Ecotopia

Following up on Selena's report...

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

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“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
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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.”
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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?
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Epistle to the Ecotopians 
By Ernest Callenbach

[This document was found on the computer of Ecotopia author Ernest Callenbach (1929-2012) after his death.]

To all brothers and sisters who hold the dream in their hearts of a future world in which humans and all other beings live in harmony and mutual support -- a world of sustainability, stability, and confidence. A world something like the one I described, so long ago, in Ecotopia and Ecotopia Emerging.

As I survey my life, which is coming near its end, I want to set down a few thoughts that might be useful to those coming after. It will soon be time for me to give back to Gaia the nutrients that I have used during a long, busy, and happy life. I am not bitter or resentful at the approaching end; I have been one of the extraordinarily lucky ones. So it behooves me here to gather together some thoughts and attitudes that may prove useful in the dark times we are facing: a century or more of exceedingly difficult times.

How will those who survive manage it? What can we teach our friends, our children, our communities? Although we may not be capable of changing history, how can we equip ourselves to survive it?

I contemplate these questions in the full consciousness of my own mortality. Being offered an actual number of likely months to live, even though the estimate is uncertain, mightily focuses the mind. On personal things, of course, on loved ones and even loved things, but also on the Big Picture.

But let us begin with last things first, for a change. The analysis will come later, for those who wish it.

Hope. Children exude hope, even under the most terrible conditions, and that must inspire us as our conditions get worse. Hopeful patients recover better. Hopeful test candidates score better. Hopeful builders construct better buildings. Hopeful parents produce secure and resilient children. In groups, an atmosphere of hope is essential to shared successful effort: “Yes, we can!” is not an empty slogan, but a mantra for people who intend to do something together -- whether it is rescuing victims of hurricanes, rebuilding flood-damaged buildings on higher ground, helping wounded people through first aid, or inventing new social structures (perhaps one in which only people are “persons,” not corporations). We cannot know what threats we will face. But ingenuity against adversity is one of our species’ built-in resources. We cope, and faith in our coping capacity is perhaps our biggest resource of all.

Mutual support. The people who do best at basic survival tasks (we know this experimentally, as well as intuitively) are cooperative, good at teamwork, often altruistic, mindful of the common good. In drastic emergencies like hurricanes or earthquakes, people surprise us by their sacrifices -- of food, of shelter, even sometimes of life itself. Those who survive social or economic collapse, or wars, or pandemics, or starvation, will be those who manage scarce resources fairly; hoarders and dominators win only in the short run, and end up dead, exiled, or friendless. So, in every way we can we need to help each other, and our children, learn to be cooperative rather than competitive; to be helpful rather than hurtful; to look out for the communities of which we are a part, and on which we ultimately depend. 

Practical skills. With the movement into cities of the U.S. population, and much of the rest of the world’s people, we have had a massive de-skilling in how to do practical tasks. When I was a boy in the country, all of us knew how to build a tree house, or construct a small hut, or raise chickens, or grow beans, or screw pipes together to deliver water. It was a sexist world, of course, so when some of my chums in eighth grade said we wanted to learn girls’ “home ec” skills like making bread or boiling eggs, the teachers were shocked, but we got to do it. There was widespread competence in fixing things -- impossible with most modern contrivances, of course, but still reasonable for the basic tools of survival: pots and pans, bicycles, quilts, tents, storage boxes.

We all need to learn, or relearn, how we would keep the rudiments of life going if there were no paid specialists around, or means to pay them. Every child should learn elementary carpentry, from layout and sawing to driving nails. Everybody should know how to chop wood safely, and build a fire. Everybody should know what to do if dangers appear from fire, flood, electric wires down, and the like. Taking care of each other is one practical step at a time, most of them requiring help from at least one other person; survival is a team sport.

Organize. Much of the American ideology, our shared and usually unspoken assumptions, is hyper-individualistic. We like to imagine that heroes are solitary, have super powers, and glory in violence, and that if our work lives and business lives seem tamer, underneath they are still struggles red in blood and claw. We have sought solitude on the prairies, as cowboys on the range, in our dependence on media (rather than real people), and even in our cars, armored cabins of solitude. We have an uneasy and doubting attitude about government, as if we all reserve the right to be outlaws. But of course human society, like ecological webs, is a complex dance of mutual support and restraint, and if we are lucky it operates by laws openly arrived at and approved by the populace.

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. We will have to know how to organize groups, how to compromise with other groups, how to argue in public for our positions. It turns out that “brainstorming,” a totally noncritical process in which people just throw out ideas wildly, doesn’t produce workable ideas. In particular, it doesn’t work as well as groups in which ideas are proposed, critiqued, improved, debated. But like any group process, this must be protected from domination by powerful people and also over-talkative people. When the group recognizes its group power, it can limit these distortions. Thinking together is enormously creative; it has huge survival value.

