Hypnotized (By The Cult Of Enviro-Mentalism)

"Sometimes a book, or an idea, can be obscure and widely influential at the same time. That’s the case with 'Ecotopia,' a 1970s cult novel, originally self-published by its author, Ernest Callenbach, that has seeped into the American groundwater without becoming well known."

 

The novel, now being rediscovered, speaks to our ecological present: in the flush of a financial crisis, the Pacific Northwest secedes from the United States, and its citizens establish a sustainable economy, a cross between Scandinavian socialism and Northern California back-to-the-landism, with the custom — years before the environmental writer Michael Pollan began his campaign — to eat local.

White bicycles sit in public places, to be borrowed at will. A creek runs down Market Street in San Francisco. Strange receptacles called 'recycle bins' sit on trains, along with 'hanging ferns and small plants.'

A female president, more Hillary Clinton than Sarah Palin, rules this nation, from Northern California up through Oregon and Washington.

“ ‘Ecotopia’ became almost immediately absorbed into the popular culture,” said Scott Slovic, a professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, and a pioneer of the growing literature-and-the-environment movement. 

'You hear people talking about the idea of Ecotopia, or about the Northwest as Ecotopia. But a lot of them don’t know where the term came from.'

...Its characters are flat; its prose — well, call it utilitarian. 

 

And the plot, in which the narrator drops his skepticism and settles into Ecotopian life, thanks in part to a love interest, lacks sophistication. 

...'Ecotopia' has its critics. Feminists attacked it for its ritual war games, in which men don spears to work off their 'natural' aggression, dragging women into the woods to celebrate. (Mr. Callenbach said he was influenced by the anthropologist Margaret Mead, and her idea that the sexes express aggression differently.)

 Some were made uncomfortable by the way black people were excluded from Ecotopian society: 

 

Most live in Soul City, which is less affluent and green than the rest of Mr. Callenbach’s world.

Over the years, Mr. Callenbach’s readership has changed, as hippies and New Agers have been joined by churchgoers. The author often visits St. Mary’s College of California, a Catholic school near Oakland. 'Ecotopia' is required freshman reading at the Presbyterian-affiliated Muskingum College in rural Ohio. And it’s part of the curriculum at the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit institution.

Mr. Callenbach hopes the book will resonate among the greening edges of an evangelical movement. But the novel’s relatively free sex and liberal politics may limit that readership. 

Susanna Hecht, a professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, sees it as a counterpoint to Thoreau’s more austere 'Walden.'

“ ‘Walden’ is very Protestant,” she said. 'This is pagan, with a Zen relationship to nature.'

But to Mr. Callenbach and many of his fans, 'Ecotopia' is a blueprint for the future.

'It is so hard to imagine anything fundamentally different from what we have now,' he said. 'But without these alternate visions, we get stuck on dead center.'

'And we’d better get ready,' he added. 'We need to know where we’d like to go.'"

-- Scott Timberg, on the '70s cult novel that has been discovered as a cultishly philosophical blueprint for American society's current manipulation, in The New York Times.