Ecotopia 1 + 2.pptx PDF

POP QUIZ: Write down one specific Ecotopian idea, invention, or societal feature that you find interesting or appealing and that was not discussed in Tuesday’s lecture. Ecotopia, Lecture 2: INTEGRATION / integrity / Making Whole  Re-Unification of Psychic, Political, Economic, and Ecological...

POP QUIZ: Write down one specific Ecotopian idea, invention, or societal feature that you find interesting or appealing and that was not discussed in Tuesday’s lecture. Ecotopia, Lecture 2: INTEGRATION / integrity / Making Whole  Re-Unification of Psychic, Political, Economic, and Ecological Realms  … and RACE (and SEX) SEGREGATION OUR FIRST PURPOSEFULLY ECOLOGICAL UTOPIA … What do “ecology” and “nature” mean here? Some (by now) expected ecological ideas: - Recycling, focus on the elimination or re-incorporation of waste - Minimizing/eliminating pollution, toxicity, pesticides, radiation {global climate change not yet in focus - Curtailment of human population, settlement, and impacts on other species - Appreciation/respect/knowledge of other species (up to the point of “tree worship”) - Use of renewable materials, emphasis on DIY, handicraft, mending, and re-use - Mass public transit, not cars, electric not fuel-burning vehicles - Re-wilding (razing, abandoning and returning to “nature” of once-settled sites, 62), return of older agriculture and ranching practices, reversion of some to forest “wilderness status,” emphasis on sustainable forestry, 58 - Inspiration (however dubious) from First Nations; “Many Ecotopians sentimental about Indians …envy the Indians their lost natural place in the American wilderness. Keep hearing references to what Indians would or wouldn’t do in a given situation” (29)  EYE CONTACT: SOME UNEXPECTED EMPHASES: the (desired) Frankness/honesty/ cultural and psychological effects of sincerity ecological life, aka, the new “naturalness” of ≠ artifice, shame, guardedness Ecotopian citizens: And their manners are even more unsettling. On the streets there are electrical moments when women stare me directly in the EMOTIONALISM eyes; so far I’ve looked away, but what would happen if I held ≠ repression, rationality, contact? People seem to be very loose and playful with each politeness other, as if they had endless time on their hands to explore whatever possibilities might come up. There’s none of the implicit PERSONALIZATION threat of open criminal violence that pervades our public space, ≠ anonymity, but there is an awful lot of strong emotion, willfully expressed! compartmentalization The peace of the train ride was broken several times by shouted arguments or insults; people have an insolent kind of curiousity TIME to PLAY that often leads to tiffs. It's as if they have lost the sense of ≠ Capitalist productivity, anonymity which enables us to live together in large numbers. efficiency You can’t, therefore, approach an Ecotopian functionary as we do. WORK-LIFE, JOB-PERSON, The Ecotopian at the train ticket window simply wouldn’t tolerate PERSONAL-PROFESSIONAL being spoken to in my usual way—he asked me what I thought he spheres UNIFIED was, a ticket-dispensing machine? In fact, he won’t give you the ticket unless you deal with the whole person, and he insists on INTERACTION b/tw PEOPLE,  1. Integration (making whole) on the level of the novel’s form, structure, genre EDITORS’ EPILOGUE Form of the book: The foregoing text has been printed from the notebook and Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William news stories written by William Weston during his trip to Weston re-integrates or synthesizes … Ecotopia. Despite the questionable or controversial nature of some of the notebook entries, we have respected Weston’s wishes in keeping the text just as he wrote it. DIARY and REPORTAGE: Readers may also be interested in the following note, PRIVATE SPHERE – PUBLIC SPHERE which was enclosed with the notebook, when it arrived at the Times-Post offices, addressed to the editor-in-chief. PERSONAL LIFE – PROFESSIONAL LIFE Dear Max— PSYCHOLOGICAL – SOCIAL/POLITICAL You told me to go ahead and write the whole story, but I INDIVIDUAL – COLLECTIVE realized, once I had gotten into it, that I couldn’t really do that. So I am sending you my notebook, even though I’m SUBJECTIVITY – OBJECTIVITY not sure what, if anything, you can do with it. As far as I’m concerned, you can pass it around the office, put it in the PROCESS - PRODUCT