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# 2025-04-15 - Ecotopia Emerging by Ernest Callenbach | |
> Under the Nazis in World War II, when the social order really | |
> did break down, the people who survived were the people with | |
> friends--support networks. Power grows out of social cohesion, not | |
> the barrel of a gun. You're only as strong as the people who will | |
> come to your aid. | |
A new online friend encouraged me to read this prequel to Ecotopia. | |
Below is a link to my notes from the original Ecotopia. | |
Ecotopia | |
In Ecotopia Emerging ideas are central. Character development and | |
plot are secondary. It's similar to Atlas Shrugged, but for hippies. | |
I wanted to like this book, but alas, i didn't like it. | |
Published in 1981, this book made many critical observations about | |
the United States in the early 1980s. It also made a few intelligent | |
projections. For example, it predicted the growth of food deserts, | |
where it would be nearly impossible to buy fresh, wholesome produce. | |
This book shows enthusiasm for group theory, urban planning, and | |
flaunting sexual mores. It contains many manifestos, some printed in | |
all italic, others presented as fireside chats from Vera Allen, the | |
president of Ecotopia. The chapters frequently switch between | |
different characters, including Lou, a young inventor of a | |
revolutionary new solar panel. | |
I like that Lou is into DIY and wants to freely publish | |
specifications and instructions in such a way that "anyone" could | |
easily and inexpensively make their own solar panels and use her | |
invention. She feels disdain for patents and the profit motive. | |
She has little patience for dishonesty. My kind of person! | |
This theme of Lou's brilliant invention reminds me of classic | |
science fiction, which focused a lot on gadgets and inventions. | |
This book introduces the original Ecotopia book in a clever way. An | |
east coast journalist writes a satirical article intended to | |
discredit the new political movement. He coins the term Ecotopia | |
intending to make it look like a naive dream. The "naive dreamers" | |
take ownership of the term, then one of them writes a fiction titled | |
Ecotopia. In it, a skeptical east coast journalist travels to | |
Ecotopia expecting to discredit it, but ends up falling in love. | |
Since ideas are the primary focus of this book, i guess that would | |
make the manifestos the most important part. Below are samples of | |
the author's manifesto writing style. | |
* * * | |
For four billion years the earth has moved in its steady course | |
around the sun. The known history of human beings is little more | |
than an eye-blink in that planetary lifetime. Yet, in their brief | |
years upon the planet, humans evolved such astonishing capacities in | |
hand and brain that they became a species which altered its own | |
environment. Chimpanzees might build rude nests of greenery in the | |
jungle and occupy them for a few days, but humans learned to pile | |
shaped stones into protective walls and buildings. Antelopes might | |
range for miles seeking lusher grass; humans learned to dig ditches | |
and divert streams to their gardens. | |
Thus, little by little, this unique species discovered ways to | |
overcome the ravages of predators and famine and disease. And once | |
humans found ways to live together in towns and cities, their | |
collective powers greatly increased; their populations multiplied. | |
In Asia and the Middle East they built canals and aqueducts to | |
irrigate vast realms and support elegant imperial courts. The Romans | |
flung their roads, their laws, and their armies over an empire | |
stretching for thousands of miles. Many such great centers of | |
civilization arose and flourished and then collapsed--in a majestic | |
cycle almost as imposing as the earth's own seasonal rhythms. | |
Through these slow pre-industrial centuries the cultivation of new | |
land gradually produced more food, and the impact of starvation and | |
malnutrition lessened; nonetheless, humans continued to live in a | |
rough balance with their fellow species. Only with the development | |
of technological society, which ambitiously harnessed the energy in | |
coal and oil, did human population soar. Then huge factory cities | |
spread over whole counties and the scale of human activities, in | |
engineering and in social organization, became overwhelming. By the | |
time that European peoples designate in their calendars as the end of | |
the twentieth century, the planet was home to over five billion | |
humans. Like a plague of locusts, they seemed to have escaped all | |
natural checks and were devouring everything in their path. Unlike | |
any creatures ever seen on the earth, humans exterminated other | |
species by the tends of thousands--either directly with guns, or | |
indirectly by destroying habitats in forest and river and grassland. | |
But the population explosion of the industrial epoch also subjected | |
humans themselves to new and unprecedented perils. Human | |
activities--even the detonation of nuclear bombs--remained puny in | |
comparison to the huge transfers of solar energy by winds and storms. | |
Nonetheless, in certain critical respects humans had acquired the | |