Learn to live with contradictions. These are dark times, these are bright times. We are implacably making the planet less habitable. Every time a new oil field is discovered, the press cheers: “Hooray, there is more fuel for the self-destroying machines!” We are turning more land into deserts and parking lots. We are wiping out innumerable species that are not only wondrous and beautiful, but might be useful to us. We are multiplying to the point where our needs and our wastes outweigh the capacities of the biosphere to produce and absorb them. And yet, despite the bloody headlines and the rocketing military budgets, we are also, unbelievably, killing fewer of each other proportionately than in earlier centuries. We have mobilized enormous global intelligence and mutual curiosity, through the Internet and outside it. We have even evolved, spottily, a global understanding that democracy is better than tyranny, that love and tolerance are better than hate, that hope is better than rage and despair, that we are prone, especially in catastrophes, to be astonishingly helpful and cooperative.

We may even have begun to share an understanding that while the dark times may continue for generations, in time new growth and regeneration will begin. In the biological process called “succession,” a desolate, disturbed area is gradually, by a predictable sequence of returning plants, restored to ecological continuity and durability. When old institutions and habits break down or consume themselves, new experimental shoots begin to appear, and people explore and test and share new and better ways to survive together.

It is never easy or simple. But already we see, under the crumbling surface of the conventional world, promising developments: new ways of organizing economic activity (cooperatives, worker-owned companies, nonprofits, trusts), new ways of using low-impact technology to capture solar energy, to sequester carbon dioxide, new ways of building compact, congenial cities that are low (or even self-sufficient) in energy use, low in waste production, high in recycling of almost everything. A vision of sustainability that sometimes shockingly resembles Ecotopia is tremulously coming into existence at the hands of people who never heard of the book.

___________________

Now in principle, the Big Picture seems simple enough, though devilishly complex in the details. 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. But this maggot class does not invest its profits here. By law and by stock-market pressures, corporations must seek their highest possible profits, no matter the social or national consequences -- which means moving capital and resources abroad, wherever profit potential is larger. As Karl Marx darkly remarked, “Capital has no country,” and in the conditions of globalization his meaning has come clear.

The looter elite systematically exports jobs, skills, knowledge, technology, retaining at home chiefly financial manipulation expertise: highly profitable, but not of actual productive value. Through “productivity gains” and speedups, it extracts maximum profit from domestic employees; then, firing the surplus, it claims surprise that the great mass of people lack purchasing power to buy up what the economy can still produce (or import).

Here again Marx had a telling phrase: “Crisis of under-consumption.” When you maximize unemployment and depress wages, people have to cut back. When they cut back, businesses they formerly supported have to shrink or fail, adding their own employees to the ranks of the jobless, and depressing wages still further. End result: something like Mexico, where a small, filthy rich plutocracy rules over an impoverished mass of desperate, uneducated, and hopeless people.

Barring unprecedented revolutionary pressures, this is the actual future we face in the United States, too. As we know from history, such societies can stand a long time, supported by police and military control, manipulation of media, surveillance and dirty tricks of all kinds. It seems likely that a few parts of the world (Germany, with its worker-council variant of capitalism, New Zealand with its relative equality, Japan with its social solidarity, and some others) will remain fairly democratic.

The U.S., which has a long history of violent plutocratic rule unknown to the textbook-fed, will stand out as the best-armed Third World country, its population ill-fed, ill-housed, ill-educated, ill-cared for in health, and increasingly poverty-stricken: even Social Security may be whittled down, impoverishing tens of millions of the elderly.

As empires decline, their leaders become increasingly incompetent -- petulant, ignorant, gifted only with PR skills of posturing and spinning, and prone to the appointment of loyal idiots to important government positions. Comedy thrives; indeed writers are hardly needed to invent outrageous events.

We live, then, in a dark time here on our tiny precious planet. Ecological devastation, political and economic collapse, irreconcilable ideological and religious conflict, poverty, famine: the end of the overshoot of cheap-oil-based consumer capitalist expansionism.

If you don’t know where you’ve been, you have small chance of understanding where you might be headed. So let me offer a capsule history for those who, like most of us, got little help from textbook history.

At 82, my life has included a surprisingly substantial slice of American history. In the century or so up until my boyhood in Appalachian central Pennsylvania, the vast majority of Americans subsisted as farmers on the land. Most, like people elsewhere in the world, were poor, barely literate, ill-informed, short-lived.  Millions had been slaves. Meanwhile in the cities, vast immigrant armies were mobilized by ruthless and often violent “robber baron” capitalists to build vast industries that made things: steel, railroads, ships, cars, skyscrapers.

Then, when I was in grade school, came World War II. America built the greatest armaments industry the world had ever seen, and when the war ended with most other industrial countries in ruins, we had a run of unprecedented productivity and prosperity. Thanks to strong unions and a sympathetic government, this prosperity was widely shared: a huge working middle class evolved -- tens of millions of people could afford (on one wage) a modest house, a car, perhaps sending a child to college. This era peaked around 1973, when wages stagnated, the Vietnam War took a terrible toll in blood and money, and the country began sliding rightward.

