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Ecotopia
Which aspects of Ecotopian life are presented as actual proposals and which are dramatic devices? When we read the novel under the template of poetic or psychological realism, we tend to ignore it as a rhetorical performance. When we read it under the template of rhetorical realism, we find it lacking and become hypercritical. We notice anachronisms and gaffs in the portrait of Ecotopian environmentalism. While thesis writing is a difficult for you, our experienced Custom thesis writers are ready to write it you! The Ecotopians bear a resemblance to the hippies of the late 1960 s and early 1970 s that is a little too close to capture the historical imagination of the post-Reagan era. Moreover, the inhabitants of Ecotopia are said to be fond of electronic devices and to support a relatively large production of devices that, from our perspective in the 1980 s, we know to be produced by industries with increasingly bad reputations as polluters. (The computer and semiconductor industries, for example, were once thought to be "clean" industries but are now frequently stigmatized for air, soil, and water pollution.) And we are left with many provocative questions unanswered. Above all, why are women more likely to be ecologically wise leaders than men; is it because they identify with the ravaged earth under the rule of patriarchy? Has Callenbach literalized what could well be a metaphorical statement of eco-feminism by representing postpatriarchal values in the figure of women priests and political leaders, or is he suggesting that in fact women would be better leaders in this regard?
In final analysis, Ecotopia, like the work of Greenpeace and Earth First!, has a great deal of potential power as a consciousness-raising rhetorical performance and has more validity as a critique of existing political and social practice than as a guide to future practice. As such, it is another testimony to the difficulty of thinking our way out of the environmental dilemma, of developing a moral character that harmonizes with our technical knowledge.
In final analysis, Ecotopia, like the work of Greenpeace and Earth First!, has a great deal of potential power as a consciousness-raising rhetorical performance and has more validity as a critique of existing political and social practice than as a guide to future practice. As such, it is another testimony to the difficulty of thinking our way out of the environmental dilemma, of developing a moral character that harmonizes with our technical knowledge.
The Difficulty
The difficulty comes when, stepping back from our engagement with the text, we readers begin to reflect on the contrasting circumstances of life. There is something of a jolt in the passage from fiction back to historical reality. How are we to know, for example, how many of the traits of Ecotopian life are put forward as serious alternatives to already existing lifestyles and political systems and how many are merely the trappings of satire, such as those used by Swift in Gulliver's Travels to shed light upon the social practices of an historical state of affairs? The best written blog on how to write an essay prepared by trained essay helpers for free! Moreover, how much of the novel's action is devoted to dramatizing the internal state of William Weston? The Ecotopians advocate a kind of free love, for example, and the "nuclear family as we know it is rapidly disappearing". If we take the book literally, reading it as a blueprint for a society reordered on ecological principles, we must see the sexual practices as essential to the functioning of the eco-feminist state. The same is true of the ritualized war games. If we view the novel as instrumentally effective, then we must take seriously the Ecotopian claims that such rituals can really replace war by providing a relatively harmless -- and naturally modeled -- outlet for the instinctive aggression of human males. But if we allow the novel the ordinary conventions of psychological realism, we may simply look upon these actions as a dramatic means for showing the mental conversion of William Weston, as a rite of passage away from his competitive, "scarce resource" mentality of consumerism in everything from clothes to work to women.
Rhetorical Effects of Fictional Narrative
Rhetorical analysis presses the question: What is gained and what is lost by fitting the programs of reform environmentalism, holistic science, and deep ecology into the framework of the fictional genre? For one thing, environmentalist ideas are no longer presented according to the strictures of what Walter Fisher has called the "rational world paradigm", whose purest manifestation we have seen in the dry analytical format of the environmental impact statement. Nor are the ideas presented in the agonistic rhetoric of reformist polemics, with the pull and tug of the text forcing the reader to take sides. Reliable Essay editing help offered by educated essay editors for college students at low price! Instead, the novel places ideas into the context of a story and thereby potentially avoids either numbing or alienating the reader. In the form of the popular (and populist) narrative, environmentalism achieves a broader base of appeal and potentially opens into a field of communicative action.
The differences between utopian fiction and other kinds of reformist or radical writing mainly lie in the image of the implied readership for each kind of literature. Writers like Aldo Leopold and Barry Commoner are lecturers; their texts imply a relatively passive, though perhaps intellectually resistant audience, the audience seated in the lecture hall. Greenpeace and Earth First! assume an audience that though potentially active, remains passive in the role of the onlooker, the best image of which is the group of innocent bystanders portrayed in The Monkey Wrench Gang. But a novel like Ecotopia at least potentially implies an audience of participators, of active fantasists. "Literature," argues the rhetorical theorist Walter J. Ong, "exists in a context of one presence calling to another". The "voice" of the written text may merely "call to" the audience, thereby seeking relatively passive witnesses for an impressive lecture or a dramatic display. Or the voice may "call forth" the audience, inviting participation in the creation of a mutual fantasy or a shared agenda for action.
