1999 Winter

Eco-fiction by Jan Spencer

"My fellow Americans, I come to you this evening with a message that is simple and of great historical importance. As you all know, we are experiencing rapid changes in the world and at home. We are tracking events as well as we can at the Federal level.

"You elected me to be your leader five years ago on a platform to contain these changes, to keep the price of food reasonable, to insure supplies of gasoline, to maintain order and our prosperous way of life

"To be honest is critical at this time. We have failed in our promises. We have failed to understand and respond to global forces beyond our control. Admittedly, there were voices warning of these kinds of circumstances. We didn't listen very well. In hindsight, if we had made better choices and policies thirty, forty, even fifty years ago, much of this could have been avoided. Truthfully, the premise of an entire culture structured around buying, selling, and consuming to the degree we did--and leading the world to do the same--was a mistake."

Thanks to the generosity of Double Tee Promotions and an employee named Sage, this reporter managed to gain free admittance to a sold-out $45-a-ticket concert at MacArthur Court in Eugene, September 24, after offering to write something about it in Talking Leaves. In this unconventional concert review, I'm going to attempt to answer the obvious but easily neglected question that emerged as I assembled the Music Reviews for this issue: not "What does an ecological future look like?" nor even "What does it sound like?," but "What does it feel like?" This concept may not fly, but please fasten your seatbelts and stay with me to see if or where it crashes. At the very least, I've gotten a great concert experience and a spectacularly flawed essay out of it. Once safely aloft, you are welcome to move around in the cabin, except during periods of turbulence, but please: no smoking.

The novel Ecotopia appeared in 1975, its "prequel" Ecotopia Emerging in 1981. The considerable success of Ecotopia (it has now sold about 700,000 copies in nine languages) seemed to me then, and still seems to me now, an optimistic sign. But I must confess that the book was written partly out of despair. Even in the early seventies, when it was clear that the new ecological thinking being deployed in Co-Evolution Quarterly, Science, and a host of other serious publications was becoming enormously sophisticated and intellectually impressive, there were plenty of reasons to believe that the jig was up: the unchecked power of industrial society to destroy the natural order had been so magnified by surging population and consumption growth and more powerful technology that the prospects for saving more than tiny remnants of undisturbed areas were dim. Air and water pollution were staggering. Forestry, agriculture, and fisheries--the basic life-support systems that make human life possible despite our ever-growing population burden--were being operated on nonsustainable bases. Fundamentally, we were eating oil, since the food system required far more petroleum calories of input (fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, equipment fuel, processing, transportation) than we got out of it in food calories.

There is a Zen story about a man who set himself the task of digging a tunnel through the solid rock of a mountain to provide travelers with an alternative to a treacherous cliffside path. He worked to serve penance for his misdeeds, and it took him fifty years to complete the tunnel. At the time I read the story, I felt jealous of the man. Though his task was difficult, the value of its objective was clear and the rest of his life was clarified by his single vision of what he would work to accomplish. His story stirred the craving in me for a clarity of purpose that would be worthy of fifty years of my life to pursue, a vision of what unique contribution I could make.