Is the world of “Ecotopia” possible? And if it is, would we want it?

Great Debates
1

Is the world of “Ecotopia” possible? And if it is, would we want it?

I recently read the environmental sci-fi classic Ecotopia, by Ernest Callenbach. Published in the 70’s, it’s about a country (WA, OR, and No. CA which seceded) based entirely on environmental principals.

A few ways in which Ecotopian life differs from real US life:

[ul]Gas-powered automobiles are outlawed, except in special situations. People get around primarily by an extensive train/monorail system, or by bike or the occasional electric vehicle for light loads. [/ul]
[ul]Plastic manufacture or import is not allowed. Everything is made of durable, recyclable materials. [/ul]
[ul]Suburbs are eliminated and most of the land is returned to nature. People live in small, compact cities connected by monorail. Hunting for food(by bow and arrow, mostly :rolleyes: ) is encouraged. [/ul]
[ul]Any person who wants to build a house must earn the privilege by first spending one year working for the forestry service, which of course plants as much as it harvests, and harvests by selecting individual trees to be cut down by hand. [/ul]
[ul]A mandated 20-hour workweek. This has several practical benefits:[/ul]

  • The economy’s need for workers instantly doubled. No unemployment.
  • People, being poorer, turn to cheaper ways of doing things: growing (or hunting) their own food, repairing equipment and clothes rather than throwing it out and buying another, walking rather than driving, etc.
  • Having so much time makes life slower; people spend more time socializing, playing, having fun.

I put this in GD because I’m not interested in whether it would make scientific sense, so much as a general discussion of what it would really be like – what’s good and bad about living an ecologically-centered lifestyle. For instance, one of the negatives of a scenario as described above would have to be the massive government influence on people’s lives; determining what can and can’t be manufactured for instance (must be recyclable, manufacturing process can’t hurt the environment) would create a huge new bureaucracy.

So, starting with the above list, how hard would each be to make happen? Would it accomplish the desired goal (e.g. would a 20 hour work-week lead to full employment without massive starvation)? Could you be happy with this kind of lifestyle?

(Good book, by the way - not practical, but it does make you think.)

2

The biggest single failing I spotted with the society was the abolition of the corporate structure. I don’t see Ecotopia having a large enough economic base to produce armaments or in fact metallic/electronic goods of any kind, if they’re limited to ~300-member “partnerships”. I suppose it could be workable if you wanted a (mostly) pre-Industrial society, and you produced enough intangibles (art, entertainment) to be able to import whatever you couldn’t produce.

I don’t expect to see it happen in relatively lefty Canada, let alone a chunk of the U.S.

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  1. You would have a considerable amount of difficulty maintaining the belief, amongst the majority of the population, that being dirt poor was a good thing. Nobody wants to be poor; nobody especially wants their CHILDREN to be poor. It would be nigh on impossible to convince an entire population to accept poverty in exchange for, basically, nothing, beyond the feeling that you were being nice to the Earth. So that’s your first problem.

  2. With respect to your bullet points,

  • Outlawing cars would certainly be easy with sufficient force, but building and maintaining a large and effective mass transit system would be awfully difficult to do in a poor country.

  • Outlawing the use of plastics would, practically speaking, make the country even poorer still. Plastics are popular for a reason; they’re the easiest, cheapest, and often most environmentally friendly way of making a lot of things.

  • Forcing people to live in cities is another step towards poverty and a lower quality of life, as well as a lack of freedom,

  • Again, lack of freedom, and kind of bizarre now that almost all forestry in North America is ALREADY fully sustainable.

  • Unenforceable. How do you prevent people from working 21 hours a week? As it is, the great majority of jobs are not subject to a 40-hour work week. Most jobs simply aren’t the sort of jobs where two people working 20 hours can do the same job as one person working 40, and in many cases where you could have two people doing the job of one, you’d vastly reduce the effectiveness of the job. There’s no way around that.

But it all comes down to how appallingly poor such a place would be. It doesn’t sound like it serves any PURPOSE; absent a purpose, your poor subjects will soon rise up in revolt when they see how wealthy their neighbours are.

4

Sounds like a nightmare to me.

And the power generation to run those train/monorail systems? Since a lot of these old style eco-nuts are opposed to nuclear, unless you are talking about cutting the population severly AND cutting personal power usage, you really wouldn’t be doing that much by simply cutting down on automobilies…its coal, natural gas and oil fired plants all the way. Why not simply build more ecologically sound PERSONAL transport for people and switch to an all nuclear power grid. THAT would solve most of the problems and wouldn’t entail draconian measures to curtail my personal freedoms.