Ecotopia clearly aspires to the rhetorical power usually ascribed to the evocative mode of calling forth the reader into creative, communicative action. The protagonist William Weston, with his comfortably familiar journalist's voice, invites the skeptical reader to join him on his journey. He wins the reader's initial sympathy with his hardheaded questioning of the Ecotopians and his unreconstructed American materialism. From this base of identification, the reader may stay with Weston as he begins to hear the sense of Ecotopian logic, as he recognizes aspects of a successful technology that outdoes the American version at its own game -- efficiency -- and finally, as he grows comfortable wearing Ecotopian clothes, as he falls in love with a druid priestess, is wounded (literally and figuratively) in ritualized combat, then healed holistically in an Ecotopian hospital, and ultimately united once and for all with the novel's heroine, the shadow of his own tenderness and receptivity that he has repressed in the personal politics of macho display.
The differences between utopian fiction and other kinds of reformist or radical writing mainly lie in the image of the implied readership for each kind of literature. Writers like Aldo Leopold and Barry Commoner are lecturers; their texts imply a relatively passive, though perhaps intellectually resistant audience, the audience seated in the lecture hall. Greenpeace and Earth First! assume an audience that though potentially active, remains passive in the role of the onlooker, the best image of which is the group of innocent bystanders portrayed in The Monkey Wrench Gang. But a novel like Ecotopia at least potentially implies an audience of participators, of active fantasists. "Literature," argues the rhetorical theorist Walter J. Ong, "exists in a context of one presence calling to another". The "voice" of the written text may merely "call to" the audience, thereby seeking relatively passive witnesses for an impressive lecture or a dramatic display. Or the voice may "call forth" the audience, inviting participation in the creation of a mutual fantasy or a shared agenda for action.
Ecotopia clearly aspires to the rhetorical power usually ascribed to the evocative mode of calling forth the reader into creative, communicative action. The protagonist William Weston, with his comfortably familiar journalist's voice, invites the skeptical reader to join him on his journey. He wins the reader's initial sympathy with his hardheaded questioning of the Ecotopians and his unreconstructed American materialism. From this base of identification, the reader may stay with Weston as he begins to hear the sense of Ecotopian logic, as he recognizes aspects of a successful technology that outdoes the American version at its own game -- efficiency -- and finally, as he grows comfortable wearing Ecotopian clothes, as he falls in love with a druid priestess, is wounded (literally and figuratively) in ritualized combat, then healed holistically in an Ecotopian hospital, and ultimately united once and for all with the novel's heroine, the shadow of his own tenderness and receptivity that he has repressed in the personal politics of macho display.
New Model
A new model of holistic science, one that foregoes the old style of objectivism, guides governmental decisions. Ecotopians are used to buttressing their arguments with appeals to science. Their science, however, appears to have been stripped of the conventions of objectivism. Do not know how to order online college essays and receive professional help with admission essay editin? They "spout statistics...with reckless abandon" and "have a way of introducing 'social costs' into their calculations which inevitably involves a certain amount of optimistic guesswork". In addition: "Scientists in Ecotopia are forbidden to accept payment or favors from either state or private enterprise for any consultation or advice they offer" -- though exactly how they make a living is not clear. One journalist whom Weston meets writes on both politics and science ("not an odd combination here"); he is "skeptical about U.S.
science, which he regards as bureaucratically constipated and wasteful". As with the scientists, so with the journalists: "There is no rule of objectivity, as with our newscasters; Ecotopians in general scorn the idea as a 'bourgeois fetish,' and profess to believe that truth is best served by giving some label to your general position, and then letting fly". Ironically, while neither science nor journalism is restricted to objectivity, advertisements are "limited to mere announcements without impersonated housewives or other consumers, and virtually without adjectives." Although Weston finds it "hard to get excited about a product's specifications-list," he suggests that "the commercials may seem watchable because they are islands of sanity in the welter of viewpoints, personnel, and visual image quality that make up 'normal' Ecotopian TV fare".
Nature mysticism is the de facto national religion. Many Ecotopians are, Weston reports, "sentimental about Indians". Their president, a woman, is "as much a religious leader as a politician". Weston discovers the depth of the Ecotopian religion when he sees his lover, the novel's heroine Marissa, whispering prayers and performing ritual acts in the hollow of a tree. It dawns on him that "this incredible woman is a goddamn druid or something, a treeworshipper!"
science, which he regards as bureaucratically constipated and wasteful". As with the scientists, so with the journalists: "There is no rule of objectivity, as with our newscasters; Ecotopians in general scorn the idea as a 'bourgeois fetish,' and profess to believe that truth is best served by giving some label to your general position, and then letting fly". Ironically, while neither science nor journalism is restricted to objectivity, advertisements are "limited to mere announcements without impersonated housewives or other consumers, and virtually without adjectives." Although Weston finds it "hard to get excited about a product's specifications-list," he suggests that "the commercials may seem watchable because they are islands of sanity in the welter of viewpoints, personnel, and visual image quality that make up 'normal' Ecotopian TV fare".
