Ecotopia (15 page)

Habitations: You seldom see any store-bought furniture in Ecotopian houses. They have mattress beds on bare floor, enormous barbaric beds built of heavy timbers as if for ancient Vikings; there are houses with no beds at all, only bedrolls brought out at
night, Japanese style. But never a proper, ordinary bed with frame, slats, springs, and an innerspring mattress!

Have now visited several Ecotopian family groups, and am still amazed at their quietness. After Independence, I am told, great efforts were made to noiseproof things, and a lot of work was put into developing virtually soundless versions of many machines and appliances. Thus refrigerators, which among us produce a daily quota of shimmies, jiggles, grunts and rumbles, are silent models, which run on household septic-tank methane. (Very simple design, so not frost-free, but uses far less energy, I am told.) That other great source of urban noise, cars, have of course been eliminated. Clothes washers and dryers, which can’t be made silent, are usually kept outside in separate huts. Dishwashers, perhaps our most annoying appliance, are not manufactured at all.

If I can get over minding the quiet, it may be nice to be subjected only to natural noises—the wind, music from other houses, footsteps, a baby crying….

Could I get any writing done out at the forest camp? When I’m there Marissa’s friends tease me because I don’t join in on all their work. And she herself, though she sees my position, thinks I should participate more. I was shocked to learn that she had told pretty much everybody in her “family” many details about our relationship. “Don’t you have any sense of privacy?” I blurted out. She got furious at me for this. “What are you talking about? These people live with me and love me. Naturally they want to know what is happening with me! So I tell them. They give me reactions, advice, they look at me, I see myself through them as well as through myself.” “I still don’t like it. You could at least have told me you were going to talk about it.” More fury: “Listen, are you
ashamed
of this relationship? What is so terrible about telling people about it?”

We worked it out finally. I began to feel I do have an exaggerated need to keep romantic involvements to myself, and I think I got her to see how strange their practices are to me. She is always assuming I can just fit in perfectly. This galls—though it also feels good whenever I do manage to fit in, by working on some job I get
praised for, or really being perceptive about some interpersonal development.

Want badly to spend more time with Marissa, but most of my sources are here in the city. It’s painful to talk to her on the picturephone and not be able to touch. But she won’t come in again right away. Maybe I’ll go out tonight, at least for one night.

Have realized that it is a little scary to be in close touch with the land, as the Ecotopians are. Not sure how I would handle that. Their little shrines are not merely pious nature-appreciation, I have discovered. There is even one commemorating a famous murder—not too far, I suppose, from the mythic way we think about Tombstone, Arizona—though most are devoted to spirits who presumably presided over especially good times (and sometimes bad times, like the death of children). Some are little more than poems, scratched on scraps of wood that will soon decay—but that is evidently part of the tradition. “They’re like dried cornstalks,” one young girl told me, “they stand there for a while so you can see that something grew there, but another season always follows.” My favorite so far is an ornate, subtly elegant maze laid out in shiny oyster shells on a hill overlooking the sea. In the center a piece of driftwood reads:

WOMEN IN POWER: POLITICIANS,
SEX AND LAW IN ECOTOPIA

San Francisco, May 27. The fact that Ecotopia’s chief of state Vera Allwen is a woman is, of course, common knowledge. But most Americans are unaware that the Survivalist Party she heads is a woman-dominated organization—and that it played a key role in the struggle for Independence.

While a majority of Survivalist Party members are women, many men are members also, and some indeed hold high party positions. The basic cooperation- and biology-oriented policies of the party, however, are usually considered to be derived mainly from female attitudes and interests; the chief opposition party, the Progressive Party, continues to express what are alleged by Survivalists to be outdated and destructive male attitudes toward individualism, productivity, and related issues.

Women are, as in the U.S., a substantial majority of the population in Ecotopia. The initial growth and success of the Survivalists, I have been told by some long-term members, came from a frank and vitalizing recognition of this fact, together with its corollary: that women have distinct interests and needs which had been, despite some advances, unmet during the 200 years of American rule. “We had had two centuries of it, and it wasn’t good enough,” one influential Survivalist woman told me.

Although dissatisfaction with life under federal control became especially deep in the western states on a variety of grounds (notably water subsidies to agribusiness), it was apparently only the Survivalists who forcefully argued that secession offered the sole hope of stable, long-range decent survival. But the acceptance of this perilous political alternative by citizens of the area that became Ecotopia was, or at least so I am now told, accomplished only by drastic tactics. We must remember that a third of the state legislators and a good many national representatives were women. In their caucuses they had worked out in preliminary form most of the measures that later became the basis of Ecotopian government. The debates over how to put these into practice, and especially
whether secession was necessary in order to do so, were long and emotionally arduous.

While the women were thus engaged, the male politicians were not idle. A crisis ensued when it was revealed that certain important male leaders had been devising a sort of sexual gerrymandering plan that would have reduced female representation almost by half. This proposal shocked the populace into fierce polarization. When Washington attempted to interfere on behalf of the gerry-manderers, widespread defiance of federal regulations began to take place—on every issue from taxes to pollution. A few months of such chaos led to the armed confrontations and growth of new locally controlled organs of state—workers’ councils and citizens’ councils—which carried out what we must now, with the Ecotopians, refer to as their Independence.

