, one of three sons of Margaret and Ernest Callenbach Sr. The rural lifestyle, he told The Chicago Tribune in 1990, meant that “everything was recycled because no one was there to carry it away.”
The environment was not his first interest. Mr. Callenbach majored in English at the University of Chicago, receiving a bachelor’s degree there in 1949 and a master’s in 1953. Two years later, after studying at the Sorbonne in Paris and often watching four movies a day, he was hired as an assistant editor for the University of California Press.
He founded Film Quarterly in 1958 and edited it for 33 years. He also edited books on film for the university. He began focusing on ecological concerns in the early 1970s. In addition to “Ecotopia,” he wrote several books on protecting the environment, including “Living Cheaply With Style” (1977).
He practiced what he preached, his wife said. He grew organic fruits and vegetables in his backyard, which he had landscaped with drought-tolerant plants to conserve water, and he installed a device called a Kill-a-Watt in his home to monitor power usage.
Besides Ms. Leefeldt, whom he married in 1978, Mr. Callenbach is survived by a son, Hans; a daughter, Joanna Callenbach; two brothers, Tony and Tim; and five grandchildren.
Mr. Callenbach often took his message to the classroom. On a visit to La Jolla High School in San Diego in 1989, students told him that they wanted to live in a society like the one he had imagined, The Union-Tribune reported. They could, he replied, if they and others of their generation were committed to it. “If you don’t save us, nobody will,” he said
==
The Novel That Predicted Portland
By SCOTT TIMBERG DEC. 12, 2008
PRESCIENT In Ernest Callenbach’s ’70s book, residents of Ecotopia recycle and eat local foods.
BERKELEY, Calif.
SOMETIMES a book, or an idea, can be obscure and widely influential at the same time. That’s the case with “Ecotopia,” a 1970s cult novel, originally self-published by its author, Ernest Callenbach, that has seeped into the American groundwater without becoming well known.
The novel, now being rediscovered, speaks to our ecological present: in the flush of a financial crisis, the Pacific Northwest secedes from the United States, and its citizens establish a sustainable economy, a cross between Scandinavian socialism and Northern California back-to-the-landism, with the custom — years before the environmental writer Michael Pollan began his campaign — to eat local.
White bicycles sit in public places, to be borrowed at will. A creek runs down Market Street in San Francisco. Strange receptacles called “recycle bins” sit on trains, along with “hanging ferns and small plants.” A female president, more Hillary Clinton than Sarah Palin, rules this nation, from Northern California up through Oregon and Washington.
“ ‘Ecotopia’ became almost immediately absorbed into the popular culture,” said Scott Slovic, a professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, and a pioneer of the growing literature-and-the-environment movement. “You hear people talking about the idea of Ecotopia, or about the Northwest as Ecotopia. But a lot of them don’t know where the term came from.”
In the ’70s, the book, with a blurb from Ralph Nader, was a hit, selling 400,000 or so copies in the United States, and more worldwide. But by the raging ’80s, the novel, along with the Whole Earth Catalog, seemed like a good candidate for a ’70s time capsule — a dusty curio without much lasting impact.
Yet today, “Ecotopia” is increasingly assigned in college courses on the environment, sociology and urban planning, and its cult following has begun to reach an unlikely readership: Mr. Callenbach, who lives in Berkeley, Calif., and calls himself a “fringe, ’60s person,” has been finding himself invited to speak at many small religious colleges. This month, the book’s publisher, Bantam, is reissuing it.
“For a while it seemed sort of antique to people,” said Mr. Callenbach, a balding and eerily fit man of 79, sitting in his backyard, which he was converting into a preserve for native plants. “They said the book is ‘very Berkeley’ and all that. But now that you go out into America and young society, it apparently doesn’t seem that weird to them at all.”
When he began working on his novel, Mr. Callenbach was a middle-aged editor of science books at the University of California Press. His marriage was crumbling, and he despaired over what he saw as an endangered environment. He spent three years writing the book, sending each chapter to scientists to make sure the science held up. Then the real work began.
