Episode Transcript
[00:00:08] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find Now Temperate zones and tropic climbs and all.
[00:00:15] Speaker B: Through currents and thriving seas and winds.
[00:00:20] Speaker A: Blowing through breathing trees Strong ozone, safe sunshine.
Good planets are hard to find.
[00:00:29] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:00:36] Speaker C: Hello KSQUID listeners, It's every other Sunday again and you're listening to Sustainability Now, a bi weekly KSQUID radio show focused on environment, sustainability and social justice in the Monterey Bay region, California and the world. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. As California looks forward to the beginning of a new presidential administration, there is growing trepidation about what it might mean for the state. Is it time to secede and join with other west coast states to create a new country? Fifty years ago, Ernest Kahlenbach published A Vision of a New country dedicated to protecting people and the environment. The book is what is sometimes called a traveler's tale. An individual visits an imagined place and reports back on what was observed there. Thomas More's Utopia was an early version of this. Ecotopia is set sometime in the late 20th or early 21st centuries, narrated by William Weston, a journalist at the New York Times who travels to the now independent west coast states that have been closed to outsiders since independence. Ecotopia has been built largely on the invention of very cheap solar cells and adoption of various other cutting edge technologies, and its political system is more of a guided social democracy than an anarchist free for all. The book was not without its flaws and reflected the 1960s and early 1970s standpoints of a middle aged white male. It is also somewhat sexist and racist, which might make it a tougher sell today.
Ten years ago, in honor of UC Santa Cruz's 50th anniversary, I organized a conference called Utopian 50 Years of Imagined Futures in California and at UCSC. Speakers included a number of academics, critics and dreamers. None of us, of course, imagined that Donald Trump might be the next President of the United States.
Today's broadcast consists of three presentations at the conference. A keynote by Kim Stanley Robinson, best known today for the Ministry of the Future, his vision of how to address climate change Rosara Sanchez, writer, storyteller, linguist and professor of Latin American Literature and Chicano Literature at UC San Diego and Fred Turner, Harry and Norman Chandler, professor of Communication at Stanford University and an acerbic observer and criticism of that contemporary generator of utopian dystopian futures, Silicon Valley.
So we're here to celebrate both the life and the work of Czech Kahlenbach and somebody else will probably mention this later tonight, but Icotopia was turned down by something like 20 publishers before it finally saw the light of day. It is said that there are something like 1 million copies in print in a number of languages, plus the 1500 that my students have read. And so they're somewhere out there. And we can't dismiss the book as simply a product of the 1970s and irrelevant today.
Although Ecotopia has become a term of derision that we sometimes read in the New York Times, whatever its flaws, it remains an inspiration to many. Which leads me to the introduction of our keynote speaker, Kim Stanley Robinson. Stan currently lives in Davis, but he's really a child of Orange county, which was the inspiration for his Orange county or California trilogy. Pacific Edge is the Ecotopia novel in his Orange county trilogy. And that is the reason he is our keynote speaker tonight.
[00:04:05] Speaker D: Thank you, Ronnie, for that kind introduction. It's a real pleasure to be celebrating Chick Kahlenbach and Ecotopia here tonight. Kahlenbach's Ecotopia was the fiction that expressed the utopian hopes and dreams of the 1970s. And that moment was the moment when the 60s hippie youth grew up. They were having kids, they were settling down, and they were hoping to invent a way of life that expressed their 60s ideals. They didn't want to just shift back into the mode that they had grown up in, but they needed to have a new plan. So 70s utopian thinking was a continuation of the 60s revolutionary spirit. The 60s revolutions were partial, they were compromised, but they did change the world. And they were the end of colonialism worldwide. They started right after World War II and continued right through the 60s. And in this multi decade period, all the natives of the world turned into people, as Jean Paul Sartre once put it. And in the United States, it was the civil rights movement that was the part of this global movement that meant the most and also resistance to the Vietnam War. Because the Vietnam War itself was an anti colonial war. And so resisting it in the United States was helping in the anti colonial effort. It was a chaotic time, and one part of it that is really very hard to recover now in terms of how it felt was the feeling that anything could happen. That's not a feeling that we have now. But back then, further revolutions seemed entirely possible. And nobody had any idea what was going to come next. The utopian nonfiction of the 1970s was about 60s Western youth growing up and designing adult lives. And so the design features included topics that were very popular in the Nonfiction of the 70s. There was home design, like the Integral Urban House, urban design like Alexander's, A Pattern Language or the Paolo Solari, Archology or Findhorn. There was personal economics like Small Is Beautiful Economics, as if people mattered by Schumacher, or muddling towards frugality or Progress, as if survival mattered. There were books on energy like Soft Energy Paths by Amory Lovins. There were philosophy and religion books, and here quite a lot of them, including the Tao of Physics by Capra or a lot of Zen literature, the Crack and the Cosmic Egg, Castaneda's Don Juan books, also Ram Dass's beautiful Be Here now books by Gregory Bateson and John Lilly. Really, philosophy and religion was big in that decade. Then straight futurism in books like Future Shock by Toffler or Person Planet by Rosak, or ecology like the Greening of America or Feminism like the Dialectic of Sex by Shulamit Firestone. And the whole Earth catalog covered all these issues in articles. There were some small that were really not bestseller strands of alternative economics by people like Herman Daly or Hazel Henderson or Joan Robinson. But this was sort of a missing strand. We'll come back to that later. Now Ekitopia gathered and drew together all these. But it was the only one that was fiction aside from Le Guin's the Dispossessed. But at that point, the Dispossessed existed in the kind of ghetto world of science fiction and was a little bit of a closed phenomenon compared to Ecotopia, which was a mass market and broad cultural bestseller for a long time. It was Colin Bach's books that gave this whole movement a narrative and a fictional shape, a story that could be told. And even if the story was a very old rudimentary standby of utopian literature, in which reporter visits Utopia, gets shown things, has some adventures and goes native. It's really the classic story there. It goes back to Thomas More, but it does the job and people are used to it. So Ecotopia became a best seller and now it's the book out of that era that's still in print. It's the book that we're celebrating. And I think it's because we love stories and we can still feel the hopes and the plans of that 1970s utopian moment.
