In the afterword to the 30th-anniversary edition of his 1975 novel, Ernest Callenbach writes, "Looking back, it seems clear that Ecotopia was the first attempt to portray a sustainable society, and that this, more than its modest literary merit, explains its durability." Sadly, there is no false humility in that statement.
Ecotopia (30th Anniversary
Edition) by Ernest Callenbach,
Heyday Books,
176 pgs., 2005.
Ecotopia is ostensibly about a secessionist Northwest -- northern California, Oregon, and Washington -- founded on ecological principles. In this independent land, cars are abolished, everybody recycles, and sewage is turned to fertilizer. More fundamentally, Ecotopia is a "stable-state" society, where old notions of economic progress are retired and "biological stasis" becomes the ultimate goal. That sounds good, as far as it goes; however, the vision is weighed down by so much extraneous cultural baggage -- Marxism, paganism, free love, ritual warfare, communal living, abortion on demand, legalized drugs, gamelan orchestras -- that readers coming to Ecotopia for the first time will find both more and less than they bargained for.
I say the novel is ostensibly about the Northwest because, in fact, all the action takes place in California, and most of it in the Bay Area. We see a good deal of Ecotopian San Francisco and Berkeley, but nothing at all of Ecotopian Portland or Seattle, let alone, say, Ecotopian Klamath Falls or Forks. The story is narrated by William Weston, a New York journalist, by way of his notebooks and dispatches -- the first filed by an American reporter from inside the breakaway republic in 20 years. Weston's stranger-in-a-strange-land observations are, by turns, ludicrously detailed (he dutifully reports that electric carving knives are unknown in Ecotopia) and impossibly obtuse, as when the reader is hit with this: "Thus the Ecotopian federal structure, which superficially resembles the small government bodies found under primitive capitalism, makes the most of its outlays on uncontroversial activities that benefit all citizens absolutely equally."
Few novels can survive that kind of thing; yet, somehow, Ecotopia has thrived, having now sold nearly a million copies in nine languages. Were it otherwise, there would be no sense in reissuing the book -- nor, indeed, in reviewing it -- except perhaps as a cultural artifact. But even today, the novel is assigned reading for college courses in political science and environmental studies. You need only google "ecotopia" to get a glimmering of its far-reaching influence: there's ecotopia.org, ecotopia.com, ecotopia.biz, ecotopia.co.uk, etc. And it may even be true that some pillars of the modern environmental movement were built upon Ecotopian ideals. Callenbach boasts that his book was an inspiration to the founders of the German Green Party, and Judi Bari's Mendocino chapter of Earth First! was named after it. Whatever else you might say about Ecotopia, it can't be dismissed as a relic.
The novel stands in sharp contrast to another enduring eco-classic from 1975, Ed Abbey's wildly successful (and also Earth First!-inspiring) The Monkey Wrench Gang. As a writer, Abbey was in another league, but his sensibilities were also a world apart. While the two books share a deep disdain of progress (so-called), Abbey's eco-saboteurs were not starry-eyed radicals so much as fed-up rednecks, beer-fueled Quixotes who leveled their lances at billboards and bulldozers and dams. While they aimed to merely throw a wrench in the works of industrial civilization, Callenbach conjured a model society -- a City on a Hill, so to speak -- where humans could live in balance with nature. As Callenbach recently told The San Francisco Chronicle, "Then, as now, people didn't have easy hope, and Ecotopia served as a beacon."
Therein lies both its appeal and its fatal weakness, for while Callenbach dared, at least, to envision human history as something other than a forced march to oblivion, his characters, stuck as they are within the utopian framework, seem like little more than the self-satisfied minions of the newly dawned Aquarius. Abbey's desert rats may be doomed, but at least they're heroic. The citizens of Callenbach's republic, by contrast, display an eerie sameness that makes all human interaction in the book seem unsettlingly artificial, as if the body-snatchers had already come and gone, leaving behind only pod people. Hayduke may live, but he doesn't live in Ecotopia.
This is not to say that the residents of this sovereignty don't argue or act up. They do. Callenbach takes pains, in fact, to show us that the good people of Ecotopia are unrestrained in their emotions. One illustration of this involves a plate of cold eggs in a restaurant. When the indignant recipient of the tepid huevos raises a stink, the resulting row brings the place to a grinding halt as the aggrieved customer and the offended cook square off in front of the other diners. The drama ends not in bitterness or violence, however, but in hugs and tears and "many little smiles all around." This is the way things go in Ecotopia -- repeatedly, until the reader realizes that Ecotopians don't so much interact as role-play. It's life as group therapy.
