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# 2025-04-16 - 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 Ecotopia | |
among other works, founded and edited the internationally known | |
journal Film Quarterly. He died at 83 on April 16th [2012], leaving | |
behind this document on his computer. | |
tags: article,collapse,manifesto | |
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