None of these books, and nobody alive then, Ekatopia included, had the slightest premonition that the Reagan Thatcher counter revolution was coming. And also there was a missing strand of thought in that 70s utopian thinking, which was simply, you could call it macroeconomics or you could call it better political economy. These were Cold War era books. And so socialism as a word and concept was off the table in American Thinking this entire body of literature never advocated fighting capitalism. And they didn't try to imagine post capitalism. They were about personal adjustments within capitalism using technical innovations or design or lifestyle or consumer choices or spiritual choices to make a counterculture within a dominant culture that they weren't really challenging. Capitalism's reaction to the sixties cultural revolution successes in essence was to say this. Look, you can do what you like in your messy and disorderly personal lives. Do what you want as long as you accept that you're going to be paid wages and you're not going to have as much job security as before, and you need to continue to consume at a high rate cultural and identity politics. The progress there didn't effectively challenge the global economic system. And in the 1980s, Reagan Thatcher began the creation and enforcement of neoliberal capitalism. Essentially the colonial system that had been enforced by armies now began to be enforced by trade laws and by practices. So the aspects of this were free market, the Washington Consensus and Austria abroad, globalized free trade, the privatization of the public sphere. And all of these were establishing what we now call neoliberal market capitalism, which after 1989's fall of the Soviet Union became truly global. And there's no place in the world that doesn't live in this system. So since then we've lived in that global neoliberal state. Capitalism and personal lifestyle choices are broader now than before, which is a remaining success of the 60s cultural revolutions. And they are important. But economic inequality is as great now as it was during the Gilded Age. Private privilege has decisively beaten the public good. And this means that we're living by a bad algorithm where the main rule is to increase quarterly profit and shareholder value. And this means cutting costs as much as possible as a way to increase profits. And the easiest costs that one can cut are first labor costs, in other words, paying people for their work and their lives, and then exteriorizing environmental costs, which means dumping waste, including CO2 and damaging the biosphere, and strip mining the natural world for its short term gain. The market, the free market systemically underprices, especially labor and the environment. And so both of these suffer. And at the same time, the economy relies on people. Consuming 70% of the American economy is simply consumption of non necessities. So debt results and it's encouraged because banks can use consumer debt to leverage further investment and speculation. So it's a highly leveraged system. In this context, the utopian fight goes on because it never really dies. People are always scheming and planning to try to make a better world, and indeed, the starker the situation looks. These are the moments where people's imaginations begin to flail in looking for solutions. So again, there is a lot of utopian nonfiction that's trying to find the way forward. And this time it very often has to do with economics and with political economy.
Understand that economics is always a study of capitalism, and it's descriptive rather than prescriptive. If you were to speculate on different kind of economics, then you get into a world of political economy. And it used to be that there would be departments of political economy and universities, but there aren't now. But it comes back anyway.
The utopian nonfiction of our time is often very angry, and it focuses on understanding the crash of 2008, which is a very important moment. It's a genre that has a lot of books in it. There's Michael Lewis the Big Schmidt, or David Harvey's the 17 Contradictions of Capitalism, Naomi Klein's this Changes Everything, or David Graeber's Debt, Maurizio Lazzarato's Governing by Debt. And in terms of the environment, there's Bill McKibben and all of the climate change literature that's coming out in the midst of this. We had the Occupy movement in, I think, 2011, and it was a great sign of fear and social unrest and desire for change. It was the precariat speaking out of their precariousness. It was a spasm without a good theory or a plan for going forward. And it was also much smaller than the 1960s protest movements. Another book in this utopian nonfiction of our time is a very interesting one called why Civil Resistance, Works by Erica Chenoweth. And all these books together try to do what the Occupy movement couldn't do, which is to theorize progress from this moment.
But now, because we are no longer in the Cold War, criticizing capitalism directly is back on the table, as from the mid 19th century to the mid 20th century, essentially, the 2008 crash shattered the idea that the free market neoliberal capitalism actually works or makes sense or can even be explained.