When conditions had stabilized, the Survivalists swept the constitutional convention elections that followed. They then reorganized the governmental structures of the states and counties, which they considered outmoded because unrelated to the organic structures of production and consumption, and also inherently inadaptable for dealing with regional ecological systems. They divided the country into five metropolitan and four rural regions. Within these they also greatly extended many powers of governments of the local communities.

They also began a second phase of national debate: whether “Ecology in One Country” is possible, or whether Ecotopia’s own survival hinges on the exporting of survivalist doctrines to the rest of the world. The radicals who take the second position have been in the minority so far, but as ecocatastrophes overtake other countries with increasing frequency their strength keeps rising.

Since Americans may be skeptical of how a woman-dominated political system actually operates, I have attended several meetings of Survivalist Party groups. Judging by these, the Party is unlike any other I have ever observed. A meeting has no formal agenda; instead, it opens with a voicing of “concerns” by many participants. As these are discussed (often amid friendly laughter, as well as a few angry outbursts) general issues begin to take shape. But there are no Roberts’ Rules of Order, no motions, no votes—
instead, a gradual ventilation of feelings, some personal antagonisms worked through, and a gradual consensual focusing on what needs to be done. Once this consensus is achieved, people take pains to assuage the feelings of those members who have had to give ground in order to achieve the consensus. Only after this healing process takes place is there formal ratification of the decisions taken—the only action during three hours or so that has the feeling of ordinary political business as we know it. And yet I must admit that, in those three hours, a great deal gets done: a political problem is indeed faced, defined, and a decision made about it, though only along with a great amount of attention to things that would be considered, among us, as more in the realm of social life than politics. On the other hand, it must also be admitted that people
enjoy
such meetings, and we might conceivably learn some lessons from them.

Although some Americans may expect Ecotopian law to be only a cover for government tyranny, closer acquaintance reveals that it operates on much the same principles as ours. Our Bill of Rights was incorporated into the Ecotopian constitution, though in its original form, which would seem dangerously sweeping and unqualified to most Americans today. Ecotopians, like Americans, maintain an enormous army of lawyers and tend to work out many kinds of disputes in the courts.

The content of the law, of course, has changed somewhat. Ecotopians treat as severe breaches of the peace many actions we consider white-collar crimes seldom deserving of police or court action. Deliberate pollution of water or air is punished by severe jail sentences. “Victimless” crimes such as prostitution, gambling, and drug use are no longer on the books, but embezzlement, fraud, collusion, and similar “gentleman’s crimes” are dealt with just as severely as crimes like assault and robbery—which are, by the way, rare in Ecotopia, perhaps because of the personal nature of their neighborhoods and the virtual impossibility of anonymity in them. (Strangers get a lot of attention in Ecotopia, but the motives for this may not be entirely friendliness.) Ecotopian courts mete out fines very seldom, it appears, preferring to rely on imprisonment, which is felt to affect convicted persons more equally. I
hope to visit an Ecotopian prison soon; I am told that all prisons require the inmates to work, and rumors have circulated that some verge on slave-labor camps.

American policy flirted erratically, over the years, with attempts to control pollution. But Ecotopian economic law has proliferated wildly in the obsessive attempt to shape all agricultural and industrial enterprise into stable-state, recycling forms. It was first hoped that industries could be persuaded by public pressure to reduce their ecological damage. Educational campaigns pointed out that synthetic fiber production used far more electricity and water, and produced far more noxious by-products than natural fiber production; that high-compression engines required more steel, electricity, and high-priced fuel; that aluminum production required enormous electrical supplies; that synthetic chemicals tended to damage both man and environment, often in totally unexpected ways.

A few improvements were secured in the heady months following Independence. However, even the enterprises that sprang up after the flight of capital were reluctant to go further on pollution measures than their competitors. Moreover, attempts to use fines and special taxes also failed, because polluting firms could always pass costs along to their customers—who thus complained they not only had to suffer from the pollution the factories emitted, but had to pay higher costs for the products too.

In time, therefore, the Survivalist Party introduced a package of laws that flatly prohibited many types of highly polluting manufacturing and processing operations. Firms affected were to be bought off or helped through the transition to non-harmful operations by a system of financial risk-spreading. Even so, a number of firms went out of business rather than attempt such drastic changes.

Despite such momentous events, it appears that early Ecotopian policy involved much utilization rather than abolishment of existing governmental machinery. For example, after Independence the staffs of the huge state highway-building departments were not disbanded, but rather were set to work, along with their old construction-company allies, to restore the dismally polluted waterfronts, lake shores, and riverbanks. In Ecotopia at that time, as in
ries, warehouses, sewage plants, railroad yards, dumps, and other unsavory uses. Armed with the condemnation powers that had earlier been used, as one Ecotopian told me, “to make the world safe for autos and impossible for people,” the highway departments soon cleared the banks of all major and many minor waterways, and created Seine-like embankments, strip parks, piers for small craft, grassy and sandy beaches, and other improvements. Where highways had encroached on waterways, the pavement was used in part as foundations for pavilions, restaurants, dance halls, and other amusement facilities, while the remaining concrete was broken up and used in building the embankments. Bicycle paths, minibus lines, and transit stops were laid out so as to provide easy access to the water for all citizens.