“It was rejected by every significant publisher in New York,” Mr. Callenbach said. “Some said it didn’t have enough sex and violence, or that they couldn’t tell if it were a novel or a tract. Somebody said the ecology trend was over. This was New York, circa 1974. I was on the point of burning it.”
But he cobbled together money from friends — “I think they wrote me checks out of pity for my poor, about-to-be-divorced state” — and printed 2,500 copies. The first printing sold, as did the next, and after an excerpt in Harper’s Weekly, Bantam decided to publish “Ecotopia.”
The author now calls it “a lucky little book.”
But not a classic book, the kind taught along with Herman Melville in American literature classes. Set at what seems to be the turn of the 21st century, and told through the columns and diaries of a reporter from the fictional New York Times-Post, the novel is not especially literary. Its characters are flat; its prose — well, call it utilitarian. And the plot, in which the narrator drops his skepticism and settles into Ecotopian life, thanks in part to a love interest, lacks sophistication. And yet the book has managed to find its place in the here and now.
Alan Weisman, author of last year’s acclaimed “The World Without Us,” a nonfiction chronicle of the planet after the departure of the human race, said the book was ahead of its time. Environmental writing in the early ’70s was not especially concerned with shortage and sustainability, he said. “A lot of it was about preserving beautiful areas and beautiful species.”
In fact, like other important environmental books, the novel’s impact may be lasting. Writing has a special place in the environmental movement — “a literature with measurable effects,” wrote Bill McKibben, in the introduction to “American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau,” a new anthology. John Muir’s essays and books about the Sierra Nevada gave the country national parks, just as Bob Marshall’s writings about forestry led to the Wilderness Act, which has protected millions of acres of federal land.
So what has “Ecotopia” given us?
A great deal, thinks Professor Slovic of the University of Nevada, including the bioregionalism movement, which considers each part of the country as having a distinct ecological character to be cultivated. The green movement’s focus on local foods and products, and its emphasis on energy reduction also have roots in “Ecotopia,” he said. In fact, much of Portland, Ore., with its public transport, slow-growth planning and eat-local restaurants, can seem like Ecotopia made reality.
“People may look at it and say, ‘These are familiar ideas,’ ” Professor Slovic said, “not even quite realizing that Callenbach launched much of our thinking about these things. We’ve absorbed it through osmosis.”
Daniel Brayton, who teaches English and environmental literature at Middlebury College in Vermont, plans to teach “Ecotopia” in his utopian fiction class. He sees the book’s genius as its “big-picture environmental thinking,” successfully predicting the big issues of today. “Callenbach got that right,” he said. “He’s looking at the total physical health of the social body.”
“Ecotopia” has its critics. Feminists attacked it for its ritual war games, in which men don spears to work off their “natural” aggression, dragging women into the woods to celebrate. (Mr. Callenbach said he was influenced by the anthropologist Margaret Mead, and her idea that the sexes express aggression differently.)
Some were made uncomfortable by the way black people were excluded from Ecotopian society: most live in Soul City, which is less affluent and green than the rest of Mr. Callenbach’s world. The author said he was reflecting black nationalist ideas of the time, as well as an early ’70s skepticism about integration. “I probably would write it quite differently at this point,” he said.
Mr. Brayton of Middlebury sees “a deep conservatism to the book,” where categories like race and gender are unalterable. “In academia we call that essentialism.”
Over the years, Mr. Callenbach’s readership has changed, as hippies and New Agers have been joined by churchgoers. The author often visits St. Mary’s College of California, a Catholic school near Oakland. “Ecotopia” is required freshman reading at the Presbyterian-affiliated Muskingum College in rural Ohio. And it’s part of the curriculum at the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit institution.
Mr. Callenbach hopes the book will resonate among the greening edges of an evangelical movement. But the novel’s relatively free sex and liberal politics may limit that readership. Susanna Hecht, a professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, sees it as a counterpoint to Thoreau’s more austere “Walden.”
“ ‘Walden’ is very Protestant,” she said. “This is pagan, with a Zen relationship to nature.”