Nature mysticism is the de facto national religion. Many Ecotopians are, Weston reports, "sentimental about Indians". Their president, a woman, is "as much a religious leader as a politician". Weston discovers the depth of the Ecotopian religion when he sees his lover, the novel's heroine Marissa, whispering prayers and performing ritual acts in the hollow of a tree. It dawns on him that "this incredible woman is a goddamn druid or something, a treeworshipper!"
An Image of Ecotopian Society
Ecotopia is an attempt to answer the question, What if people lived according to the ideals of the environmentalist ethos as it had developed by the mid-1970 s? What if people began to shape their living practices by taking seriously the "fusion of resource scarcity economics with holistic biology" to create the kind of "green" community that "ecosophical thinkers" have been working to imagine since the last quarter of the nineteenth century and that deep ecologists have recently proclaimed as a formal normative system?
The fictive nation emerges when the northwest quadrant of the United States -- northern California, Oregon, and Washington -- secedes from the Union in a bloodless revolution, with the revolutionaries threatening to explode nuclear devices planted by commandos in New York harbor. Term paper writing is not easy, but our custom term paper writing service is your solution to time blocks! No one knows if such a device really exists, but the U.S. government takes no chances. If the methods by which the Ecotopians break free of American control -- as well as their general playfulness and freedom with their emotions -- suggest the work of Earth First! "ecoteurs," the basic features of the Ecotopian political economy are rather closer to the model of liberal environmentalism proposed by such eco-humanists as Herman Daly and Barry Commoner. Several features of deep ecology, particularly the favored themes of "eco-feminism," also appear, however. The overall result is a fictional model of a "stable-state," ecologically conscious nation run largely by women. The general outlines of the ecotopian political economy thus represent a blend of reform environmentalism, scientific activism, and deep ecology.
Government control is used to ensure the preservation of ecological ideals. Just after secession, the industries (including agriculture) and the transportation system are, for example, nationalized and either dismantled or reformed; displaced workers are absorbed in the construction and maintenance of new, energy efficient public systems of commerce, utility, and transportation; and demands for jobs are offset by the implementation of a twenty-hour work week. The second phase of Ecotopian history witnesses "the radical decentralization of the country's economic life," during which period "the Ecotopians largely scuttle their national tax and spending system, and local communities regain control over all basic life systems". But, true to the practices of already existing socialisms, the Ecotopians must depend in the short-run on a strong, and at times, a repressive centralized state. William Weston, while still in his unreconstructed state of mind, reports that "the Ecotopian situation has allowed their government to take actions that would be impossible under the checks and balances of our kind of democracy".
The fictive nation emerges when the northwest quadrant of the United States -- northern California, Oregon, and Washington -- secedes from the Union in a bloodless revolution, with the revolutionaries threatening to explode nuclear devices planted by commandos in New York harbor. Term paper writing is not easy, but our custom term paper writing service is your solution to time blocks! No one knows if such a device really exists, but the U.S. government takes no chances. If the methods by which the Ecotopians break free of American control -- as well as their general playfulness and freedom with their emotions -- suggest the work of Earth First! "ecoteurs," the basic features of the Ecotopian political economy are rather closer to the model of liberal environmentalism proposed by such eco-humanists as Herman Daly and Barry Commoner. Several features of deep ecology, particularly the favored themes of "eco-feminism," also appear, however. The overall result is a fictional model of a "stable-state," ecologically conscious nation run largely by women. The general outlines of the ecotopian political economy thus represent a blend of reform environmentalism, scientific activism, and deep ecology.
Government control is used to ensure the preservation of ecological ideals. Just after secession, the industries (including agriculture) and the transportation system are, for example, nationalized and either dismantled or reformed; displaced workers are absorbed in the construction and maintenance of new, energy efficient public systems of commerce, utility, and transportation; and demands for jobs are offset by the implementation of a twenty-hour work week. The second phase of Ecotopian history witnesses "the radical decentralization of the country's economic life," during which period "the Ecotopians largely scuttle their national tax and spending system, and local communities regain control over all basic life systems". But, true to the practices of already existing socialisms, the Ecotopians must depend in the short-run on a strong, and at times, a repressive centralized state. William Weston, while still in his unreconstructed state of mind, reports that "the Ecotopian situation has allowed their government to take actions that would be impossible under the checks and balances of our kind of democracy".