And that means that nobody can justify it. If you can't explain it, you can't justify it. And so both justice and environmental sustainability are bigger issues for people now than the defense of any given economic system or any given ideology.
Now a free market looks like a kind of religious fundamentalism. And the window of acceptable discourse, which is a very useful term that at any given time in society at large, you can talk about certain ideological points, goes too far to the left. And too far to the right. You will not get on the tv, you won't see Noam Chomsky on mainstream tv, and you won't see right wing survivalists. They're outside the window of acceptable discourse. And now, since 2008, the window of acceptable discourse has shifted way to the left.
And it may be also to the right because it's such an extreme time. But in any case, it's certainly shifted left also. So there's many books that are what you could call again, utopian nonfiction, trying to chart a way forward from this moment. But what I'm coming up to is where's the equivalent of Ecotopia itself? In other words, we have all this utopian nonfiction, but we don't yet have the ecotopia equivalent. Someone needs to write the utopian novel for our time. And so, just hypothetically, for tonight's sake, I am going to volunteer to do this, an Ecotopia today. And I feel that Chick Kalumbach would be enjoying this kind of a description. It would have to describe a just and sustainable post capitalism and also tell the story of how to get there from here, which is crucial because you can always make a great plan. But we know that we're in this world now. So what you also want is not just the plan, but the way to get to the good place. And indeed, Kahlenbach himself did that when he wrote the prequel to Ecotopia, which was called Ecotopia Emerging. And it's a needed part of any modern utopia, because we want to know what to do now and not just hear about wonderful hypothetical worlds that we suspect will not come to pass. We want a blueprint and we also want an action plan. And that's what utopias have to do. So first it has to be global. This time, it can't just be one place on Earth like Northern California and Oregon, like Ecotopia was in the 1970s. There's no such thing as a pocket utopia. We live in a global economy, and essentially we're in one world. So the solution for any place on Earth involves every other place on Earth. And this sort of ups the gain on the problem. But we are in fact what you might call a global village. But it's not a village. It's simply one world that we all live in. And we have not yet properly comprehended that. So the utopian solution has to be global. That increases the difficulties, but we have to do it. And Ekatopia is not wrong to be part. It's like all the other utopian writings that came in that era. In essence, all the previous utopias have been modeling exercises. We look at them to learn lessons that we might apply to the world at large. So that's hard because there is no good world government, and we're forced to do it at the level of the nation state and by international treaty. Very, very weak governance to make this gigantic change. And so I think that a utopian novel has got to focus on the United States. Still. Change in the United States would tend to change everything everywhere. And so we can focus here on the United States as a lever to change the world, which is nice because we have a little bit of control as Americans over what happens in the States. In 2008, the crash was the result of a liquidity crisis and a credit crunch, and the world financial system lost confidence in itself and almost collapsed. Governments bailed out the banks that were in trouble at 100% on the dollar, rather than giving them a haircut, as they say. And so they used taxpayer funds to do it. And in essence, the bank's debts, which had been created by crazy speculation and by a frenzy of greed, in effect by an entire financial community, they defaulted on those debts, and it was shifted onto taxpayers to pay it for them. And the bailout's been estimated at anywhere from 5 to 15 trillion dollars. And it's a little worrisome that you can't even tell whether it was 5 or 15 trillion. So at that point, the US government nationalized General Motors, but it didn't nationalize the banks. But the idea of nationalization is there because of what we did with GM and with the banks in 2008. We took on their debt, but we left them in control of their activities and in control of their profits. And they went right back to doing what they were doing before. There was some very weak legislation passed afterwards, but the bank lobbies managed to keep Congress from passing anything particularly effective, and they're back at it. There will be another crash, because that's how capitalism works. There are bubbles that are very hard to see when you're in them. However, when the next crisis comes, we need to be ready for it, because we could nationalize the banks. When we bail them out like we did GM in 2008, and with finance turned into a public utility district like any other public utility district, like a credit union, then there could be democratic control of finance that could regulate how finance works and take a majority share of the profits involved and cycle that to the people. This would make governments and people very flush and able to do Things for themselves. Social services, education, healthcare. The commons would have returned because the government is a virtual commons. And whenever there's a commons, there's an enclosure movement, which is privatization. And whenever there's an enclosure, there's suffering and revolution follows. If we were to take over, we could call this new state government of the people, by the people, and for the people. And as for this next crash, we don't have to wait for it. We can trigger a liquidity crisis for the banks anytime that we want by civil nonviolent resistance in the form of mass defaulting on our debts. You could even do it legally and simply declare that you're bankrupt, whether you are or not. You can declare bankruptcy as a legal move. So. But what I'm saying here is this would have to be done by everybody or by a huge amount of people. But since all of our debt allows this leveraged bank speculation, the moment that our debt looks bad, the moment people declare student debts and house mortgages to be odious debts and declare sovereignty, there would be too many of us to prosecute.
