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# 2023-06-03 - Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach
(IMG) Ecotopia by Mark Harrison
A friend gave me this book. It was first published in 1975.
This book reminded me of The Fifth Sacred Thing.
(DIR) The Fifth Sacred Thing
I was a little surprised by some of the ideas presented in the book.
For example, the author talks about Ecotopians avoiding sugar in
their cooking. I did not think the public was aware of sugar as a
health risk in 1975. I suppose Weston A. Price wrote a book about
it in 1939.
(TXT) Weston A. Price
Below are quotes with my notes within square brackets.
-----
Although the streets still have an American look, it is annoyingly
difficult to identify things in Ecotopia. Only very small signs are
permitted on the fronts of buildings; street signs are few and hard
to spot, mainly attached to buildings on corners.
[Reminds me of my visit to a Pueblo where there were no street signs
at all.
It became clear early on that this book is about an anarchist Utopia
set in a seceded west coast USA. They are car-free, 420-friendly,
and True Believers in the power of composting and humanure.
]
Ecotopians [are] a little vague about time, I notice--few wear
watches, and they pay more attention to things like sunrise and
sunset or the tides than to actual hour time.
[All that 420 messes with the perception of time and can make people
flaky.]
At the same time you [as a couple] don't have a group of people to
live with, to support you emotionally, to keep your collective life
going on actively and strongly while you're apart. ... We don't think
that commitment is something you go off and do by yourselves, just
the two of you. It has to have a structure, social surroundings you
can rely on.
Ecotopian schools, with their looser scheduling (and better climate)
give children far more outdoor time than ours. So the youngsters
have a high level of physical activity throughout their school years.
Ecotopians claim to have sifted through modern technology and
rejected huge tracts of it, because of its ecological harmfulness.
However, despite this general technological austerity, they employ
video devices even more extensively than we do. Feeling that they
should transport their bodies only when it's a pleasure, they seldom
travel "on business" in our manner. Instead, they tend to transact
business by using their picturephones.
[Sounds like smartphones, video conferencing, tele-commuting, and
remote work.]
Usually on my trips I feel pretty frustrated sexually after a couple
of days and try to get taken care of, somehow or other. I am still
totally puzzled why these independent Ecotopian women don't react to
my signals.
[Sounds awfully dependent to me.]
The deadly novelty introduced into this accepted train of thought by
a few Ecotopian militants was to spread the point of view that
economic disaster was not identical with survival disaster for
persons--and that, in particular, a financial panic could be turned
to advantage if the new nation could be organized to devote its real
resources of energy, knowledge, skills, and materials to the basic
necessities of survival. If that were done, even a catastrophic
decline in the GNP (which was, in their opinion, largely composed of
wasteful activity anyway) might prove politically useful.
-----
"When I have a job to do I like to get it over with. What's wrong
with a little efficiency?"
"A little goes a long way, Will," Lorna said. "Our point of view is
that if something's worth doing, it ought to be done in a way that's
enjoyable--otherwise it can't really be worth doing."
"Then how does anything get done?" I asked, exasperatedly.
"It is the way we do it," said Bert. "Almost anything can be, if you
keep your eye on the process and not on the goal."
-----
It was only over a great deal of resistance that a radical idea such
as ritual warfare had become legally practicable, even with the
ingenuity of the best lawyers. But its advocates had persisted,
convinced as they were that it was essential to develop some kind of
open civic expression for the physical competitiveness that seemed to
be inherent in [humanity's] biological programming--and otherwise
came out in perverse forms, like war.
Standardization is carried amazingly far in the core stores.
Preserved foods come in only three sizes of containers...
For the newspapers, which are even smaller than our tabloids, are
actually sold through electronic print-out terminals in the street
kiosks, in libraries, and at other points; and these terminals are
connected to central computer banks, where facilities are "rented" by
the publications.
[In other words, cloud-based Internet print-on-demand.]
In fact if Crick School, which I visited, is any example, Ecotopian
schools look more like farms than anything else. An Ecotopian
teacher replied to this observation, "Well, that's because we've
crossed over into the age of biology. Your school system is still
physics-dominated. That's the reason for all the prison atmosphere.
You can't allow things to GROW there."
[The name Crick School is in honor of Francis Crick, co-discoverer of
the structure of DNA.]
... children in Ecotopian schools literally spend at least two hours
a day actually working. ... The system is intended to teach children
that work is a part of every normal person's life, and to inculcate
Ecotopian ideals about how workplaces are controlled: there are no
"bosses" in the shop, and the children seem to discuss and agree
among themselves about how the work is to be done. They marshal the
necessary information with a verve that is altogether different from
the way our children absorb prepackaged formal learning.
It might also be argued that Ecotopian children seem in better touch
with each other than the children in our large, crowded,
discipline-plagued schools; they evidently learn how to organize
their lives in a reasonably orderly and self-propelled way.
The Ecotopians are extremely proud that they employ petroleum
products solely for lubrication...
[Earlier, the book said that Ecotopians still used diesel to fuel
logging trucks. Woops!]
Another surprise is that the student body, at most Ecotopian
institutions of higher education, has shrunk considerably. People
seem to attend the university because they like the intellectual life
there, not for practical or ulterior motives. Ecotopian society is
oriented toward experience and activity rather than credentials,
licenses, and requirements.
Just as Ecotopians blur the difference between professional and
amateur in science, there is almost no distinction between amateurs
and professionals in the arts. People of all levels of skill and
creativity put themselves forward unabashedly.
[Participating, not spectating.]
-----
People recover best if they are happy. We don't separate medicine
and life. So we do try to make the hospitals the best places there
are...
"Don't patients just try to prolong their stays indefinitely, then?"
I asked. "Why go home?"
"No, actually, they don't. They really truly recover, and want to
get on with living..."
-----
Ecotopians are covered by a type of cradle-to-the-grave medical
insurance which has had drastic effects on the medical system.
Instead of control by the profession itself, the clinics and
hospitals are responsible to the communities--normally to the
mini-city units of about 10,000 people. Thus the power of the
physician to set [her or] his own fees has evaporated, though a
doctor can always bargain between the salary offers of one community
and another, and in fact doctors are reputed to have among the
highest incomes despite the fact that they are much more numerous
than with us.
This wasteful system is justified by the argument that it keeps them
in touch with the medical needs of the people as a whole; but it
clearly represents a serious reduction in the best utilization of
specialist training. In fact some specialties have died out
entirely. For instance, babies are usually delivered at home by
nurse-midwives except in a few cases that present complications, and
the hospitals have neither maternity wards nor obstetricians.
... the Ecotopian medical system has a strong emphasis on
preventative care.
Incidentally, many rather intellectual people seem to be members of
the ordinary factory and farm workforce. Partly this seems to be due
to the relative lack of opportunity for class differentiation in
Ecotopia; partly it is due to a deliberate policy which requires
students to alternate a year of work with each year of study.
The distinction between work and non-work seems to be eroding away in
Ecotopia, along with our whole concept of jobs as something separate
from "real life."
... because of the minimal guaranteed income system and the core
stores, periods of unemployment are not considered disasters or
threats by individuals; they are usually put to use, and sometimes
deliberately extended, for some kind of creative, educational, or
recreational purposes.
author: Callenbach, Ernest
(TXT) detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Ecotopia
LOC: PS3553.A424 E35
tags: book,fiction
title: Ecotopia
# Tags
(DIR) book
(DIR) fiction