In the next epoch, which we are still in and which may be our last as a great nation, capitalists who grew rich and powerful by making things gave way to a new breed: financiers who grasped that you could make even more money by manipulating money. (And by persuading Congress to subsidize them -- the system should have been called Subsidism, not Capitalism.) They had no concern for the productivity of the nation or the welfare of its people; with religious fervor, they believed in maximizing profit as the absolute economic goal. They recognized that, by capturing the government through the election finance system and removing government regulation, they could turn the financial system into a giant casino.

Little by little, they hollowed the country out, until it was helplessly dependent on other nations for almost all its necessities. We had to import significant steel components from China or Japan. We came to pay for our oil imports by exporting food (i.e., our soil). Our media and our educational system withered. Our wars became chronic and endless and stupefyingly expensive. Our diets became suicidal, and our medical system faltered; life expectancies began to fall.

And so we have returned, in a sort of terrible circle, to something like my boyhood years, when President Roosevelt spoke in anger of “one third of a nation ill-housed, ill-fed, ill-clothed.” A large and militant contingent of white, mostly elderly, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant right wingers, mortally threatened by their impending minority status and pretending to be liberty-lovers, desperately seek to return us still further back.

Americans like to think of ours as an exceptional country, immune through geographical isolation and some kind of special virtue to the tides of history. Through the distorted lens of our corporate media, we possess only a distorted view of what the country is really like now. In the next decades, we shall see whether we indeed possess the intelligence, the strength, and the mutual courage to break through to another positive era.

No futurist can foresee the possibilities. As empires decay, their civilian leaderships become increasingly crazed, corrupt, and incompetent, and often the military (which is after all a parasite of the whole nation, and has no independent financial base like the looter class) takes over. Another possible scenario is that if the theocratic red center of the country prevails in Washington, the relatively progressive and prosperous coastal areas will secede in self-defense.

Ecotopia is a novel, and secession was its dominant metaphor: how would a relatively rational part of the country save itself ecologically if it was on its own? As Ecotopia Emerging puts it, Ecotopia aspired to be a beacon for the rest of the world. And so it may prove, in the very, very long run, because the general outlines of Ecotopia are those of any possible future sustainable society.

The "ecology in one country" argument was an echo of an actual early Soviet argument, as to whether "socialism in one country" was possible. In both cases, it now seems to me, the answer must be no. We are now fatally interconnected, in climate change, ocean impoverishment, agricultural soil loss, etc., etc., etc. International consumer capitalism is a self-destroying machine, and as long as it remains the dominant social form, we are headed for catastrophe; indeed, like rafters first entering the "tongue" of a great rapid, we are already embarked on it.

When disasters strike and institutions falter, as at the end of empires, it does not mean that the buildings all fall down and everybody dies. Life goes on, and in particular, the remaining people fashion new institutions that they hope will better ensure their survival.

So I look to a long-term process of "succession," as the biological concept has it, where "disturbances" kill off an ecosystem, but little by little new plants colonize the devastated area, prepare the soil for larger and more complex plants (and the other beings who depend on them), and finally the process achieves a flourishing, resilient, complex state -- not necessarily what was there before, but durable and richly productive. In a similar way, experiments under way now, all over the world, are exploring how sustainability can in fact be achieved locally. Technically, socially, economically -- since it is quite true, as ecologists know, that everything is connected to everything else, and you can never just do one thing by itself.

Since I wrote Ecotopia, I have become less confident of humans' political ability to act on commonsense, shared values. Our era has become one of spectacular polarization, with folly multiplying on every hand. That is the way empires crumble: they are taken over by looter elites, who sooner or later cause collapse. But then new games become possible, and with luck Ecotopia might be among them.

Humans tend to try to manage things: land, structures, even rivers. We spend enormous amounts of time, energy, and treasure in imposing our will on nature, on preexisting or inherited structures, dreaming of permanent solutions, monuments to our ambitions and dreams. But in periods of slack, decline, or collapse, our abilities no longer suffice for all this management. We have to let things go.

All things “go” somewhere: they evolve, with or without us, into new forms. So as the decades pass, we should try not always to futilely fight these transformations. As the Japanese know, there is much unnoticed beauty in wabi-sabi -- the old, the worn, the tumble-down, those things beginning their transformation into something else. We can embrace this process of devolution: embellish it when strength avails, learn to love it.

There is beauty in weathered and unpainted wood, in orchards overgrown, even in abandoned cars being incorporated into the earth. Let us learn, like the Forest Service sometimes does, to put unwise or unneeded roads “to bed,” help a little in the healing of the natural contours, the re-vegetation by native plants. Let us embrace decay, for it is the source of all new life and growth.

Ernest Callenbach, author of the classic environmental novel Ecotopiaamong other works, founded and edited the internationally known journal Film Quarterly.  He died at 83 on April 16th, leaving behind this document on his computer.

Copyright Ernest Callenbach 2012