# 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
# Tags
DIR article
DIR collapse
DIR manifesto