archives, or print it. (Intact or not at all, please.) I’ve decided not to come back, Max. You’ll understand why from the notebook. But thank you for sending me on this assignment, when neither you nor I knew where it might lead. It led me home. “I want to try out some different kinds of writing” (166) --WILL  2. Integration of Work with Life Drives: Labor, Leisure/Play, Art LEISURE. “The more I have discovered about Ecotopian work habits, the more amazed I am that their system functions at all. It is not only that they have adopted a 20-hour week; you can’t even tell when an Ecotopian is working, and when he is at leisure. During an important discussion in a government office, suddenly everybody will decide to go to the sauna bath … And it is also true that even in the sauna our discussion continued, on a more personal level, which turned out to be quite delightful” (158-159). ART-MAKING. “Oddly enough, the avidity with which almost all Ecotopians pursue some kind of artwork actually adds to the difficulty of achieving success as an artist … Apparently, if art is something everybody does, a Picasso or a Van Gogh no longer seem quite so special” (134). “The effects of this attitude can be seen not only in the high level of beauty attained by craft products—pottery, weaving, jewelry, and so on—but also in the quality of Ecotopian furniture, utensils, and house decorations” (135) MENTAL & MANUAL LABOR. “Incidentally, many rather intellectual people seem to be members of the ordinary factory and farm work force …partly due to a deliberate policy which requires students to alternate a year of work with each year of study … not only is the students’ education prolonged, but their ideological influence is responsible for many of the new policies that prevail in Ecotopian enterprises” [for example, workers’ ownership/control] (159)  3. Integration of Will in Ecotopia: Biology, Emotion, Embodiment, Presence  Participation + injury in the “war game” / “blood” initiation into Ecotopian masculinity: “Marissa’s attitude toward me has somehow changed …it feels good to be treated as less of a foreigner by her, even in jokes: ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘now you have a little Ecotopian blood in your veins!’ (because of the transfusion during my operation.” (140)  Being chosen as a “mate” after deciding to stay … “ ‘Good place to conceive a child,’ she said, glancing around at the oak. But she wouldn’t tell me whether she was in her fertile period, or still had her loop in. ‘It’s my body’ was all she would say. Knowing the kind of commitment she feels to family and the continuity of generations, the idea was profoundly scary—yet I seem ready for it.” (165)  Learning to feel: “This country has certainly taught me to cry, and for some reason it feels good, as if it is not only my tear ducts that have been opened up” (146)  Learning that feelings – including happiness – exist in complexity and contradiction: “I’m not used to being made happy when I’m supposed to be suffering!” (140, holistic medicine)  “Breakthrough” in the baths: “I lost all sense of horizon, of place—all sense of everything except the steady gurgling of the water coming up to me from deep inside the warm earth. I have no idea how long I remained in that state, but suddenly I heard my own voice saying, ‘I am going to stay in Ecotopia!’- startlingly loud and clear.” (164) 4. Integration of all the costs, consequences, and phases into Social Policy “SOCIAL COST” + “STABLE-STATE” political economy Epigraph “In nature, no organic substance is synthesized unless there is provision for its degradation; recycling is enforced” – Barry Commoner “When I asked how the enormous expenses of the [transit] system had been financed, my companions laughed … [one of them] argued that the total social cost per mile on their trains was less than that for air transport at any distance under a thousand miles.” (8) “They have a way of introducing ‘social costs’ into their calculations which inevitably involves a certain amount of optimistic guesswork. It would be interesting to confront such informants with one of the hard-headed experts from our auto or highway industries—who would, of course, be horrified by the Ecotopians’ abolition of cars.” (13) “I questioned him about the economic drawbacks of such a system [of small-scale, free range agriculture] … ‘On the contrary, he replied,’ our system is considerably