Like Breck said, you can't exactly dismiss the people in elected another one. So the bank system would immediately crash, as in 2008. It would be a crisis of confidence. Mortgage bonds and derivatives based on student debt, which already exist, would all go subprime at once and turn into unredeemable promissory notes. And the big banks and investment firms, meaning only eight or nine companies on this entire planet, would not know who to trust, would go to government to demand a bailout as intended 2008, but this time the government would bail them out and take them over as they did General Motors. Then the banks are credit unions and public utilities. And there are huge returns of finance now owned by the state. And the state would then not be an instrument of finance, but rather an instrument of the people controlling finance. This would be a big shift, basically a revolution. And quantitative easing, where new money is made up from nothing and given to the banks. Billions every month that could actually be given directly to people so that you could be the Institute of Jennifer, or you could be the People's Republic of George and be getting direct quantitative easing infusions. Like the citizens of Alaska get free oil money for living where they live.
So then of course global capital would try to run elsewhere. Stock markets would create. But when stocks are low, there's always some people that buy them and raise them back up again. And China already has a nationalized banks. They would look at us and say, well, we do this already. What's so strange about it? And they want the United States doing well. We are their main customer and they also own a lot of us. So then the European Union would be forced to follow and the G20 would be forced to follow and then it's game over. Because that's most of the economy of the world right now. And there we would be people in control of their economy.
What a concept.
So what would people do if people were in charge of the economy rather than vice versa? How would things run? It would be a newly created global ecotopia. What would happen? Well, first, obviously full employment. Everybody should have the right to work. And if government could hire you, then private industry would have to compete for employment and suddenly there would be demand. It's kind of neoclassical economics at that point. And everybody would be able to say, look, I don't need to take your crappy wages, I can work for the government instead. This would be like the WPA during the New Deal. What would we do? Well, it would be environmental work, landscape restoration, habitat creation, clean energy and infrastructure, education and helping to get the poorest 3 billion out of poverty, making every place good on this planet. All this would avoid the mass extinction event that is on the way. And it would help to deal with the inevitable climate change that's coming and habitat corridors all around this continent. To allow the wild animals to prosper is not only doable by the way that people are contracting in the cities anyway, but it's also a Chick Kalmbach idea who was suggesting for the last 40 years that the upper plains and the Rocky Mountains should be determined to a buffalo and wolves ecology and that people and planet would be doing better from that. You would also want to have a hard carbon tax where a rising tax on carbon, and we don't call that a tax anymore, we call that paying the true cost because that's how much carbon really costs. And that's what we need to pay in order not to be ripping off the next generations. Then also a progressive tax, of course, but not just on incomes, but also on capital assets. This is the Piketty plan. Thomas Piketty. Because if you're rich, you can always bury your income in capital returns, capital gains. You can essentially dodge the fact and pay yourself as your own employee a small amount of money and get taxed on that. But if you have a progressive tax, a sharp one on capital assets, it simply means the horizontalization of wealth. It means the beginning of social democracy big time. And it would put governments in control of accumulated capital that is now Owned by an oligarchy that is mostly buying our governments. So we need that progressive tax on capital assets.
And then you could say to the members of the oligarchy, because there are some people that will fight for this system and there are some people that are just going to go along with whatever the system exists. But for people who fear loss, you could always guarantee everybody that you get to keep $10 million and you just have to live with that.
In this system, a market would still exist, but it would be marginalized to toys and diversions, tourism and entertainments. So the basic needs of life, food, water, shelter, clothing, healthcare, education and work would all be public utilities, something that you have a right to as a citizen of this planet. But then beyond that, capitalism would be the residual. And of course it could still play its games. It could still work on its iPhones. If everybody on the planet lived at adequacy and capitalism was shoved to the margin, that margin would prosper too. It would go crazy because people like to play and people would be free to throw themselves into realms of culture where the market could be a kind of a sport rather than a desperate forced survival march. That's where it needs to stay. And of course this would protect the environment, but the environment would have to be protected by regulation and tended and nourished and paid for as such. It would be the work of civilization and it would also be playful and a matter of gardening, of playing with the other animals on the planets and also to make cycles that can go on through the centuries and proven rather than being the strip mining and endgame that we're now engaged on. So this would be the new Ecotopia for our times. I feel like Chick Kalmbach would like it and I want to say. What did I say at the end? Oh, spread the word.
[00:27:14] Speaker C: You're listening to Sustainability now. I'm your host Ronnie Lipschitz and today's show consists of excerpts of presentations at a 2015 conference Utopian 50 Years of Imagined Futures in California and at UCSC. The next speaker is Professor Rosaro Sanchez from UC San Diego.