power to diminish the earth's capacity to support life. Deserts were | |
spreading because exploitative land ownership patterns drove desperate | |
people to overgraze and defoliate the land. Cancer and degeneration | |
of the gene pool through mutations were rising, consequences of human | |
cleverness in producing new chemical compounds for agricultural, | |
industrial, or military use. The burning of immense quantities of | |
coal and oil was steadily increasing the carbon dioxide of the | |
atmosphere; if this continued, a "greenhouse effect" would raise | |
temperatures enough to melt the polar ice caps, inundate parts of | |
many coastal cities, and make deserts of now fertile temperate | |
agricultural areas. Nor was there any certainty that the process | |
could be reversed; it might turn much of the earth's surface into a | |
Mars-like wasteland. | |
One peril was still more threatening. Under the industrial mode of | |
life, humans were subjugated in vast quarrelsome patriarchal | |
nation-states. The rulers of these states were now armed with | |
nuclear weapons so fearsome and so numerous that if they were used | |
even in small part they would end modern civilization, at least in | |
the northern hemisphere. Even more ominously, a nuclear war would | |
affect the outer atmosphere in unpredictable ways; its protective | |
layers might lose the critical ability to shield the earth from the | |
lethal blaze of the sun's radiation. | |
Thus, paradoxically, the technological ingenuity which had enabled | |
humans to proliferate into every habitable niche on the earth's | |
surface had also begun to threaten the survival upon the planet of | |
all plant and animal life--including the human species itself. | |
* * * | |
Since the seventies, the Western economy had been heavily dependent | |
on oil--particularly Middle Eastern oil. Because of American | |
domination of the territories around the Persian Gulf, this oil had | |
been available for several decades at extremely low prices compared | |
to coal and other energy reserves. When effective steps were | |
initiated by the OPEC nations to drive the price of oil upward, the | |
initial shock had taken both Western governments and corporations by | |
surprise. They reacted with confusion and a variety of ineffective | |
plans. | |
The conservative political tide which had swept the United States in | |
the eighties had also pushed federal energy policies in suicidal | |
directions. Vast sums were dispensed to subsidize synthetic fuel | |
production even though such fields would by, by the time they finally | |
came on the market, more costly than renewable biomass alternatives | |
and would cause additional cost burdens through air and water | |
pollution damage. New missiles and other armaments were put into | |
production, weakening the economy but adding to the public impression | |
that American might could always preserve access to the Gulf oil | |
fields. Federal funds shored up failing automobile | |
corporations--which had proved unable to compete with Japanese firms | |
in producing gas-efficient cars--instead of diverting them toward | |
production of busses, trains, and other low-energy means of | |
transportation. At a time when even utility executives recognized | |
that nuclear energy was becoming economically unviable, the federal | |
government slashed its budget for solar energy and conservation | |
measures and put the money into nuclear development. | |
The government's only significant realistic action was price | |
decontrol, which allowed oil companies to raise prices further, | |
generating almost incalculable profits. Higher prices drastically | |
penalized the poor, who drove old cars and lived in badly insulated | |
houses, but they did cut down on public gasoline and oil consumption. | |
Most American politicians, however, continued to believe that | |
reliance upon oil must continue and that increased drilling in the | |
United States and in areas within its immediate sphere of influence | |
(such as Mexico) would somehow provide so much new oil that prices | |
would fall. Support for this belief could be found in the history of | |
other industries, where increased demand had often led to increased | |
production. | |
But oil was not an ordinary industry. Along with agriculture--which | |
some thought could be made productive enough, through the application | |
of ever more chemicals, to pay for oil imports--the oil industry had | |
become the foundation of all social activity. And it depended upon a | |
resource which, however much of it might remain to be discovered, was | |
getting steadily more expensive to produce. Deeper wells took more | |
complex drilling equipment, better crews, used more drilling and | |
pumping energy. Wells offshore or in the Arctic required | |
sophisticated drilling rigs and extraction technology; transporting | |
their oil required expensive pipelines and often posed difficult | |
ecological and political problems. | |
Oil prices, then, would ultimately continue to rise until energy | |
consumers developed other, competing sources they could turn to, thus | |
providing a real check. But this idea was so unpalatable, and its | |
consequences so drastic, that it was literally unthinkable both to | |