cheaper than yours, if we add in all the costs. Many of your costs are ignored, or passed on through subterfuge to posterity or the general public. We on the other hand must acknowledge all costs. Otherwise we could not hope to achieve the stable-state life systems which are our fundamental ecological and political goal. If, for instance, we had continued your practice of ‘free’ disposal of wastes in watercourses, sooner or later somebody else would have had to calculate (and 5. That which will not be integrated: Racial Separatism / “self-segregation” in Ecotopia (98-101, 151-2) “There are surprisingly few dark-skinned faces “Life within the black territories, “Black bands play a music on San Francisco streets, and I have now judging by my limited with roots in the jazz and learned why. After Independence, the principle of secession became a lively factor in observations, has more hold-overs blues we know from Ecotopian life … The black population, whose from pre-Independence days than Chicago and New York, economic deprivation under white control had Ecotopia as a whole. … ‘We’re and Carribbean music. made it increasingly nationalist and separatist still making up for lost time,’ one Bands from Spanish even before Independence, apparently joined stylish black man put it to me” backgrounds play with an in the general exultation when the great break (99) obvious Latin American with Washington came. But in the ghettoes of influence. White bands Oakland and San Francisco—having been “This admission that the races tend to play music that strangled by the white suburbs earlier, the black population now wanted to control their cannot live in harmony is surely sounds to me something own territory. After a long and bitter political one of the most disheartening like Balinese gamelan struggle, the black areas (and also Chinatown developments in all of ecotopia, orchestras—an intricate, in San Francisco) were officially designated as and it clouds the future of our cerebral, yet driving jazz, city-states within Ecotopia. They had their nation as well.” (101) with many homemade own city governments, levied the usual taxes, drums and gongs had their own police and courts, their own prominent in it… The one industries, and their own farms … In fact they Black contributions to dominant characteristic of possessed all the attributes of tiny independent Ecotopia: arts & culture, all such musical styles, countries …except for the carrying on of foreign relations.” (98) Prison reform/penology, however, is a strong dance “people-centered” beat.” (134) architecture (99)  “Under Ecotopian ideas, the era of great nation “In my earlier column I described the city-states that have, in states, with their promise of one ultimate world- effect, themselves seceded within Ecotopia. There is talk state, would fade away... mankind would fly apart currently of formalizing the Spanish-speaking and Japanese into small, culturally homogenous groupings.” communities of San Francisco … Jewish, American Indian, and (151) other minorities all contain militants who desire a greater autonomy for their peoples.” (151) “Ecotopians argue that such separatism is desirable on ecological as well as cultural “It is still the American ideal that all men and women should grounds–that a small regional society is can obtain equal protection from the law and have equal status as exploit its ‘niche’ in the world biosystem more citizens of one great and powerful nation. The Ecotopian subtly and richly and efficiently (and of course principle of secession denies this hope and this faith…[it] leads less destructively) than have the superpowers. This away from the former greatness of America, unified in spirit seems to me, however, a dubiously fetishistic ‘from sea to shining sea,’ toward a balkanized continent – a decentralism … [that] would seem to risk welter of small, second-class nations, each with its own petty throwing the baby of civilization itself out with cultural differentiations. Instead of continuing the long march the polluted bathwater. If we wish to achieve better toward one world of peace and freedom, to which American has living conditions for ourselves and our descendants, dedicated itself on the battlefields of Korea, Vietnam, and Brazil surely the wiser utilization of the methods we know best (not to mention our own Civil War), the Ecotopians propose is the only way to accomplish it. only separatism, quietism, a