But to Mr. Callenbach and many of his fans, “Ecotopia” is a blueprint for the future.
“It is so hard to imagine anything fundamentally different from what we have now,” he said. “But without these alternate visions, we get stuck on dead center.”
“And we’d better get ready,” he added. “We need to know where we’d like to go.”
==
The Ecotopiast Who Glimpsed the Future
By MARK BITTMAN MAY 8, 2012
By DENNIS HEVESI APRIL 27, 2012
Ernest Callenbach, the author of the 1975 novel “Ecotopia,” the tale of an awakening paradise in the Pacific Northwest that developed a cult following as a harbinger of the environmental movement, died on April 16 at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 83.
The cause was cancer, said his wife, Christine Leefeldt.
Written in the throes of the Vietnam War, “Ecotopia” tells of a secessionist nation — carved from what was once Oregon, Washington and Northern California — that by 1999 has evolved toward a “stable state” of bioregionalism, in which each territory cultivates its distinct ecological character.
Mr. Callenbach, the founding editor of Film Quarterly, originally published the novel himself after 25 publishing houses had rejected the manuscript. It has now sold nearly one million copies and been translated into a dozen languages, most recently Chinese. Its readership has included hippies and New Agers, environmental activists and college and high school science students, as well as evangelical Christians increasingly concerned about the global environment. It was reprinted by Bantam Books in 1977, two years after Bantam rejected it, asserting, Mr. Callenbach recalled, that “the ecological fad is over.”
The novel is told through the accounts of a newspaper reporter who is sent to Ecotopia two decades after it seceded from an economically collapsing United States. Ecotopians realized just in time, the reporter writes, that “financial panic could be turned to advantage if the new nation could be organized to devote its real resources of energy, knowledge, skills and materials to the basic necessities of survival.”
The book describes a society in which recycling is a way of life, gas-powered cars are replaced by electric cars (although most people walk or commute on high-speed magnetic-levitation trains) and bicycles are placed in public spaces to be borrowed at will. In Ecotopia, solar energyis commonplace, organic food is locally grown and, instead of petrochemical fertilizers, processed sewage is used to cultivate crops.
Mr. Callenbach mixed his communal change-or-perish message with the free-love attitudes of the 1960s and ’70s. Ecotopian couples are “generally monogamous,” the reporter writes, “except for four holidays each year, at the solstices and equinoxes, when sexual promiscuity is widespread.” Marijuana is legal.
While long considered a cult novel, “Ecotopia” gained recognition for addressing issues that have since come to the fore as the environmental movement has grown.
Ernest Callenbach told of a land of free bikes and free love.
“People may look at it and say, ‘These are familiar ideas,’ ” Scott Slovic, a professor of environmental literature at the University of Nevada, Reno, told The New York Times in 2008, “not even quite realizing that Callenbach launched much of our thinking about these things.”
“We’ve absorbed it,” he added, “through osmosis.”
The book, Mr. Callenbach told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1989, “does seem to offer at least some people a sense of hope that we can work through the messes we have gotten our society into and actually arrive at some kind of decent way to inhabit our precious little planet.”
That hope was instilled in him while growing up in rural Boalsburg, Pa., where his father, a professor of poultry science at Pennsylvania State University, raised chickens. Ernest William Callenbach — known since he was a baby as Chick — was born on April 3, 1929, one of three sons of Margaret and Ernest Callenbach Sr. The rural lifestyle, he told The Chicago Tribune in 1990, meant that “everything was recycled because no one was there to carry it away.”
The environment was not his first interest. Mr. Callenbach majored in English at the University of Chicago, receiving a bachelor’s degree there in 1949 and a master’s in 1953. Two years later, after studying at the Sorbonne in Paris and often watching four movies a day, he was hired as an assistant editor for the University of California Press.
He founded Film Quarterly in 1958 and edited it for 33 years. He also edited books on film for the university. He began focusing on ecological concerns in the early 1970s. In addition to “Ecotopia,” he wrote several books on protecting the environment, including “Living Cheaply With Style” (1977).