politicians and to most of the citizenry at large. So a widespread | |
national flight from reality occurred, in which numerous alternatives | |
to oil were considered and rejected. After all, it was felt, oil | |
might be getting more expensive, but it was there; the alternatives | |
were untried. Moreover, because the alternatives were at the moment | |
slightly more expensive than oil, excuses could be found to reject | |
them on hardheaded economic grounds--ignoring the fact that they | |
would soon be cheaper since they relied on "free," inexhaustible | |
sources as the wind, the earth's geothermal heat, or ocean thermal | |
differentials. Alternatives to oil for transportation purposes, such | |
as burnable oils produced by desert plants, or alcohol fermented from | |
sugar cane, grain, or agricultural wastes, were similarly discarded. | |
Instead, officials fell back on a naive faith that the oil companies, | |
if "unleashed," would somehow revive the good old days of cheap | |
gasoline. | |
Thus, like a lumbering dinosaur unable to face the fact that the | |
climate had changed, daydreaming of the better pasturage of | |
yesteryear, oil-hungry America lurched toward some unseen economic | |
catastrophe. | |
* * * | |
Since the beginning of the war-production drive of 1940-1945, which | |
transformed the United States into the greatest industrial machine | |
the earth had yet seen, chemists had been developing new substances | |
at an astonishing pace. Once they learned the basic techniques of | |
hooking and unhooking atoms their imaginations seemed unlimited. | |
They played with shiny colored balls that represented atoms, building | |
them into beautiful, complex new molecules; then, first in | |
laboratories and later in immense plants that resembled oil | |
refineries, they produced the actual compounds. | |
Many of these new materials had extraordinarily interesting | |
properties. Some of them could kill insects; these were manufactured | |
by the millions of tons, and given names like DDT or 2-4D. Some were | |
useful as drugs, though they had unsuspected side-effects of nausea, | |
headaches, sweating, gastric upsets, circulatory disorders. Some | |
were glue-like and hardened as strong as steel, but could be molded | |
into infinitely varied shapes. Some could be made into thin, almost | |
weightless transparent films. Some could be used in foods as | |
preservatives, flavorizers, tenderizers, or to make foods stiffer or | |
creamier. Some were dyes, widely used in foods, clothing, plastics. | |
Some were capable of foaming up and then hardening into spongy or | |
rigid forms. | |
They appeared in paints and varnishes, they were made into bottles | |
and pan-coatings and phonograph records. They were eaten and drunk, | |
sprayed and powdered, applied in a thousand ways upon the landscape | |
and all the creatures who inhabited it. By the end of the seventies | |
there was no human activity in all the United States, from | |
contraception to the management of terminal disease, carried out free | |
of materials that had not existed on the face of the earth forty | |
years earlier. This, it was widely believed, was a testimonial to | |
humankind's improvements on nature. People clamored for the new | |
wonder products, and could no longer imagine living without them. | |
Especially during manufacture, but also for weeks or months later, | |
some of the new compounds gave off some of their molecules into the | |
surrounding air, which thus became permeated with strangely | |
penetrating smells. Children and animals attempted to evade these | |
smells, but tens of millions of adults were exposed to them | |
regularly--on their jobs in industrial plants or on farms, in their | |
houses, on the roads, and in the streets. Through the lungs, and | |
also through food and water, the new molecules entered into human | |
bodies. What they did there, aside from causing an occasional | |
headache or bout of nausea, nobody then regarded as important. | |
About thirty years after the great boom in chemical production began, | |
American public health officials and doctors realized that the nation | |
was experiencing an alarming new rise in the incidence of cancer. | |
Some attempted to explain this by saying that modern sanitation and | |
medicine enabled people to live longer, and that when they lived | |
longer they just naturally fell prey to diseases like cancer. Others | |
noted the rise in certain cancers due to cigarette smoking, or the | |
taking of popular drugs that had been insufficiently tested, or | |
dietary factors. Research was hampered by the fact that there were | |
so many different types of cancers, and many of them took twenty | |
years or so to develop. Increasingly, however, people of all ages | |
were suffering from the disease--with more than one in every four | |
Americans becoming victims. | |
Through the endless ingenuity of chemists about a thousand new | |
chemicals per year were introduced into the environment; the total | |
reached well past 80,000, of which almost 35,000 were officially | |
classified as known or potential hazards to human health. After many | |
citizen protests, the federal government had begun a program of | |
testing these substances to determine how severe were the dangers | |
they posed. But it was estimated that, at the budget allotted, this | |
