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.
In the years since, as Barry Commoner once put it, the combined might of the environmental movement, although it successfully defended many precious areas from development, had only two large-scale achievements relevant to long-term sustainability: the removal of toxic lead from gasoline and the shutting down of DDT use in the US. To these we might wish to add the (still incomplete) phasing out of CFC manufacture--we still can't bear to eliminate the even more intensely global-warming methyl bromide. But we need to stop adding to the ecosphere thousands of other toxic substances. We need to get mining and grazing out of parks. We need to rebuild our cities for minimal ecological impact, not for the convenience of cars. There is a century or more of work desperately needing to be done.
Ecotopia and Ecotopia Emerging are stories (they include love stories) with happy endings. But at bottom they are dramatizations of what life in a sustainable society might be like. Both were very carefully researched, and aside from a few details they remain scientifically and socially valid today. Indeed, in a sense they are the only game in town: everybody who looks honestly and realistically at the long-term prospects for human survival, whatever their political convictions, will come out with some Ecotopia-like projections. In the long run, it is "Ecotopia or Bust." The novels, then, are "thought-experiments" designed to help us think about where we ought to be going. Politics-fiction, perhaps, rather than science-fiction. Over the years, though they have hardly changed the course of history, they have inspired a lot of people to live differently, to choose different work lives, to see the world in Ecotopian ways.
The secessionist metaphor of Ecotopia is aimed at making us think of how we would run the world immediately around us if we were not subject to the vagaries of distant power in Washington or in corporate headquarters. It still makes me feel good to re-read Ecotopia: yes, I say to myself, we could live like that! Paradoxically, the competing "vision" of greed operating within unfettered market capitalism as a satisfactory engine for human happiness and survival is not really taken seriously by anybody, yet attempts to discuss our destiny in any other terms are derided as naive, silly, irrelevant. Trapped in the futile and self-destroying ideology of "free trade," "globalization," and "let the market rule," we are self-blinded from seeing that when the market rules, it brings devastation. ("Surely the theory must be right," we tell ourselves. "It sounds so reasonable!" Well, we all need to take a look at Jerry Mander's The Case Against Globalization.)
As we know, the wholesome Ecotopian vision having obviously by no means turned the tide toward sustainability, the world as a whole, with the US in the forefront, rushes on toward unimaginable ecological catastrophes, heedless of the underlying biological realities that support human life, and also constrain it. We live as if we were indeed "masters of the universe," when we are only peculiarly prolific mammals. And we hardly grasp the direness of the future that lies ahead of us--that indeed is taking form all around us--because of the wastage of our forests, the destruction of our fisheries, the mining of our once-rich agricultural lands, the distortion of our city and suburban lives by automobilization. We cling to technological hopes that we can somehow immunize ourselves against ecological realities. This is a main reason why I recently spent three years writing Ecology: A Pocket Guide, a compact, reader-friendly treatment of ecological terminology and thinking--so that we should all be able at least to talk about these things, and thus hopefully see what we should do about them. (Once we have a shared vocabulary, we should be able to have productive arguments.)
It's always hard to keep in mind that changes, good or bad, mostly happen in small increments. Another bill subsidizing mining or sugar companies passes, greased by suitable campaign contributions to key legislators. An oil company, after being sued for 20 years by environmental organizations, finally agrees to stop dumping toxic refinery discharges into San Francisco Bay. What we have to do, besides fighting on all the battlefronts we have time and energy for, is keep an eye on trends (through such publications as the Worldwatch Institute's annual Vital Signs and such devices as Sustainable Seattle's indexes) and use them as guidance in finding struggles we can hope to win.
On the whole, of course, enormous losses to human welfare and the natural order have characterized the years since Ecotopia was written. We live increasingly in an ecological dark age, and sometimes can only cling to the certainty that Nature Bats Last. In the end, human disruptions of the ecosphere will be overwhelmed in catastrophes of our own making. But in the short run, where we live, it is psychologically far healthier to live as a possibly foolish optimist than a knowing but suicidal pessimist. We can never really enjoy the luxury of pessimism. As Joan Dunning reminds us in From the Redwood Forests, her moving and informative book about the Headwaters Forest struggle, "Action is the antidote to despair."