reversion toward the two bit principalities of medieval Europe, or perhaps even the tribalism (June 20) Blah, blah, blah. Can hardly bear to of the jungle.” (151) reread that last column. They’ll probably love it in New York. Real ‘objective’ pseudo-think, trying to come to conclusions at any cost...” (152)  ANIMALITY and/as SEX+BODY POSITIVITY: “Ecotopians, both male and female, have a secure sense of Rationale for male-only themselves as animals. At the Cove they lie about utterly War Games: “it was relaxed … flopped down in sunny spots on little rugs or essential to develop some mats, almost like a bunch of cats. They stretch, rearrange kind of open civic themselves … and just seem to enjoy their bodies expression for the immensely. Nor do they keep this to themselves, physical competitiveness particularly—I’ve several times walked in on people that seemed to be making love, who didn’t seem much embarrassed or inherent in man’s annoyed…I find myself envying this comfortableness in biological programming—  GENDER, their SEXUALITY biological + POWER beings.” (30) and otherwise came out “According to him, women in Ecotopia have totally escaped the in perverse forms, like dependent roles they still tend to play with us. Not that they war.” (74) domineer over men—but they exercise power in work and relationships just as men do. Above all, they don’t have to “Before our feminist manipulate men: the Survivalist Party, and social developments militants leap on this generally, have arranged the society so that women’s objective point, they should know situation is equal to men’s. Thus people can be just people, that … Ecotopians prefer without our symbolic loading on sex roles. (I notice, however, to focus women’s that Ecotopian women still seem to me feminine, with a relaxed air competitiveness in other of their biological attractiveness, and even fertility, though I don’t ways, through organizing see how they combine this with their heavy responsibilities and hard work—at which women work. And men, though they express feelings more openly than are believed to excel— First Ecotopian SEXUAL EXPERIENCES with MARISSA (TMI) Early Context: “Have the awful suspicion that every woman around me is secretly, constantly fucking and that I could have them if only I knew the password – but I don’t.” (33) “What we do sexually is different from anything that has ever happened to me.” {and he’ll tell you more than you ever wanted to know … pp. 52-54 Springing in after her, I found myself in some kind of shrine. She was lying there on a bed of needles, taking deep, gasping breaths. Dimly visible, suspended on the charred inside of the tree, were charms and pendants made of bone and teeth and feathers, gleaming polished stones. It was as if I was being sucked into a tree, into some powerful spirit, and I fell on her as if I were falling freely through the soft air from a great height, through darkness, my reportorial self floating away. We must have made love for hours. Cannot describe. “[Marissa] seemed to me a ravishing presence in a way I have never before encountered. Not exactly beautiful, at least by my usual standards. But sometimes, when she looks at me, my hair stands up as if I’m confronting a creature who’s wild and incomprehensible, animal and human at once” (52-53)” “Marissa’s got positively hypnotic powers: when she’s here I lose track of time, obligations, my American preconceptions. She exists in a contagious state of immediate consciousness. Somewhere far back in her head must be the forest camp, her responsibilities there, her plans to return tomorrow. But she seems to be able to turn them absolutely off and just be. She seems capable of anything—she’s the freest and least- anxious person I’ve ever known. To the extent I can get in on this, I begin to feel high and a little strange, as if I was on some kind of drug. I keep thinking she’s like a wild animal: of course she responds to the influences and constraints of the other animals around (me included) but these are not inside her head somehow. She’s highly unpredictable, moody, changeable Remarked to Linda that their intimate methods of treatment could sometimes pose problems for the nurses. She was irritated by my attitude. ‘First,’ she said, ‘every treatment is unique. Second, there is something in every person to value and love’ (here she smiled) ‘even in a dumb chauvinist ugly American like you. Third, nurses are also persons, and we have control over what we do or don’t do. Do you think I’m you’re slave or something?’ (145) DISCUSSION QUESTION: pp. 130-132 provides an Ecotopian re-imagining of U.C. Berkeley. How does this compare to your own education? Which version of Cal would you choose? SEXUALITY, REPRODUCTIVE FREEDOMS, and the FAMILY 64 – “the nuclear family as we know it is rapidly disappearing”; mostly 20- person intergenerational groups of mixed biological and chosen kin, often organized around child-rearing, though some youthful childless “families” centered around professions or other endeavors (65) 65 “Generally there are more or less permanent heterosexual couples involved – though both male and female homosexual couples also exist, and I gather that same-sex relationships pose less of a problem psychologically than they do with us.” 63 “The use of contraceptive devices now seems universal. (They are all, incidentally, female-controlled; there is no ‘male pill’ here).” 64. “In many such families not only eating and household duties are shared, but also the raising of children—in which men and women seem to participate equally as far as time spent is concerned, but within a strange power context. Ecotopian life is strikingly equalitarian in general – women hold responsible jobs, receive equal pay, and of course they also control the Survivalist Party. The fact that they also exercise absolute control over their own bodies means that they openly exert a power which in other societies is covert or nonexistent: the right to select the fathers of their children. ‘No Ecotopian woman ever bears a child by a man she has not freely chosen,’ I was told sternly. And in the nurturing of GROUP 1: Celeste Alfaro Aguilar, Emery Arias, Ashley Beal, Jissel Camacho, Ashley Campbell, David Cease, Crystal Chavez Barragan, Sebastian Colie, Eden Collier, Catherine Conley, Kate Corlew GROUP 2: Timothy Croucher, Lily Dahlgren, Elizabeth Dally, Michelle Delgado, Tanya Dhindsa, Nathan Dilger, Andre Duremdes, Amy Eliassieh, Sam Gebb, Emma Godfried, Tommy Golin GROUP 3: Morgan Gonzalez, Jayla Greenberg, Aoife Haines, Yvette Hernandez, Robyn Hua, Landon Jansen, Ozzie Juaregui, Luke Joseph, Gayana Karapetyan, Zoe Kessler GROUP 4: Min Kim, Ellla Kirshbaum, Allie Koski, Eloiese Krause, Holt Larkin, Kaiulani Larson, Gabby Le, Cindy Li, Luce Lopez-Reyes, Jules Magistrado, Sidrah Manjra GROUP 5: Danielus Maslovskis, Laila Mendiola, Lilly Mennealy, Rowan Messier, Tiara Nanayakkara, Tricia Nguyen, David Oimon, Sara Olson, Ashley Orellana Rivas, Alexa Padilla GROUP 6: Joanne Park, Joanne Park, Daniel Payan-Siegrist, Diana Piper, Anthony Pritchett, Brenda Quintero, Julian Ramirez, Becca Reiner, Ella Rembaum, Precious Rios, Alyssa Rivera GROUP 7: Claire Roach, Calvin San, Drew Shinozaki, Maya Sholin, Gracie Smith, Raja Yasaswini Sriramoju, Dzian Tran, Carli Trillo, Natalia Trounce, Brianna Vasquez, Petra (Elle) Volpe GROUP 8: Kat Walser, Sara Warford-Crow, Eldon Whitehead, Madeline Wickliff, Millie Wright, Courtney Yee, Tiffany Yuan, Jiayang Zhang, Billy Zheng, Loulou Ziegler JMW Turner, St. Gothard’s Pass (1803-4) Edward Burtynsky, Iberia Quarries #3, Paradais, Portugal, 2006 J.M.W. Turner, Passage of the St. Gothard, 1804Edward Burtynsky, E.L. Smith Quarry,  Friedrich, Sea of Ice, 1823-4 Shipbreaking, Chittagong, Bangladesh, 2000 Densified Oil Drums, Hamilton, Ontario, 1997 Makrana Marble Quarry, Rajasthan, India, 2000 DISCUSSION QUESTION: How does Major Jackson’s “Pest,” or Gerald Barrax, Sr.’s “To Waste at Trees” present an alternative to “sublime”/Romantic Nature and the troubled concept of “wilderness”? LET’S PREPARE … THE UTOPIAN WORLDS’ FAIR Create groups of 10-11 people (we need 8 groups total) 1) Write down all your names on a sheet of paper for the Professor 2) Exchange contact info yourselves 3) Begin to brainstorm a Utopia. What might be its core principle or radical/absurd provocation? 4) Crystallize the values of your society in a single ritual, festival, or event that you could perform for Outsiders, allowing them to see the essence of your Utopia/Social Dream. 5) Consider how each of you can contribute to the performance. Roles include: Music, song, sound design  Food/cooking Set design, scenography  Animation/videography Lighting  Acting (many social roles to perform) Iconography (emblems, insignia)  Scriptwriting, dialogue Costumes  Frame narrative, metafictional elements