BTW, who decides the ‘special situations’? This sounds like the old communist standby to mean those in power who of course know best…

Plastics are recyclable of course today. Again though, where does the power come from to run the manufacturing for those durable, recyclable materials?

Leaving aside the hunting thing which is frankly ridiculous (no WAY you could feed modern population levels by hunting and gathering), this sounds like a nightmare to me. I don’t WANT to live cramped in a big city. I’d go completely nuts, especially if you had bigger population density than we currently do in the big cities like New York or LA…which you’d HAVE to have if there were no suburbs allowed at all.

shudder So, if I, a network engineer, want a house, I need to spend a year doing something I have no idea what I’m doing and couldn’t contribute anything substantial too (since I’d probably just be learning the job when I finished)…for what exactly? FORCED labor so I can get a house?

Our economy would collapse overnight if you tried anything like this. This would have the sole practical benifit that after all the screaming and dieing, the population would be vastly reduced, so perhaps you’d be able to sustain them in this eco-nightmare for a time…before they all died out of typhoid or something because they couldn’t maintain their tech base and REALLY went back to living in caves or whatever. This is why you don’t let eco-nuts even TALK about the economy, because they are clueless to reality.

Well, the bad would be that our entire modern way of life would cease to exist, millions would die (maybe billions if this was attempted world wide). I suppose the good would be that the carabou would be safe and happy, and the air would smell better, especially after the whole thing collapsed completely…until then we’d still be polluting the environment with coal and oil fired power plants since the eco-nuts probably wouldn’t go for nuclear.

There is nothing good about living in any extreme ‘utopia’. Even if you could make it work the personal freedom I’d have to give up wouldn’t be worth it for a cleaner environment. This would be a government that would make the communists look like pikers from a personal freedoms perspective…total nightmare from my perspective.

You’ll pry my hydrocarbon burning, carbon spewing personal transport out of my COLD DEAD HANDS!!! :slight_smile:

-XT

5

A much more persuasive ecotopian novel is Pacific Edge by Kim Stanley Robinson (1990). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Californias_Trilogy, http://www.sfsite.com/lists/ksr.htm.

6

Quite possibly true. And we’re getting closer to this event every day.

I have to agree that much of the book is unwieldy – but something has to give. We can’t keep up our current consumption for much longer.

Great book, though. Some of the things from the book are happening, albeit on a limited scale. Flexcars. Light rail. Multiple recycle bins. Small groups of lightly organized freedom fighters holding off an oppressing military-industrial complex. Faux news reports.

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[men in black]

Your offer is acceptable.

[/men in black]

8

The book was quite biased, though, suggesting the rest of the U.S. had become a chokingly polluted, crime-ridden hellhole too busy fighting itself and others to stage a successful attempt to repatriate the seceeded states.

The novel claimed that after secession, huge numbers of city-dwellers fled, along with pretty much all corporations. As a result, living space in the cities was practically free. Picture converting a 20-room corporate office suite into an apartment, for example.

Personally, I think that’s a cheat. If the population of Ecotopia ever reached its pre-secession numbers, they’d quickly find they don’t have the economic base to maintain or expand their existing cities, all of which would gradually decay away.

Considering the hippy-dippy time in which the book was written (heck, it was required reading for a humanities course I took called “Technology and Human Values”, so you know it wasn’t written for the Tom Clancy crowd) where “the man” would gladly have sent you off to Vietnam or something, it might have seemed desrable in contrast.

9

Even as a sometime leftist, I disagree with most of the vision.

But let me just draw attention to the quoted part. I think this has been factually debunked by economists by now.

I would love to hear if anybody has quantitative economic models, but as a business owner I would roughly guesstimate that a 20-hour workweek would require at least three times the worker productivity of a 40-hour work week in order to be cost-effective (due to the overhead of a workday). Instead, your scenario lowers productivity. This means that almost none of the jobs we do today would be cost-effective. Unemployment would skyrocket. Living standards would plummet. It would be back to the stone age - certainly no monorails!

10

:stuck_out_tongue:

So you say…but the jury is still out on whether this is true or not. And we ARE moving towards a cleaner environment, at least here in the US. The nations you REALLY need to worry about are China, Russia, India, etc. If we can ever get the eco-nuts who inspired the book cited in the OP out of the way, we can even cut down our emmisions more by going to a mostly/fully nuclear power grid. THAT opens up all kinds of other possibilities. Rising oil prices ALSO opens up a lot of room for new innovation on alternatives. Market economics will save the environment, not this kind of pie in the sky fantasy.