And so we must fight. We must organize Green parties and other organizations to "speak truth to power." We must seek to sow seeds of change in the communities and companies and universities where we spend our lives. We must find corners of the earth that can be saved, and save them. We must help each other to be joyful and to live well--which is always the best revenge and takes far less money than the advertisers try to persuade us.
Moreover, in the long run bioregions "tell": they will influence, in Cascadia as in the others all over the planet, how people can successfully survive. We need to nurture our bioregional wisdom, explore how "to live in place," learn the plants and animals and microorganisms that share our place with us. In the long run, societies that permit or encourage the obscene inequalities in wealth that we have now in the US will be overturned by desperate and revengeful populations. In the long run, oil-based technologies that destroy underlying resources while seeming to produce plenty (our fisheries, our forestry, our agriculture) are doomed, and the billions who depend on them will pass away. In the long run, our curiously suicidal abdication of power to corporations, which we have allowed to claim more than human rights and powers, must be replaced by new and as yet unimagined means of curtailing and regulating them, before they do us all in.
In our small or large ways, we can help, even in the perilous circumstances we face, to prepare the way for a better Ecotopian future. As people said in the early days of the successful struggle to end an immoral and unjust war in Vietnam, "It isn't going to be an easy job." Nor can we, I think, put our hopes in the possibility that things like the celebrated Y2K problem will lead in Ecotopian directions. For one thing, technological society is astonishingly resilient when it has to be--whenever money-making is threatened. For another, serious change doesn't happen randomly or suddenly. It is planned, organized, and worked for over a long period. There are really no "revolutions"; what seem to be revolutionary changes are always the products of long-continued underlying shifts in economic and power relationships. Human agency counts, of course: the current drift toward the right and ever-accelerating environmental destruction has been contemplated and striven for by a whole generation of amply financed right-wingers. Many subterranean trends will push us in Ecotopian directions for mere survival. But if we wish society to move toward Ecotopian sustainability with some grace, it will come only through the mobilizing of people, not through some concatenation of circumstances like computers malfunctioning for a while.
The only real long-term good I can envision coming out of the Y2K situation is that it is leading a fair number of people to reconsider their technophilia--their belief that technology can always save us. For beyond Y2K lie many other challenges to the brave new technological era. We're running out of phone numbers--and rebuilding and reprogramming the communications system to use Tokyo-style longer numbers will also be enormously expensive and troublesome. Europe will go through huge convulsions converting to a common currency. License plates, Social Security numbers, and other identification systems will go through painful expansions. Date-sensitive programming problems will also turn up in the Global Positioning System and other technological interconnections.
But these are all details. What's really going on is far more profound: in the grip of a lunatic economic dogma, we are destroying the biological substrate that human populations depend on. Moreover, we are creating explosive tensions within human societies by systematically destroying both informal (family and community) and governmental security nets. We're expecting ourselves and others to live as if Homo economicus were more than a mad fantasy.
But we are anthropoid mammals. We like to play and joke, to hang around together, to work intermittently and cooperatively, to sing and dance and make music and make love. At some point, we must realize that our fundamental task is to reorganize society so that we can live like the delightful animals we are, not like machines for profit-making. When we finally see that clearly, Ecotopia will be within reach at last.
Ernest Callenbach's new book, Ecology: A Pocket Guide (Univ. of California Press, $9.95), a compact, reader-friendly introduction to sixty basic ecological concepts, has been described as "what every would-be Ecotopian needs to know about ecology." His other books include Bring Back the Buffalo, Ecotopia, and Ecotopia Emerging.
©1998 Talking Leaves
Winter 1999
Volume 8, Number 3
Visions of an Ecological Future