[00:27:35] Speaker A: Both Ecotopia and Ecotopia Emerging create a quasi utopian mostly white society. A new nation state that allows for the establishment of of separate black and Chinese city states within Ecotopia and that is considering plans for formalizing Spanish speaking and Japanese communities of San Francisco as city states within Ecotopia as well measures that will ensure the predominantly white composition of most of Ecotopia Latinos, as Beatriz mentioned, are nowhere to be seen and even Though we were fewer in the 70s, we were still there picking grapes, fruits and vegetables from the Salinas Valley to the San Joaquin Valley and north to wine country and Sacramento. It was this population of farm workers that Chavez set out to organize. But they seemed to have evacuated the scene in Ecotopia, as have the farm workers in the Yakima Valley in the state of Washington. Ecotopia prefers small, self sustained, culturally homogeneous groupings. This points to a highly racialized society and perhaps explains why Ecotopia is a closed society with guarded borders and no immigrants clamoring to get in. It is exclusionary, but in its 20 or so years of existence, it has managed to incorporate a good many measures that will eliminate chemical pollution and contamination of the soil, air and water and produce a reduction in carbon emissions. By doing away with cars, it has succeeded admirably in producing biodegradable plastics, instituting corporate taxes and recycling paper, plastic and glass products, and especially sewage. People walk or ride bikes, buses or trains. Processed and packaged foods are no longer produced, and there is now a reduction in agricultural produce. For a smaller population.
Sodas are no longer produced and only materials that decompose or allow them produce. No synthetic clothing is produced. Some industries have been taken over by employees. Some are owned by the state. But clearly there are individual owners as well. Overall, the work schedule has been reduced to 20 hours a week. Monopolies have been eliminated by not allowing any one owner to operate more than one company. There is gender equality and women are not independent rules. They exercise power in relationships and at work, so it is said. Clearly there has been a radical reorganization of society. And the population in Ecotopia, which is declining after 20 years, is still led by Vera Alwyn. Ecotopia, like the Green movement, has an ethical orientation. It proposes the need for an eco centric worldview to protect the earth and its species. Citizens have been largely convinced of the greater good. Absent is a serious ecological and social critique of capitalism as a world system. While some of the transformations would fit within a socialist society, there are numerous lacunae in the Ecotopia dream that make us wonder where workers who are not part owners fit in. Has exploitation been eliminated? Is all the labor being done by the white citizens of Ecotopia? What is the relation between class and color in Ecotopia? What about wages? Are there any unions? Have they been able to clean up the rivers, beaches, soils in 20 years? We know there is an internal opposition. Those within Ecotopia who wish to return to things as they were, who seek military support from the US and foresee an armed conflict as a result of what they consider this ecological craziness. But is that the only opposition? True, the west and Northwest were highly industrialized, unlike Cuba, for example. But how? How was acceptance gained from those who previously profited from their private enterprises? What happened to the homeless, the poor, the dispossessed? Did the bosses all pick up and leave? Or were they convinced by the best practices policies of ecotopia? It is only in the Epistle to the Ecotopians that kellenbacher wrote, dated 2012, written right before he passed away, that Callenbach specifically draws upon Marx to remind us that capital has no country. And he adds, quote, we live then in a dark time here on our tiny precious planet. Ecological devastation, political and economic collapse, irreconcilable ideological and religious conflict, poverty, famine, the end of the overshoot of cheap oil based consumer capitalist expansionism. End of quote. Here then, the connections are addressed in a nutshell, the nutshell missing from the rest of the works. Ecological critique is very much a part of contemporary Marxist thought. Ecological Marxists today recognize that the planetary ecological crisis has to be seen in relation to the current capitalist economy. Economy. John Bellamy Foster, for example, makes clear that the present greatest acceleration in the deterioration of the planet's ecosystem must be seen in direct and complex relation to the rise of monopoly capitalism and globalization, as argued by Monthly Review Quote There has so far been little recognition that monopoly finance capitalism and the third technological revolution have produced unique forms of ecological destruction in the past half century.
If Callenbach's works on ecotopia neglect to spell out the specific relation between planetary ecology and capitalism, they do mention in passing that the US is involved in imperialist wars and actions in the global south, in Brazil more specifically specifically, and also in the Middle East. These references allude to the numerous US military adventures that took place in the decade of the 70s. When Ecotopia first appeared. Not only was the US finishing up the Vietnam War, but it was also fomenting and facilitating the military coup against President Allende in Chile. It also assisted the military juntas of Argentina. Argentina during the Dirty War, organized the Contra war against the Sandinistas, assisted Guatemalan military in its war of genocide against the indigenous people of Guatemala, and supported the government of El Salvador in its war against its own peasants, workers, and even the progressive clergy. Of course, the US embargo of Cuba continued. Here we are only recalling US military action in Latin America. But of course a few years later in Afghanistan, the US was supporting Bin Laden against the Russians and Hussein against Iran in the Middle East. The US was also supporting Israel against the dispossessed Palestinians. And in its occupation of Palestinian lands, US interests made their presence known in Africa as well. In the process, the US has always found it useful to other those it seeks to subjugate. The US, as we all know, has even today numerous military bases, some 761 in fact, throughout the world, and presently is more of a military than an economic power, as argued by Harvey Kalinikos and Arrighi, among others. Imperialism, however, is more than military intervention. And as we also know, the US has its finger in many economic pots, supporting transnational corporations that are polluting the soil and depriving natives of water rights. The ecology of the planet requires that we consider the impact of global imperialism, not only in Latin America, but throughout the world. Corporations specifically, and human beings in general, have become the culprits in this destruction of the planet's ecological system. System Environmental historians today suggest that, quote, the Earth is in its sixth great extinction event, with rates of species loss growing rapidly for both terrestrial and marine ecosystems. End of quote. This change in the world's ecosystems marks what is being called the beginning of a new geological epoch or age, the Anthropocene epoch that follows the Holocene epoch that came with the last ice age and the beginning of a relatively warm climate. All human history since before the invention of agriculture is said to have occurred during the Holocene. But now ecological change is being driven by the active interference of humans, and for that reason ours is being called the Anthropocene epoch or as some suggest, another age within the Holocene. But it does not augur well for us long term as a species. We humans collectively are thus largely responsible for the planetary emergency represented by global warming, the melting of the ice in the Arctic, the rising sea levels, the rising carbon emissions, the ocean acidification, the loss of biological diversity, the collapse of the nation's honeybee colonies, the disappearance of fresh water, the deforestation and the growing pollution, to name a few. The problem is clearly worldwide and cannot be contained by the actions of one nation state. It's bigger than that. It may already be too late. If this is the reality of our planet, it is difficult to dream about a better world. It is no wonder then perhaps, that our Latino, Chicano and Latin American fiction presents for the most part a dystopic view that provides post apocalyptic scenes in which all is destroyed, water is poisoned and the Earth scorched, and yet the world is calling for a revolutionary ecological view linked to social transformation. Without it, we do not see a way out. One has to recognize that new imaginings are necessary if we are to forestall a species and planet apocalypse and change the economic and political system. We have to imagine ways to divest ourselves of economic structures that hold us back and that will allow us to transform human relations with nature. That is what is at stake. And calling back, saw that. Thank you.