-XT

11

Its purpose is the same as the purpose of any society: Collective survival. Ecotopia is based on the assumption, right or wrong, is that Ecotopia is indefinitely sustainable and a system of constant, open-ended industrial expansion is not.

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I suppose it’s possible, but it still needs to be powered by something.

Not possible if your Ectopia is to have any kind of technology at all.

Well, assuming the population didn’t just disappear, people would need to live in LARGE compact cities like Blade Runner.

Just stupid

Sounds sweet but based on faulty economics.

Basically you can’t have it both ways. You cannot create an agrarian society that has monorails and the technology required to allow people to live comfortibly in compact cities.

Hunting with bows and arrows is not economically friendly if the entire population of the Pacific Northwest is doing it. It is far more environmentally friendly to have compact high-yield idustrial farms that produce more food with less of a footprint.
But I see now you didn’t ask for the scientific analysis.

I imagine such a society would be very similar to living under the Khamer Rouge in Cambodia. I believe they tried something similar.

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Why not?

14

Pol Pot in reverse is no improvement over Pol Pot in forward.

15

I stand corrected. Should be:

We can’t keep up our current consumption forever.

16

The above does not go with:

This is part of a long list of labor intensive tasks for which no one will be paid. Let’s look at history and see what tends to happen when everything had to be done by hand. Oh, yeah. Servitude. In many forms. I’m sure that a form would evolve to fit this society. Not my idea of a good time. There’s a difference between having your own garden and growing enough food to survive on.

I vote for controlling population. At this point in time, I think the best way to do that is to make as much education available to as many people as possible. Perhaps as much health care as well. I know I definitely don’t want to spend hours a day spinnning or weaving or grinding flour by hand. Not even if my neighbors were sitting and doing it with me. Not even if we all sang. Just not my idea of a good time.

17

OK. I think it’s just as likely (maybe even more so) that new technologies for power generation will displace the buring of fossil fuels before we “destroy the environemnt” with them.

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msmith: I imagine such a society would be very similar to living under the Khamer Rouge in Cambodia.

SteveMB: Pol Pot in reverse is no improvement over Pol Pot in forward.

I think these comparisons to the Khmer Rouge are really sloppy reasoning. The only significant similarity between Khmer-Rouge Cambodia and the fictional “Ecotopia” seems to be the massive shift between ruralization and urbanization (in opposite directions in the two cases).

What made Pol Pot’s Cambodia so horrible was the massive genocides, purges, virtual enslavement, malnutrition, and regime of state terror. I really don’t see anything in the description of “Ecotopia” that suggests anything like that was going on in the society pictured in the book.

Either come up with a detailed, convincing explanation of why you think such horrific consequences would necessarily follow from the “Ecotopia” scenario, or cut out the gratuitous “Khmer-Godwinizing”.

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Agonist: what it would really be like – what’s good and bad about living an ecologically-centered lifestyle.

The chief trouble here IMO is with trying to draw a sharp boundary between “ecologically-centered lifestyle” and “modern way of life”. Actually, “modern” and “eco-centered” are on the same continuous spectrum.

Many European societies live quite happily and prosperously with high urban population density, a less-than-40-hour workweek, much more public transit than private automobiles, and other things that some of the “anti-ecologists” (?) here seem to associate with poverty and low quality of life.

The question is, how far could you expand such measures before you really undermined necessary infrastructure and economic stability? I don’t think such an extreme case as “Ecotopia” is practically feasible, although I think we could get quite a bit closer to it than we currently are without the catastrophic results that the “anti-ecologists” seem to fear.

The fundamental, and most interesting, question IMO is: what really is the relationship between a prosperous society and economic growth? Is it possible to have material prosperity and high quality of life in combination with slow economic growth? (Perhaps in a situation with decreasing population?) If it’s not possible to decouple prosperity from economic growth, is it at least possible to decouple it from ever-increasing use of non-renewable resources?

20

I read that book when I was in high school, circa 1978. I thought it fell apart on the point of Soul City, the all-Black enclave that Black citizens willingly restricted themselves to (I thought it was the author’s way of saying “I don’t know how utopians would deal with racial strife”). So much of the book runs counter to human nature as it’s experienced outside of North Korea that I’m surprised it’s still remembered. (I preferred The Monkey Wrench Gang myself.)