testing program would not catch up for a hundred years--if then. | |
Meanwhile, pesticides were being impregnated into upholstery and | |
carpets and building materials. They were sprayed or painted onto | |
buildings by insect and rodent exterminators. Pesticides and | |
herbicides were sprayed in parks and public buildings and buses and | |
on gardens and golf courses. They were sprayed along roadsides, | |
where they drifted into nearby houses. Highly toxic materials called | |
PCBs were dispersed throughout the land as insulation material in | |
millions of electric-pole transformers and capacitors, television | |
sets, fluorescent light fixtures, and industrial equipment; whenever | |
these leaked or exploded or were tossed into dumps, the oily | |
persistent liquid diffused over nearby earth, automobiles, or people. | |
Agricultural pesticides and herbicides were sprayed from airplanes | |
and helicopters; combined with fertilizers, they were used to soak | |
seeds before planting. Each year, in the western states alone, | |
hundreds of millions of pounds of carcinogenic and mutagenic | |
compounds were distributed. Toxic substances in quantities large | |
enough to require destruction of poultry and eggs ended up in food | |
supplies of 17 states; in the East and Midwest, many lakes and | |
streams were closed to fishing because of dangerous chemical | |
concentrations. | |
Researchers hoping to find a viral cause for cancer were reluctantly | |
driven to the conclusion that, though some virus process might be | |
involved, the precipitating causes of cancer were something like 80 | |
percent environmental. People were doing it to themselves. But this | |
was not a message that most Americans were then prepared to hear; it | |
went largely unreported and undiscussed, and the cancer rates | |
continued rising. Chemistry graduates continued to receive lucrative | |
job offers before they even stepped off campus. People went on | |
breathing air that was known to be dangerous to their health, | |
drinking water known to be contaminated, eating pesticide- and | |
additive-laden foods, and concentrating their attention on making | |
money in order (as they imagined it) to survive. | |
* * * | |
Riding the public enthusiasm for clean air and clean water which had | |
moved Congress during the seventies to enact major environmental | |
protection measures, the Environmental Protection Agency had early | |
scored substantial victories. An immense program of improved sewage | |
processing facilities--welcomed by construction interests as well as | |
the public--helped to lower pollution of streams and rivers. (It did | |
not, however, address the ultimate necessity of removing industrial | |
wastes--toxic metals, dangerous chemicals--from sewage sludge, so it | |
could be recycled back onto the land and thus sustain a permanent | |
agriculture.) Air quality standards helped to reduce the burden of | |
certain pollutants, though auto smog in major cities remained severe, | |
and the auto industry secured delays and exemptions to exhaust | |
pollution abatement. | |
Other industries also proved recalcitrant. Illegal night-time | |
dumping of toxic compounds was commonplace; EPA regulations designed | |
to track dangerous substances from their creation to final disposal | |
proved easy to circumvent. Many large corporations making steel and | |
paper and chemicals found it cheaper to flout environmental laws and | |
pay the insignificant fines that resulted, rather than to clean up | |
their operations. Then, in the early eighties, Congress's support | |
of environmental protections waned--despite the fact that a | |
substantial majority of Americans remained stubbornly in strong | |
support of them, even at considerable financial cost. The EPA thus | |
gradually ceased to be the champion of a clean environment and | |
promoter of public health and welfare; instead, it became a | |
weathervane responding to which ways the winds of Washington pressure | |
blew. Good people continued to work within its programs, but their | |
efforts were more frequently countermanded by higher levels of the | |
administration--more concerned with budget-cutting or rewarding | |
powerful political contributors than with the death and destruction | |
being wreaked upon the people. | |
In some cases the EPA's lethargy became literally farcical. When it | |
finally got ready to issue hazardous-waste regulations (two and a | |
half years behind its Congressional deadline), an official ceremony | |
was planned to take place at a notorious chemical dump in New Jersey. | |
However, the dump exploded before the ceremony could be held, with | |
55-gallon drums hurled through the air amid a spectacular fire which | |
sent a cloud of dangerous fumes over adjacent counties. Release of | |
the rules was then blocked for some days by budget officials who | |
feared suits from the chemical industry. As if to remind mortal that | |
nature will not indefinitely allow herself to be mocked, the dump | |
exploded twice again in succeeding weeks. | |
In the usual Washington style, the agency acted mainly when compelled | |
to--usually through lawsuits brought by environmental groups, who | |
were able to prove it was derelict in its duties. At other times | |