[00:39:08] Speaker C: You're listening to Sustainability Now. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz, and today's show consists of excerpts of presentations at a 2015 conference, Utopian 50 Years of Imagined Futures in California and at UCSC. The last speaker on the show is Professor Fred Turner from Stanford University.
[00:39:28] Speaker B: I'm going to take us back to a time after a lot of discussion about how bodies matter in utopias. Let me take us back to a time when folks tried to get the body out of the equation. And it's a time when the conditions of our contemporary cyber imaginary get set. And I want to think about how the American counterculture has done that. A brief word about how I got to this stuff. I was a journalist in an earlier life. I taught in a business school. I went back in the mid-90s to graduate school in California in communication with an eye to becoming a professor. And I wandered into a California that completely surprised me. I had just finished a book about how Americans remember the Vietnam War. And in my Vietnam book I had discovered that the computer was the emblem of the Cold War state. It seemed to people at the time to be dehumanizing. Being digitized was a terrible thing. Some of you who were at the Free speech movement in 1964 may remember that people actually wore computer cards when they marched hollerith cards stamped fsm. One of the big important chants during anti war marches was, I am a human being. Do not fold, spindle or mutilate. Computers were the emblem of the Cold War state. So imagine my surprise when I arrive at the University of California, san Diego in 1996 and see things like this. This is wired magazine circa 1967. You can see a sort of 60s imagery here and a 60s imaginary sort of psychedelic color scheme. A round globe that looks a little bit like a tab of ecstasy or a little bit like a millennial's vision of what a tab of acid might look like. And you see a language of world liberation. Only now the fight's happening at the treasury and we're fighting for a new economy. And so I got to wondering, where on earth did we start imagining computers as tools of countercultural change. So I started rummaging the way that journalists do in Wired. And I started seeing that the writers for Wired in the late 1990s all knew each other and they were writing about each other. And they had come together 30 years earlier at the Whole Earth Catalog. And I ended up, to my complete surprise, mapping a social network that stayed together for 30 years with very few changes and that transformed our understanding of computing. Stuart Brand, founder of the Whole earth catalog in 1968 with his wife Lois, went on to edit the Coevolution Quarterly and to help found the Whole Earth Review, which is a paper publication. The well, which is a very important early online community and the global business network. His network also made it possible to get Wired started. Wired was edited by a man named Louis Rosetto, a woman named Jane Metcalf. They couldn't have done it without the Brand network. I was simply astonished. This, it turns out, was the community that gave us some of the following phrases. Electronic frontier, virtual community, and my personal favorite, personal computer. This is the crowd that helped us personalize devices and to imagine them as tools of countercultural change. To understand why they were so important, we need to go back to what the counterculture was. I inherited a story in which the counterculture was a single collaborative movement. You know, you'd march against the war during the day, go home, pull out the bong at night. The notion was that sort of the drug oriented counterculture and the political counterculture were one. It turns out that the counterculture was not one movement, but two. And they were quite distinct. Here in the Bay Area. We might think of them as Berkeley and San Francisco. On the one hand, we have the new left, the Berkeley side. The new Left did politics to change. Politics led marches against the war, struggled, saw itself as the ancestor and replacement to the old left. The new communalists, on the other hand, did something quite different. You may not remember, although some of you might, that between 1966 and 1973 saw the largest wave of commune building in all of American history. Something like a million Americans left their college campuses, left their towns, moved back to the land, or formed collaborative communes in cities. This is an incredible movement. It's incredibly important. Remember that until that time, we are a nation of communes. The Pilgrims were a commune. To have the density of communes that was founded in this period is sort of amazing. Both of these communities were anti bureaucracy, anti big technology, anti mass culture. But it was interesting. Among the new communalists, there was a challenge. And the challenge was, how do we do politics? In a way, that doesn't replicate the hierarchies and the conflicts of mainstream society. You know, the new Left was quite willing to keep doing politics in order to change politics. They just wanted better, more humane parties. The new communalists wanted to leave parties behind entirely. How could they do that? They turned away from big technologies, but they turned directly toward small scale technologies with which to transform their minds. Technologies that I'm going to call technologies of consciousness. These include lsd, stereos, to some degree, automobiles. Why was the VW bus so spectacularly important in that period? In part because it's a technology that allows you to experience mobility and community simultaneously. Why? Why would they turn toward technology? Another thing to know about the generation of 68 is they grew up in the wake of World War II, in the middle of an enormous tech boom. Not just the kind of technology that brought us the atom bomb, but the kind of technology that brought us the first integrated