He practiced what he preached, his wife said. He grew organic fruits and vegetables in his backyard, which he had landscaped with drought-tolerant plants to conserve water, and he installed a device called a Kill-a-Watt in his home to monitor power usage.
Besides Ms. Leefeldt, whom he married in 1978, Mr. Callenbach is survived by a son, Hans; a daughter, Joanna Callenbach; two brothers, Tony and Tim; and five grandchildren.
Mr. Callenbach often took his message to the classroom. On a visit to La Jolla High School in San Diego in 1989, students told him that they wanted to live in a society like the one he had imagined, The Union-Tribune reported. They could, he replied, if they and others of their generation were committed to it. “If you don’t save us, nobody will,” he said
==
The Novel That Predicted Portland
By SCOTT TIMBERG DEC. 12, 2008
PRESCIENT In Ernest Callenbach’s ’70s book, residents of Ecotopia recycle and eat local foods.
BERKELEY, Calif.
SOMETIMES a book, or an idea, can be obscure and widely influential at the same time. That’s the case with “Ecotopia,” a 1970s cult novel, originally self-published by its author, Ernest Callenbach, that has seeped into the American groundwater without becoming well known.
The novel, now being rediscovered, speaks to our ecological present: in the flush of a financial crisis, the Pacific Northwest secedes from the United States, and its citizens establish a sustainable economy, a cross between Scandinavian socialism and Northern California back-to-the-landism, with the custom — years before the environmental writer Michael Pollan began his campaign — to eat local.
White bicycles sit in public places, to be borrowed at will. A creek runs down Market Street in San Francisco. Strange receptacles called “recycle bins” sit on trains, along with “hanging ferns and small plants.” A female president, more Hillary Clinton than Sarah Palin, rules this nation, from Northern California up through Oregon and Washington.
“ ‘Ecotopia’ became almost immediately absorbed into the popular culture,” said Scott Slovic, a professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, and a pioneer of the growing literature-and-the-environment movement. “You hear people talking about the idea of Ecotopia, or about the Northwest as Ecotopia. But a lot of them don’t know where the term came from.”
In the ’70s, the book, with a blurb from Ralph Nader, was a hit, selling 400,000 or so copies in the United States, and more worldwide. But by the raging ’80s, the novel, along with the Whole Earth Catalog, seemed like a good candidate for a ’70s time capsule — a dusty curio without much lasting impact.
Yet today, “Ecotopia” is increasingly assigned in college courses on the environment, sociology and urban planning, and its cult following has begun to reach an unlikely readership: Mr. Callenbach, who lives in Berkeley, Calif., and calls himself a “fringe, ’60s person,” has been finding himself invited to speak at many small religious colleges. This month, the book’s publisher, Bantam, is reissuing it.
“For a while it seemed sort of antique to people,” said Mr. Callenbach, a balding and eerily fit man of 79, sitting in his backyard, which he was converting into a preserve for native plants. “They said the book is ‘very Berkeley’ and all that. But now that you go out into America and young society, it apparently doesn’t seem that weird to them at all.”
When he began working on his novel, Mr. Callenbach was a middle-aged editor of science books at the University of California Press. His marriage was crumbling, and he despaired over what he saw as an endangered environment. He spent three years writing the book, sending each chapter to scientists to make sure the science held up. Then the real work began.
“It was rejected by every significant publisher in New York,” Mr. Callenbach said. “Some said it didn’t have enough sex and violence, or that they couldn’t tell if it were a novel or a tract. Somebody said the ecology trend was over. This was New York, circa 1974. I was on the point of burning it.”
But he cobbled together money from friends — “I think they wrote me checks out of pity for my poor, about-to-be-divorced state” — and printed 2,500 copies. The first printing sold, as did the next, and after an excerpt in Harper’s Weekly, Bantam decided to publish “Ecotopia.”
The author now calls it “a lucky little book.”