only massive citizen outrage could bring action. Thus, in the | |
forested areas of the Northwest, women who lived in small towns | |
surrounded by timberland noticed a dismaying rise in the umber of | |
miscarriages, deformed fetuses, and birth defects, along with an | |
increase in various chronic kidney and other diseases. The women and | |
their doctors went to the media with horrifying photographs; | |
anti-spraying groups spread throughout the lumber country. Finally | |
EPA agreed to put a temporary ban on 2,4,5-T spraying. | |
However, the timber and chemical companies fought back ferociously. | |
One chemical firm argued that traces of toxic dioxin in the forests | |
did not come from 2,4,5-T at all, but from forest fires. In any | |
case, other sprays were available--perhaps safer, or perhaps more | |
dangerous. Ad so spray helicopters resumed their runs, and people's | |
suspicion of federal inaction settled into despair or defiance. | |
* * * | |
The city of Berkeley, California, had experimented in the seventies | |
with a plan for diverting through traffic around certain residential | |
neighborhoods. However, since the plan had not been accompanied by | |
improvements in bus services or other public transportation | |
facilities, it merely increased congestion and pollution on the major | |
arteries surrounding these lucky neighborhoods. As a result, the | |
city was bitterly polarized on the issue; the traffic barricades only | |
survived by a narrow referendum majority. And irate drivers | |
continued to vandalize the wooden barriers, sometimes even ramming | |
them. | |
However, as the years went by, the greater quiet, safety for | |
children, and fresher air within the barricaded neighborhoods was | |
widely noticed. More frequent bus service and cheaper taxi service | |
was gradually provided, and the growth of neighborhood shopping | |
centers cut down the amount of cross-town traffic. A network of | |
"slow streets" with bumps to slow cars to around 15 miles per hour | |
had been instituted, giving bicyclists and people using slow | |
vehicles (wheel chairs and little electric cars) safe routes through | |
the city. Nonetheless, residents of two Berkeley neighborhoods | |
petitioned the city council to turn their streets into narrow | |
cul-de-sacs where cars would park end-on to the curbs and would have | |
to share the street, at a walking pace, with pedestrians and | |
children. | |
The plan was closely modeled on successful Dutch practices but it was | |
rejected by the council, which feared a repetition of the barriers | |
controversy. Int he weeks that followed, the residents of one of the | |
neighborhoods fumed, argued, then plotted and prepared. And one fine | |
night they turned out en masse and, working all night with a great | |
burst of shared energy, built a masonry wall across one end of their | |
street, planted trees and bushes along it, removed all non-resident | |
cars and parked their own inside white stripes they painted on the | |
asphalt. When morning came they sat on their stoops with their | |
coffee or tea and waited. Some people went off to work. A few | |
visitors arrived and duly parked in the vacant spots. At about ten | |
o'clock a police car finally passed the walled-off end of the street, | |
paused, then drove on--the officer in it probably assumed that the | |
traffic department was trying some experiment he hadn't heard of yet. | |
In fact it was not until three days later, when a city streets | |
department truck crew happened to drive past, that the dastardly deed | |
was discovered. Police visited the block, and everyone from | |
greybeards to tiny tots told them that the wall had always been | |
there, and they had no idea who built it. The police, who in | |
Berkeley wear long mustaches and rather luxurious hair, were amused, | |
but duly made their reports. Court orders were filed; the street | |
department laid plans to bulldoze the wall. It was rumored that the | |
county D.A. was not at all amused, and planned prosecutions. | |
At this point the neighbors, who by now loved their protective wall | |
passionately, realized they had to wage a do-or-die political | |
struggle. They organized visits to the street by journalists, TV | |
crews, and block organizations from many other parts of the city. | |
They managed to get almost all the members of the city council to | |
come and take a look. They provided safety statistics and readings | |
of sound levels, and a poetic neighborhood petition signed by all the | |
residents. They made an elaborate and ingenious but legally hopeless | |
argument defending their "direct citizen volunteer construction plan" | |
as a response to city budgetary stinginess. | |
Most of the press and media coverage of the case was surprisingly | |
favorable, though editors worried over the precedent-setting danger | |
of citizens taking their neighborhood welfare into their own | |
hands--especially in the dark of night. "Vigilante Progress?" was | |
the headline of one ambivalent editorial. In the end the city | |
council, rather embarrassed by the whole affair, passed an ordinance | |
that gave official blessing to this particular street-closing and | |
also defined a procedure that residents of other streets could follow | |