highway system in America. That brought us small record players. My point here is that this generation wanted to push away from mass culture, away from military culture, away from the atom bomb, but not to abandon consumer technologies that had made their lives so pleasurable. In fact, they turned toward consumer technologies as the basis of a new kind of politics, a politics of consciousness. This politics came fairly directly, in the case of the Holder's catalog, out of the work of Buckminster Fuller. Buckminster Fuller was a kind of autodidact architect, journalist, designed and patented. Actually wasn't actually the first to build it. But he patented the geodesic dome which you see behind him there. He had a notion that he called comprehensive design. He said, look, the resources of the world have been misallocated. They've been concentrated in the wrong hands. Your job in this world is to take the resources created by industrial society and valve them down into your own life and turn them into tools for transforming your everyday reality. One of the first places his philosophy took hold was here at Drop City, a flagship commune from 1965 in the Plains of Trinidad, Colorado. These are some early Zomes. They're not quite geodesic domes. Fuller actually gave these folks an award, gave them $500 of his own money. We're trying to build a city that looked like the future. These zones, see the different colored panels? Steve Baer was the designer of these. And what happened on Drop City was that the builders of these zones went out to junkyards locally and chopped the tops off cars. They literally valved the industrial products of the American automobile industry into technologies, rounded homes that might transform Their consciousness give them a new way to live together. One of the most important valvers of industrial technology to the commune movement. With Stuart Brand. I want to focus on this piece, the Whole Earth Catalog. You know, late 1967, early 1968, Stuart has moved back to California. He's living on the edge of the Stanford campus. He's become a merry prankster, a sort of peripheral merry prankster. He's a former sort of multimedia artist. He helps create the acid tests. So he's very active here. And about near late 1967, the hate starts to empty out a little bit. You may remember that the Summer of Love is the summer of 1967. By that time, tourist buses are traveling through San Francisco to look at hippies. It's not very comfortable there anymore. If you want to make an alternative world, it's time to leave the city. So people start heading out, including many people that Stuart knows, and building things like Drop City or the Llama foundation or any number of other communes, mostly through the Southwest. In any case, Stuart wants to figure out how he can help them, and he figures they're going to need tools. And so he and his wife Lois, get up in a pickup truck, drive around to a series of communes and try to figure out what people need. And they bring them various artifacts, and they don't sell very many of those. And they come back and they build using a bit of Brand's inheritance. The Whole Earth Catalog. The Whole Earth Catalog is the most bizarre document. Two things about it are very strange. If you were headed back to the land and you were about to build a farm in the middle of Colorado, what would you want? Just shout out a tool. You might want a hoe. Right? Shovel. Keep going. Saw solar panels. I want a tractor. Most of the tools that were depicted in the Whole Earth Catalog were not anything that we just talked about. They were books. Two thirds of the items in the catalog were books. Why? Because books were what commune people needed to build consciousness. They needed to develop a shared consciousness of the way the world was interconnected. And books were better for that than tractors were. And you can see here. I mean, it's unbelievably strange, right? Here's Norbert Wiener. Norbert Wiener was a military researcher in World War II and the founder of, or at least the corner of the term cybernetics. What's he doing in a countercultural catalog? That's the Hewlett Packard 9100A up above him. The most powerful individual calculator that Hewlett Packard made at the time. I don't know about you living on Drop City. I don't need a massively packed calculator, except insofar as a calculator seems to do the calculations that model the fact that the world really is a circulating system of information. The cybernetic vision holds true. And in the pages of the Whole Earth Catalog, it gets married to this strangely retrograde vision of community. A vision in which we dress like Indians, we do macrame, we do hand work. So the catalog was not a place where you could buy anything. It's a place that pointed you to other things, pointed you to how to buy things. It's for that reason that Steve jobs recently, in 2005, tell an audience at Stanford that it was like Google. Before Google. It was a search engine of a kind. But one of its most important features was that the things that would be searched for were mailed in by users. You would recommend a product for the catalog. The product, if it was accepted, you'd be paid 10 bucks, your name would be printed, and a little statement sometimes. Think back now to 1968. 