But not a classic book, the kind taught along with Herman Melville in American literature classes. Set at what seems to be the turn of the 21st century, and told through the columns and diaries of a reporter from the fictional New York Times-Post, the novel is not especially literary. Its characters are flat; its prose — well, call it utilitarian. And the plot, in which the narrator drops his skepticism and settles into Ecotopian life, thanks in part to a love interest, lacks sophistication. And yet the book has managed to find its place in the here and now.
Alan Weisman, author of last year’s acclaimed “The World Without Us,” a nonfiction chronicle of the planet after the departure of the human race, said the book was ahead of its time. Environmental writing in the early ’70s was not especially concerned with shortage and sustainability, he said. “A lot of it was about preserving beautiful areas and beautiful species.”
In fact, like other important environmental books, the novel’s impact may be lasting. Writing has a special place in the environmental movement — “a literature with measurable effects,” wrote Bill McKibben, in the introduction to “American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau,” a new anthology. John Muir’s essays and books about the Sierra Nevada gave the country national parks, just as Bob Marshall’s writings about forestry led to the Wilderness Act, which has protected millions of acres of federal land.
So what has “Ecotopia” given us?
A great deal, thinks Professor Slovic of the University of Nevada, including the bioregionalism movement, which considers each part of the country as having a distinct ecological character to be cultivated. The green movement’s focus on local foods and products, and its emphasis on energy reduction also have roots in “Ecotopia,” he said. In fact, much of Portland, Ore., with its public transport, slow-growth planning and eat-local restaurants, can seem like Ecotopia made reality.
“People may look at it and say, ‘These are familiar ideas,’ ” Professor Slovic said, “not even quite realizing that Callenbach launched much of our thinking about these things. We’ve absorbed it through osmosis.”
Daniel Brayton, who teaches English and environmental literature at Middlebury College in Vermont, plans to teach “Ecotopia” in his utopian fiction class. He sees the book’s genius as its “big-picture environmental thinking,” successfully predicting the big issues of today. “Callenbach got that right,” he said. “He’s looking at the total physical health of the social body.”
“Ecotopia” has its critics. Feminists attacked it for its ritual war games, in which men don spears to work off their “natural” aggression, dragging women into the woods to celebrate. (Mr. Callenbach said he was influenced by the anthropologist Margaret Mead, and her idea that the sexes express aggression differently.)
Some were made uncomfortable by the way black people were excluded from Ecotopian society: most live in Soul City, which is less affluent and green than the rest of Mr. Callenbach’s world. The author said he was reflecting black nationalist ideas of the time, as well as an early ’70s skepticism about integration. “I probably would write it quite differently at this point,” he said.
Mr. Brayton of Middlebury sees “a deep conservatism to the book,” where categories like race and gender are unalterable. “In academia we call that essentialism.”
Over the years, Mr. Callenbach’s readership has changed, as hippies and New Agers have been joined by churchgoers. The author often visits St. Mary’s College of California, a Catholic school near Oakland. “Ecotopia” is required freshman reading at the Presbyterian-affiliated Muskingum College in rural Ohio. And it’s part of the curriculum at the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit institution.
Mr. Callenbach hopes the book will resonate among the greening edges of an evangelical movement. But the novel’s relatively free sex and liberal politics may limit that readership. Susanna Hecht, a professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, sees it as a counterpoint to Thoreau’s more austere “Walden.”
“ ‘Walden’ is very Protestant,” she said. “This is pagan, with a Zen relationship to nature.”
But to Mr. Callenbach and many of his fans, “Ecotopia” is a blueprint for the future.
“It is so hard to imagine anything fundamentally different from what we have now,” he said. “But without these alternate visions, we get stuck on dead center.”
“And we’d better get ready,” he added. “We need to know where we’d like to go.”