Speaking of roles, free love has a starring one in Callenbach's vision. His lucky narrator enjoys wild romps in forest shrines, anonymous threesomes in tents, even sex with the lovely and obliging nurse who tends to him in the hospital. (As porn clichés go, the Naughty Nurse has to be right up there with the Lusty Librarian.) After his Florence Nightingale manually "gets him off," Weston happily reports to his readers back home, "The nurses are highly trained in a number of specialties unknown to ours, particularly massage, which they regard as important for stimulating the body's recuperative powers." That's comical, to be sure, but given the unrelenting earnestness of the novel, it's difficult to say whether or not the humor was intended.
Here's how the sticky issue of race is addressed in the novel: blacks have voluntarily segregated themselves. Oakland thus becomes Soul City, an Afro-centric enclave where businesses are "more naturally collectivist than in the white areas" and which is a "heavy exporter of music and musicians, novels and movies and poetry." Natch. Native Americans are at once prominent and scarce in Ecotopia; that is, they exist only as part of the idealized, pre-Columbian past, as noble savages. As such, Ecotopians are free to play Indian: they happily adopt faux-native names and hunt with bow and arrow; they say things like, "You'd never catch an Indian wearing a watch"; and, as they march to a ritual war game in Golden Gate Park, we read that the men "joked with a certain bravado ... Tom quoted the old plains Indian saying: 'It is a good day to die.'"
The evil of warfare has been ritualized as a way of dissipating its awful power and relegating it to the safe, if frightening, confines of ceremony. The scene, as Callenbach paints it, is unbridled neo-primitivism, complete with all the props: chanting, obsidian spears, cauldrons filled with potions, face paint. All that's missing from the Tarzan fantasy are grass skirts and bones protruding from pierced septums. The charade ends when Weston is ritually speared in the side -- the wound that lands him in the sexual-healing ward.
Before he can return home to New York, Weston is abducted on the orders of the president of Ecotopia, Vera Allwen. His benevolent captors spirit him away to a hot springs in the foothills. There, steaming in the baptismal waters, the last of his intellectual resistance -- his "objective pseudo-think," as he disparages it in his journal -- melts away, and at long last, he is reborn. The scene ends as things inevitably do in Ecotopia: with hugs and tears and everyone "obviously very pleased with themselves."
Ernest Callenbach in his Berkeley garden.
Photo: © 2005 Gregory Dicum.
Callenbach has called his book "politics fiction" (as opposed to science fiction), but he's wide of the mark there. Aside from the occasional whiff of authoritarianism, there are no politics to speak of here. How could there be? The Ecotopian worldview is of such a cultish consistency, after all, that politics are superfluous. Moreover, in this Rousseauian world, people are all basically good. Evil is in exile, banished to the old world beyond the borders. With no need of politics, neither are there politicians. Allwen, the president, is really more of a high priestess, the therapist-in-chief. Weston notes with some alarm that his long-awaited meeting with her is "almost like a psychiatric interview" and later, after his conversion, reflects that she "must have seen what was going on in my mind when I didn't know it myself." Yeah, almost like the Bhagwan or Jim Jones. What the ending of Ecotopia makes clear, finally, is that Callenbach's story is a religious parable, a Pilgrim's Progress for the deep-ecology set. It's a cult classic in the fullest sense.
If Callenbach is embarrassed by any of this 30 years on, he gives no indication in the new afterword. "Being the author of Ecotopia," he writes from his home in Berkeley, "has been like being the parent of a talented child." Fair enough. Parents should be proud of their offspring. But the rest of us ought to be a little more objective.
Springtime is peak time for naturally raised eggs—and bread puddings and meringues
Comments
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rickeym Posted 11:00 am
12 May 2005
No cars?! Why cars are what made this country great. Who wouldn't want their own car? Life without a Hummer is ... well, kinda humdrum, don't ya think?
But seriously, Pat ... aside from the fact that everything about "Ecotopia" sucks, how was the book?
If nothing else, Callenbach gets a little credit for at least imagining an alternative to "The Apprentice" and life with Ann Coulter? Whatever it lacks as literature -- and it's not as bad as you portray -- it has been one among very few contemporary attempts at a fictional imagining of a life beyond the hell of post modern consumer culture fascism. Sometimes people need more than just good literature -- or perhaps you'd prefer a well wrought novel of upper-middle-class adultery.
I suspect that people will still be inspired by Callenbach's shaggy dog of a novel long after they've forgotten your review.
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EarthSherab Posted 11:25 am
12 May 2005
I agree with rikeym that Callenbach does deserve for at least positing a future without the mental climate which we now find ourselves in. Certainly it has flaws, but I find great value in it anyway, if only to keep in the back of my mind as a model for a just and sustainable society.