69. It's a world before the Internet. Long distance phone calls are really expensive. Snail mail is how you confess your love. In that timeframe, the catalog became a map of an otherwise hard to see national counterculture. If you wanted to know where the other hippies were, you got the catalog. It's a very powerful device for that purpose. It's a tool for bringing together individual mindsets and then knitting those individual mindsets together into a collective consciousness of community. So that's 1968, 69. By 1972, the catalog is officially closed. There are other bits and pieces that come out. There are other examples of it that come out later. For various reasons. By the early 1980s, Stewart Brand and the Commune movement are more or less kaput. By the mid-1980s, Reagan is in power. The Commune movement has dissolved. The Vietnam War has ended. What happened back there? And the answer is, there's no answer that they're comfortable with. But emerging around them in the 1980s is a different world, a world of computers that may seem to have some of the same properties that the Whole Earth Catalog had in the past. So the Whole Earth Catalog was technophilic, reversionary, communal alternative. When they woke up in the 1980s in Silicon Valley, the communalists of the 1960s, led by Stuart, the Whole Earth Catalog crew, reimagined computing as a tool for creating virtual community, digitized community. Finally, through computers, we would build the kind of consciousness that we could not build earlier on the communes. I only want to note that the catalog was a snail mail, paper driven event. The well actually existed in digital real time. You would dial up using your modem, remember that sound, and because of that, you were part of an interactive community when you got there. Another thing to remember, in this period, the Internet was not yet a visual medium. It's just text, okay? So you kind of leave your body behind at the same time. You do that in a world that is industrially completely different. 1968, the era of the whole earth catalog. Silicon Valley was largely dominated by large military industrial tech firms. You tended to have a job, you got a job with, say, Boeing, you kept it your life long. By 1985, that wasn't the case. The valley had become transformed. It was a network oriented production space featuring contract employment and microcomputers. In that kind of a world, you needed a network to survive. It wasn't a luxury anymore. And on the well, the odd fusion of countercultural style and networking was enormously powerful. This is Howard Rheingold, a journalist writing in 1990, and I love his language here. He says the well is an outright magical resource professionally. But the best thing is it's a gift economy. It's not a, you know, it's not an economy economy. It's a place where we build things together. We don't do spreadsheets. What you can hear here, ladies and gentlemen, is a repurposing of the countercultural ideal. This is not a business place, says Howard. It isn't even a bar. It's a commune of the ether. Virtual community becomes the governing metaphor by which we understand computer interaction for the first 20 years of the Internet. It's an enormously powerful cultural event. This is John Cote, a former member of the farm commune out in Tennessee. Check out his language. The well is a place where professional and personal interactions overlap, because that's what a village is. You go down to the butcher, the blacksmith, you transact your business. I live in Silicon Valley. I couldn't find a butcher if you paid me, let alone a blacksmith. This is the reversionary language of commune building. Come back now and becoming attached to computers. That language haunts us today. The dream of utopia that animated the communes of the late 1960s is now a linguistic, a cultural, a style resource for the builders of Uber and Airbnb, of Google, of Facebook. The dreams of community that animated us in 1968 have become the language by which computer worlds today are building communities that expose us to exactly the kinds of military industrial monitoring. We protested in 1960. That's where we are. I hope you feel a chill. I feel a chill. And that's why I want to wrap up with a warning. This is the Llama Foundation. These are friends of Stuart Stewart Brands, and they're dancing for world peace under a dome. And I have two very distinct feelings about these people. On the one hand, I love them. I want to dance for world peace under domes myself. Why else are we here? When I dance in the living room with my wife and my daughter and our friends, that's what I'm here for. But as a politics, dancing under domes is radically inadequate. We inhabit a world where we still tend to believe that simply expressing ourselves together, changing the consciousness of those around us, will change the world. That is stunningly naive. When I look at the Occupy movement, I see a movement that claimed the term the 99% and the 1%. And that reframes debate. And that's great. Reframing debate is great. When I look at the Tea Party, based in churches, working in our government, I see a transformation of Congress and through it, a transformation of law. My challenge, ladies and gentlemen, is the challenge of letting go of the utopian dream of a community of consciousness and turning instead toward the building of an America that has people who are different from one another, who work together despite their differences for the common good across their differences. Thank you very much.
[00:55:05] Speaker C: You've been listening to a Sustainability now broadcast of talks from the 2015 conference Utopian 50 Years of Imagined Futures in California and at UCSC. The speakers were science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson, UC San Diego professor Rosaro Sanchez, and Stanford professor Fred Turner. More information about the conference can be found at the Sustainability now podcast sites, where you can also listen to previous shows. Just visit ksquid.org sustainabilitynow or Spotify, YouTube and Pocketcasts and look for Sustainability now on KSQD. So thanks for listening, and thanks to all the staff and volunteers who make KSQUID your community radio station and keep it going. And so, until next every other Sunday, Sustainability Now.
[00:56:00] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find now Temperate zones and tropic climbs and all.
[00:56:07] Speaker B: Through currents and thriving seas and winds.
[00:56:12] Speaker A: Blowing through breathing trees and strongholds on safe sunshine.
Good planets are hard to find. Yeah.