in debating, designing, and building their own street patterns. The | |
D.A. dropped plans for prosecution, and to celebrate this | |
announcement the neighbors--this time acting on strictly legal | |
lines--secured a proper city permit and closed their street entirely | |
for a Sunday afternoon block party. Small children added flowers to | |
the planting box that ran along the top of the new wall. Bigger | |
children dug holes for more trees, and the adults beamed at each | |
other and lifted each other off the ground in great bear-hugs, and | |
joked about renaming it "Wall Street." | |
* * * | |
Like persons, societies are sometimes seized by unconscious suicidal | |
impulses which remain inexplicable to outsiders. Individuals may | |
drive recklessly or drink or smoke too much; societies may become | |
addicted to impressive but precarious technologies which actually | |
contribute to friction and ultimate social breakdown. Sooner or | |
later, societies, like individuals, must seek to replace such | |
destructive behavior patterns with constructive ones--or they will | |
die. | |
An example is close at hand. In the fifties and sixties the United | |
States indulged in persistently self-destructive behavior regarding | |
its transportation system. Inheriting an extensive, efficient (and | |
rapacious) railroad industry, the country proceeded to displace it by | |
a truck-based freight industry and airplane- and automobile-based | |
passenger moving industries--all heavily subsidized from the public | |
treasury. | |
Commonsense might have pointed out that railroads require only about | |
a fourth of the fuel required, ton for ton and mile for mile, by | |
trucks. However, energy was then too cheap to be a determining | |
factor, and through a complex combination of political pressures the | |
highway and air lobbies defeated the railroad lobby for government | |
favor. In the decades following World War II, railroads had to | |
maintain their tracks and stations at their own expense, while $525 | |
billion of federal, state, and local funds were spent on highways and | |
streets, $23 billion on dredging and locks for barges, and $50 | |
billion on air transportation facilities. | |
The resulting decay of rail transport seemed relatively painless at | |
the time. The slow rise of one industry and the decline of another | |
does not normally cause great anguish to the public--although, in | |
this case, a small but vocal group protested the strangulation of | |
passenger train service. However, without realizing it, the general | |
public was in fact paying heavily for this particular change. The | |
true total shipping costs of many goods were several times higher on | |
the highway system than they would have been for shipping by rail; | |
but the part of these costs met by government subsidies was paid | |
indirectly and invisibly in taxes rather than in higher retail | |
prices. | |
By the late seventies, when rising energy costs began to make it | |
plain that the oil-dependent trucking system was a major contributor | |
to the nation's energy problem, the railroads had deteriorated in | |
many parts of the country almost to a disaster level. (The roadbed | |
was so bad in places that trains had to move at a walker's pace.) | |
Even determined efforts to rebuild the rail system would take many | |
years--while the enormous drain put on the economy by the need to | |
purchase foreign oil would continue. | |
Worse still, while double-track railway decently maintained could | |
carry the traffic of a 20-lane superhighway, the once-proud | |
interstates were proving so vulnerable to the pounding of trucks that | |
further massive capital subsidies would be required to keep them in | |
passable shape, since truck taxes came nowhere near the sums needed. | |
(A single truck caused 10,000 times the wear on a highway that a | |
passenger car did.) | |
Thus decisions made on the basis of short-term economic and political | |
calculations int he energy-flush earlier years have returned in later | |
times to haunt us, the children of their makers, with increased costs | |
for every item of merchandise that moves in the American economy, | |
and every plane trip. ... | |
* * * | |
As the first European colonists landed on the coast of North America | |
they faced a fast, forbidding sea of trees stretching from the | |
Atlantic beaches all the way to the Great Plains. The settlers | |
hacked at these trees in a frenzy. They chopped them down to make | |
room for agricultural plantings; they sawed them up for lumber to | |
build houses and piers and even roads. They burned them to stay | |
warm. But they also cleared the land simply because trees | |
constituted the hateful wilderness which they felt it was their | |
God-given mission to subdue. Only in the Northwest, whose immense | |
stands of virgin timber were isolated from Eastern markets, did | |
sections of the original forest survive; and after the second World | |
War these too fell rapidly to the chainsaws of the logging companies. | |
The original forest floors were rich reservoirs of nutrients, | |
accumulated by the leaf and twig droppings and the rotted trunks of | |
hundreds of generations of trees. The forest floor was tunneled by | |
worms and insect larvae, penetrated by roots, inhabited by | |