==
The Ecotopiast Who Glimpsed the Future
By MARK BITTMAN MAY 8, 2012
Ernest Callenbach died a few weeks ago, and I felt a tinge of sadness. I first read his semi-utopian novel “Ecotopia” just after it appeared in 1975, when I was living in Somerville, Mass., and working as a cab driver and “editor” of an erratically appearing newspaper. The early- to mid- ’70s, as frivolous and lush as they might appear in hindsight — what with “free love,” cool drugs, cheap living and all — were in some ways not much different from now. We had a pragmatic president[1], an energy crisis and a wrongheaded, meanspirited, decidedly unjust quicksand of a war from which we needed to extricate ourselves.
I had moved from college in Worcester, Mass., back to New York for my junior year in 1969, in a state of depression probably not uncommon for 19-year-olds in those days. Hope seemed impossible; progress, unattainable. During that infamous spring of 1970, “we” — the United States, that is — bombed Cambodia, which somehow seemed even more outrageous than waging an ongoing and undeclared war on Vietnam. National Guard troops shot and killed four students at Kent State and — 10 days later — state and local police killed two students and injured a dozen others at Jackson State. Government atrocities were taken for granted. (Watergate, ultimately, came as no surprise, really.) Like nearly every other student in New York — or so it seemed — I spent my days protesting one thing or another. Change was in the air.[2]
When I returned to Massachusetts in September 1970, it was with the idealistic and naïve intent, as I said to a friend, to make “everyone” — the antiwar movement, the environmentalists, the defenders of welfare (remember welfare?), the strugglers of rights for women and minorities and workers and farmers, progressives of all types — see that our struggle was a common one.
If you substitute food stamps and WIC for welfare, and add the “food movement” to that list, not much has changed. The details are all different, of course: welfare is gone, the war has moved locations a couple of times, the environmental movement now confronts climate change in addition to everything else, there has been positive change on rights in some areas (although negative change in others[3]), unemployment and extreme income inequality have taken the place of inflation as the main causes for suffering among the nonrich. But the overall picture is much the same.
In short, it’s this: if we want things to improve dramatically, if we want to improve our likelihood of survival, the power must shift from those who value profits over everything toward those who value the mental, spiritual and physical health of human beings and the well-being of the planet and its other inhabitants. Easily said, and said routinely since at least the age of enlightenment, but not so easily achieved.
Ernest Callenbach saw that, and in the early ’70s he wrote his novel, in which Northern California (as usual, Southern California gets a bad rap), Oregon and Washington secede from the United States and form a union based on cooperation and sustainability: solar power, mass transit, no gas-powered vehicles, recycling and re-use, local growth and production, the whole package. It was, it seemed to me, the fictional counterpart of The Whole Earth Catalog.
You may have noticed that that didn’t happen. (“Ecotopia” was set in 1999; the secession was supposed to have happened in 1980.) Ecotopia and other creative principles for organizing society remain largely mocked despite being what may be our only hope. Callenbach continued his fine career as the editor of Film Quarterly and retained his interest in progressive and alternative ways of realizing democracy.
It was easy to pass over writing about all of this when he died, because he’d largely faded from public view. But Sunday, Tom Engelhardt, the founder of the essential tomdispatch.com, posted a letter that Callenbach, according to his agent, had wanted published. And it’s important enough — or at least interesting enough — to call to your attention.
Callenbach begins by discussing hope: “’Yes, we can!'”, he writes, “is not an empty slogan, but a mantra for people who intend to do something together.” Predictably and wisely, he encourages us to be cooperative rather than competitive, and helpful rather than hurtful, reminding us that “survival is a team sport” and encouraging us to learn practical skills. (In this he reminds me of Margaret Atwood, whose brilliant dystopic novels feature heroes and heroines who know how to garden, scavenge, cook and stay alive.)
The key to the letter lies in the two paragraphs about organizing: “If the teetering structure of corporate domination, with its monetary control of Congress and our other institutions, should collapse of its own greed, and the government be unable to rescue it, we will have to reorganize a government that suits the people.” I would alter that slightly: the reorganizing of governing institutions, or at least the examples and models by which those institutions might be reorganized, should begin locally and now. In fact, of course, it already has.[4] This isn’t utopianism but pragmatism.
