Ecotopia 1, Short (1) PDF

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, t...

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,  ANIMALITY and/as SEX+BODY POSITIVITY: “Ecotopians, both male and female, have a secure sense of themselves as animals. At the Cove they lie about utterly relaxed … flopped down in sunny spots on little rugs or mats, almost like a bunch of cats. They stretch, rearrange themselves … and just seem to enjoy their bodies immensely. Nor do they keep this to themselves, particularly—I’ve several times walked in on people making love, who didn’t seem much embarrassed or annoyed…I find myself envying this comfortableness in their  biological GENDER, beings.” SEXUALITY (30) + POWER “According to him, women in Ecotopia have totally escaped the dependent roles they still tend to play with us. Not that they domineer over men—but they exercise power in work and relationships just as men do. Above all, they don’t have to manipulate men: the Survivalist Party, and social developments generally, have arranged the society so that women’s objective situation is equal to men’s. Thus people can be just people, without our symbolic loading on sex roles. (I notice, however, that Ecotopian women still seem to me feminine, with a relaxed air of their biological attractiveness, and even fertility, though I don’t see how they combine this with their heavy responsibilities and hard Ecotopian SEXUAL EXPERIENCES with MARISSA (TMI) “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 … 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. Will not.” (53) “[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 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  Key ideas: Politics, Society, Democracy “SOCIAL COST” + “STABLE-STATE” political economy “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 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