microorganisms busily decomposing materials that would soon be | |
recomposed into the next cycle of growth. The thick tree and | |
undergrowth cover gentled the impact of even the heaviest storms, so | |
that rainwater percolated into the earth instead of running off, and | |
creeks ran steadily and clear year round. | |
Once the trees were chopped down, the immense fertility they had | |
created could be exploited. Farms spread throughout the areas that | |
had enough rainfall to support crops, with only small woodlots as | |
remainders of what had been. Year after year, in all the vast | |
farmland stretching from Boston to Colorado, farmers extracted from | |
the earth the richness that the trees (or, father west, grasses) had | |
built up. Driven by market forces controlled by speculators in the | |
cities, they abandoned the ancient peasant wisdom of crop rotation | |
and mixed farming; they became corn farmers or wheat farmers, | |
dependent on the fluctuations of international markets. They no | |
longer planted ground-holding legumes to replenish the soil's | |
nitrogen, but turn3ed to chemical fertilizers. Seventy percent of | |
available agricultural land was devoted to the production of grain | |
for meat animals. Professional agricultural experts began to speak | |
of "factory farms." | |
Once the soil was denuded of its tree cover, erosion had set in. | |
Where there was heavy rainfall, as in the South, poverty-stricken | |
tenant farmers were driven to such desperate practices that gully | |
erosion sometimes consumed half a farm's acreage. In the dry Plains | |
area, grasslands plowed up for wheat simply blew away in dry years, | |
leaving the desolation of the Dust Bowl. | |
Gradually, most farmers had learned to plow with the contour of the | |
land, to plant windbreak trees, to sow soil-holding crops. | |
Nonetheless, even in years of benign climate and with the best | |
possible farming methods, topsoil losses through wind and water | |
erosion greatly exceeded soil build-up through organic processes. | |
From each row in each field, in all the thousands of fields making up | |
the watersheds of the nation, rivulets of rain carried soil particles | |
to the ditches and creeks and rivers, which became brown with the | |
soil suspended in them. The land lost the absorbency it had had when | |
forested, so run-off became rapid and great floods were common. In | |
dry seasons, wind scoured the fields, blowing loose soil into the | |
gullies. By the seventies, for each bushel of corn grown in Iowa, | |
six bushels of soil eroded away; in eastern Washington, 20 pounds of | |
topsoil were lost for every pound of wheat produced. Even in | |
well-tended farm country such as Wisconsin, about eight tons of | |
topsoil were being lost from each acre each year, and only about four | |
tons regenerated. The national average net loss was almost nine tons | |
per acre. Three million acres of cropland per year were being lost | |
to highways, factories, subdivisions, but the equivalent of another | |
three million was blowing and washing away. | |
In the great farm belts of America, vast tracts of land were worked | |
by machines which consumed large quantities of petroleum fuel. | |
Further expenditures of costly energy were made in food processing, | |
packaging, and distribution. Indeed, for every calorie of food | |
energy consumed, more than one calorie of fossil fuel energy was | |
being expended in producing and delivering it. The overall energy | |
budget of American agriculture had thus begun to show a net loss. | |
Paradoxically, the situation would have been improved if human beings | |
or their livestock could eat oil directly--and in fact during the | |
sixties, when oil was very cheap, researchers had tried to develop | |
bacteria what ate oil and could then be made into porridge or cattle | |
feed. | |
However, most people preferred to believe that the natural abundance | |
of the American soil was eternal. After all, corporate advertising | |
told them that the ingenuity of American agribusiness could control | |
nature and extract unimagined productivity from the land. The | |
underlying energy consumption of the system remained invisible, | |
except in steadily rising prices for foodstuffs. Few Americans would | |
have relished the idea that their food supply was in reality | |
critically dependent on oil wells in feudal countries half a world | |
away, prey to sudden revolutions and disruption. The point at which | |
energy outlays would no longer be able to make up for declining soil | |
fertility came ever nearer. But the prospect of food shortages in | |
America seemed as remote as the prospect of gas shortages had seemed | |
a decade earlier. | |
* * * | |
From the onset of the Industrial Revolution, it had been an article | |
of faith that there were always economies in greater scale: if a | |
factory could be doubled in size, it could turn out more than twice | |
as many goods and return more than twice the profits. This belief led | |
to ever increasing size in corporate enterprises, and it was applied, | |
by powerful analogy, to every aspect of life. The bigger a | |
power-generating station, the better. The bigger a steamship, the | |
better. The bigger a city, the better. | |
This tendency, however, came to stand in fundamental opposition to | |