I leave you to parse the drama of Callenbach’s analysis of contemporary society; it’s piercing and lyrical and wise. A taste: “We live in the declining years of what is still the biggest economy in the world, where a looter elite has fastened itself upon the decaying carcass of the empire. It is intent on speedily and relentlessly extracting the maximum wealth from that carcass, impoverishing our former working middle class.”
Don’t let it scare you that Callenbach mentions the bogeyman Karl Marx, who was not of course a Leninist or a Stalinist or a Maoist but an analyst, one who foresaw much that has happened, as John Lanchester (entertainingly, as usual) details in this London Review of Books piece celebrating Marx’s 193rd birthday. Callenbach, who grew up in central Pennsylvania and lived to be 83, led a life as “American” — whatever that means — as any of us. The messages I take from him are these: hope is necessary, organizing is imperative, and a government by and for the vast majority of the people must not be considered impossible.
[1] He happened to be a Republican, a crook, and a mean-spirited racist and anti-Semitic SOB, but one could easily argue he was to the left of Bill Clinton and perhaps even Barack Obama on the evidence.
[2] Read Tom Hayden in The Nation for a succinct, nicely detailed and ultimately optimistic analysis about how things went from bad to worse from the time of the Port Huron statement (now 50 years ago!), perhaps the pinnacle of hopefulness for the New Left.
[3] The fact that nearly 10 percent of the African-American population is either in prison or on parole tells us that the anti-racism struggle, as we used to call it, has a ways to go.
[4] If you accept this paragraph as valid, try substituting the words “food system” for “government,” and read it again. Works, huh?
 | TIME (@TIME) |
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The troubling reason the Electoral College exists ti.me/2fXffKG
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 | Yale Climate Program (@YaleClimateComm) |
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The 1st zero emissions train now exists in Germany: bit.ly/2fS0bxV. Will the US follow? Most Americans want to reduce GHG emissions pic.twitter.com/9npQbUFGIH
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 | Chris Hamilton (@ChrisRHamilton) |
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Number of bikes exceeds cars in Copenhagen for first time cyclingweekly.co.uk/news/
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Is it surprising to learn that Ecotopia inspired significant environmental movements in Germany, Japan, and Denmark?
ReplyDeleteNot in the slightest. Ecotopia is drawing inspiration from countries that could be considered the leaders of clean Energy and green living. It only makes sense that a society that wants to create the optimum green community be influenced by the accomplishments of nations that have made significant headway in the war against climate related issues.
Is there anything "environmental" about hedonism or "free love"?
ReplyDeleteI would say no but hey everyone is entitled to their own opinions
Is it surprising to learn that Ecotopia inspired significant environmental movements in Germany, Japan, and Denmark?
ReplyDeleteNot when you think about that most things or ideas have to come from something i that they have to an inspiration behind them for doing it and in this case the inspiration teamed up with the book and the want for a better environmental future fo the places listed.
Is the time right for a renewal of "visionary optimism," or do most millennials already embrace a fatalism about the future?
ReplyDeleteI would say its a mix of both. Its time for renewal of that idea but then again the fatalism outlook does exist so which way we end up going may be the determining factor.
Which will come first, walkable/bike-able cities or urban re-migration?
ReplyDeleteI would say they both go hand in hand in that if urban remigration occurs then the cities will become walk able and bikeable and vice versa.
"If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own." (Also timely, no?)
ReplyDeleteWhile somewhat true making news isn't always good. I would say just make sure you're making news for good reasons lol
Is eco-revolution more likely to possess any particular gender pedigree?
ReplyDeleteI think its gender neutral, as in that its a very complex situation and one may be more to one side but another to the other so it evens out in the end.
What kind of bicycle infrastructure would you like to see? What would it take to get you out of your car and onto a bike (and/or mass transit) more frequently?
ReplyDeleteI think areas that have bike infrastructure would be best around areas where its actually usable because noone wants to sweat thru their clothes in the summer or show up like a Popsicle in the winter. Also cleaner mass transit as well more efficient and appealing to the eye would help me use it but at the moment it isn't usable for my situations and its often nasty.
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ReplyDelete