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Biodiversivist Posted 12:53 am
13 May 2005
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David Roberts Posted 2:15 am
13 May 2005
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Biodiversivist Posted 4:11 am
13 May 2005
The anger (I think) I detected in your response is an example of why communes always fail--dissent. Human beings are inherently aggressive and competitive (except for you and me...wink wink). Consensus is lost as soon as a second person shows up. We think it is because we always know best, but actually, it is built into us by natural selection.
Ecotopia is nothing but a large commune, an idealized communist country. It does not exist anywhere on the planet, never has, and never will. In short, Ecotopia has its cake, and eats it too.
What is missing, is dissent. It is missing only because the author chose to ignore it. In the real world, dissent is always present. Dissent and Communism are not compatible. In all other communist experiments, that little problem (dissent) is throttled by a central overpowering authority, Pol Pot, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, the former USSR, China. The stereotypical "hippy" farm communes typically fail because of internal power struggles (usually, males competing for females). Communism (a commune) does a poor job of providing for its citizens in the end because it goes against the grain of human nature. Given the freedom to do so, all people will compete for status (except for you and me...raised eyebrows). The only way to stop that instinctive urge is to crush it by force, thus, communism sucks worse than free markets. I would be a Marxist today if not for the overwhelming evidence that it is a pipe dream.
From Poison Darts-Protecting the Biodiversity of Our World:
The economic systems available to us fall into a spectrum. At one end, you will find unbridled capitalism and the use of slaves. The Greeks, Romans, Mayans, and most everyone else practiced this as a matter of course throughout human history. As you move toward the middle, you will find regulated free markets. This is capitalism with rules in place to limit how badly people with power can abuse those who are making them rich. Anti-trust laws break up companies that have started to swallow all competition. This does not always work. These companies resist and sometimes they succeed, as Microsoft has so far been able to do. There are laws to limit how long you can make your employees work, the conditions they work under, and laws to insure a minimum wage. Workers are called employees at this point, or sometimes wage slaves. Next on the scale comes socialism. Socialism and free market systems begin to blur as taxation and the size of government bureaucracies creep up. Finally, as taxation reaches 100 percent you have a communist system. Experience has shown that a system that sits in the middle somewhere seems to work the best.
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David Roberts Posted 4:31 am
13 May 2005
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Thomas Palm Posted 1:54 am
14 May 2005
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jdhlax Posted 3:24 pm
15 May 2005
First, no one in brainwashed America ever mentions how badly most people in capitalist Cuba were doing before the revolution. They are far better off now, despite their currnent abject poverty. At least now they are guaranteed food, shelter, and medical care, which the vast majority of Cubans were sorely lacking or completely without under capitalism.
Second, Capitalism is not at one end of the spectrum, fascism is. The fundamental aspect of fascism is big business or corporations running the government, which means that the U.S. is arguably fascist. Capitalism is the next step.
Moreover, capitalism was not practiced by the "Greeks, Romans, Mayans, and most everyone else ... throughout human history." Capitalism has only been around for at most a few hundred years, and back then it was not truly capitalism. I learned this in a basic economics course, and I suggest people who want to make comments about economics at least do some studying on the matter!
As to Dave's comment about ruthless repression, this issue is far more complicated than you give it credit for. What Castro seeks to repress is capitalist propaganda that he fears would tempt Cubans to turn to capitalism by appealing to their selfish instincts. I fully agree with what Castro seeks to prevent, but I don't think repression is an effective way to do it, and there are clearly moral problems with repression as well. Education and attempting to raise Cubans' level of consciousness would be a much better way of accomplishing Castro's goals, though I'm sure he already does some of this with his long speeches.
Last but not least, a society "where most food is grown locally and organically in small collective farms, a land of very few cars where people walk, ride bikes, or take buses if they must travel far [and where] [t]hey waste little energy heating or cooling their modest homes and have not made war" is a society environmentalists should all support and aspire to, not one to be ridiculed because it doesn't live up to your capitalist American standards.
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Tom Athanasiou Posted 1:09 am
16 May 2005
Actually, I remember enjoying EcoTopia, but I was young and horny and stoned.
-- toma
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yammerjammer Posted 8:16 am
17 May 2005
I thought the gratuitous sex with horny women and gratuitous violence with tough men, as well as the overt racism and stupid ideas on house building (what was it? some sort of fiberglass foam stuff that you could break off easily and with great joy when bored? huh? can somebody say "strawbale", "adobe" or "rammed earth"?), plus the reality that it wasn't a book you could call "written well with great forethought" pretty much ruined it for me.
No, it's not just a passably good representation of a possible utopian society, it's an insult to my intelligence and idealism as well as a book that makes all deep eco-freaks look like idiots and cult followers. And this is coming from a self-styled deep ecologist who doesn't own a car, likes to eats organic vegetables, and thinks sex is great.
Like the author of the reivew hinted at, go read Abbey instead. Or better yet, do something outside.
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