another principle, which might be called the irreducibility of error. | |
Careful design of human-machine "interfaces" such as control panels | |
could reduce human errors, especially if operators were carefully | |
trained and frequently tested. But, surprising though it might seem | |
in the abstract, errors could never be eliminated entirely. IT was | |
never entirely possible to foresee all possible breakdowns. | |
Moreover, the human mind was more complexly flexible than any | |
computer; evolution of the human mind had equipped it to deal with | |
rapidly changing situations that required instinctive judgment and | |
the balancing of uncertain risks, but the very qualities of broad | |
adaptability that gave it survival potential also made it more | |
erratic than simpler organisms. And no machine remained reliable | |
forever. The strongest metals in the end developed fatigue; | |
insulation broke down; even computers aged and developed electronic | |
failures or mysterious bugs in their complex programs. | |
The establishment of extremely dangerous large technologies, such as | |
those of nuclear warfare or nuclear plants or those involving the | |
production of immensely toxic chemicals like dioxin, thus brought the | |
possibility of large-scale disasters to human populations into | |
juxtaposition with the unavoidability of error. Clever military | |
designers inserted fail-safe devices into command and control | |
systems, and they surrounded bomb trigger mechanisms with multiple | |
layers of protective devices. Their industrial counterparts | |
interposed computer links between human operators and reactor cores, | |
wrote ever more complex programs, provided more warning bells, left | |
fewer human over-rule possibilities. | |
Nonetheless, both human and machine error persists. A pilot of 20 | |
years' experience, landing with ample ground control contact on a | |
clear day, puts an airliner down in the middle of San Francisco Bay. | |
Operators of a nuclear plant forget that certain valves have been left | |
open, a partial core meltdown occurs, a hundred thousand people must | |
be evacuated. A bomber inexplicably drops a hydrogen bomb by | |
accident; five of the bomb's six safety devices fail, and only the | |
sixth prevents the destruction of much of North Carolina. | |
Under such circumstances, the art of risk assessment becomes | |
metaphysical. Professional insurance staticians opt out of these | |
games, knowing that the risks are not amenable to normal actuarial | |
analysis. Nonetheless, sophisticated calculations are made by eminent | |
scientific committees, and then revised and re-revised. They provide | |
estimates of the likelihood of irreparable catastrophic | |
events--making a major American city uninhabitable, for instance, or | |
mistakenly believing a Russian missile attack was in progress and | |
responding by devastating the entire Northern Hemisphere. | |
The risks in such calculations always turn out to be impressively | |
small, indeed minute--smaller by far than the risk the ordinary | |
citizen takes in crossing town by car. However, ordinary citizens do | |
not possess the statistical refinement needed to evaluate a risk | |
expressed as .000001% And so the normal political process, which | |
depends upon the judgment of ordinary citizens fitfully informed by | |
the news media and by a few conscientious scientists, cannot come to | |
terms with such risks. | |
It is only when a major disaster occurs, as in the explosion that | |
scattered dioxin over the town of Seveso in Italy, or a near-disaster | |
such as the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in Pennsylvania, that | |
the political process re-exerts control over technology. Then the | |
trend toward ever greater scale may be checked or even reversed; | |
people demand security against super-catastrophic risks even at the | |
cost of more frequent smaller risks. | |
In the United States as in elsewhere in the world, people began to | |
discover that nuclear installations suffered far more "minor" | |
accidents than had been publicly revealed. Moreover, as existing | |
nuclear plants aged, many experts placed the risk of further | |
Three-Mile-Island type accidents at near certainty over a range of | |
ten years or so. The chances of worse accidents--seriously | |
contaminating a few miles around a plant, with large but perhaps | |
acceptable damage to property and some lives lost through radiation | |
exposure--still seemed bearable to some. but the risks of a meltdown | |
accident, which would render several counties uninhabitable, perhaps | |
for generations, and which directly or indirectly caused tens of | |
thousands of deaths, might be statistically very small and yet very | |
politically and morally insupportable. | |
In the end, thus, commonsense reasserted itself over arcane | |
statistics. People decided that they would rather expose themselves | |
to a 1% chance of a solar boiler blowing up and killing three people | |
than the .00001% chance of a nuclear meltdown. ... | |
author: Callenbach, Ernest | |
detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Ecotopia_Emerging | |
LOC: PS3553.A424 E3 | |
tags: book,fiction | |
title: Ecotopia Emerging | |
# Tags | |
book | |
fiction |