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style="FONT-STYLE: normal; DISPLAY: inline; FONT-FAMILY: 'Calibri'; COLOR: #000000; FONT-SIZE: small; FONT-WEIGHT: normal; TEXT-DECORATION: none">Ernest
Callenbach, author of Ecotopia and Ecotopia Emerging, died this past April 12th.
<BR><BR>The document linked below was found on his computer, titled the “Epistle
to the Ecotopians.” I encountered Ecotopia in the mid 1970s, at the same time
that I met the Whole Earth Catalog series, its sister magazine Co-evolution
Quarterly, and experimented with vegetarianism thanks to the cookbook Laurel’s
Kitchen. While the vegetarian phase lasted only a few months, Laurel’s Kitchen –
especially its essay, “The Keeper of the Keys” -- gave me a lifetime of words to
describe my feelings about food that grew out of my experience being raised on a
farm in southwest Oklahoma in the 1950s-early 1970s. <BR><BR>Thus it came to
pass that I was “ruined for life”. Things got even worse when Callenbach wrote
Ecotopia Emerging in 1981. lol.<BR><BR>Here is the wikipedia article about him.
<A
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Callenbach">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Callenbach</A><BR><BR>LA
Times obituary: <A
href="http://articles.latimes.com/2012/apr/25/local/la-me-ernest-callenbach-20120425">http://articles.latimes.com/2012/apr/25/local/la-me-ernest-callenbach-20120425</A><BR><BR>Bob
Waldrop, OKC<BR><BR><A
href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175538/">http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175538/</A><BR><BR>[This
document was found on the computer of Ecotopia author Ernest Callenbach
(1929–2012) after his death.]<BR> <BR>To all brothers and sisters who hold the
dream in their hearts of a future world in which humans and all other beings
live in harmony and mutual support—a world of sustainability, stability, and
confidence. A world something like the one I described, so long ago, in Ecotopia
and Ecotopia Emerging.<BR><BR>As I survey my life, which is coming near its end,
I want to set down a few thoughts that might be useful to those coming after. It
will soon be time for me to give back to Gaia the nutrients that I have used
during a long, busy and happy life. I am not bitter or resentful at the
approaching end; I have been one of the extraordinarily lucky ones. So it
behooves me here to gather together some thoughts and attitudes that may prove
useful in the dark times we are facing: a century or more of exceedingly
difficult times.<BR>How will those who survive manage it? What can we teach our
friends, our children, our communities? Although we may not be capable of
changing history, how can we equip ourselves to survive it?<BR><BR>I contemplate
these questions in the full consciousness of my own mortality. Being offered an
actual number of likely months to live, even though the estimate is uncertain,
mightily focuses the mind. On personal things, of course, on loved ones and even
loved things, but also on the Big Picture.<BR><BR>But let us begin with last
things first, for a change. The analysis will come later, for those who wish
it.<BR><BR>Hope. Children exude hope, even under the most terrible conditions,
and that must inspire us as our conditions get worse. Hopeful patients recover
better. Hopeful test candidates score better. Hopeful builders construct better
buildings. Hopeful parents produce secure and resilient children. In groups, an
atmosphere of hope is essential to shared successful effort: “Yes, we can!” is
not an empty slogan, but a mantra for people who intend to do something
together—whether it is rescuing victims of hurricanes, rebuilding flood-damaged
buildings on higher ground, helping wounded people through first aid, or
inventing new social structures (perhaps one in which only people are “persons,”
not corporations). We cannot know what threats we will face. But ingenuity
against adversity is one of our species’ built-in resources. We cope, and faith
in our coping capacity is perhaps our biggest resource of all.<BR><BR>Mutual
support. The people who do best at basic survival tasks (we know this
experimentally, as well as intuitively) are cooperative, good at teamwork, often
altruistic, mindful of the common good. In drastic emergencies like hurricanes
or earthquakes, people surprise us by their sacrifices—of food, of shelter, even
sometimes of life itself. Those who survive social or economic collapse, or
wars, or pandemics, or starvation, will be those who manage scarce resources
fairly; hoarders and dominators win only in the short run, and end up dead,
exiled or friendless. So, in every way we can we need to help each other, and
our children, learn to be cooperative rather than competitive; to be helpful
rather than hurtful; to look out for the communities of which we are a part, and
on which we ultimately depend.<BR><BR>Practical skills. With the movement into
cities of the US population, and much of the rest of the world’s people, we have
had a massive de-skilling in how to do practical tasks. When I was a boy in the
country, all of us knew how to build a tree house, or construct a small hut, or
raise chickens, or grow beans, or screw pipes together to deliver water. It was
a sexist world, of course, so when some of my chums in eighth grade said we
wanted to learn girls’ “home ec” skills like making bread or boiling eggs, the
teachers were shocked, but we got to do it. There was widespread competence in
fixing things—impossible with most modern contrivances, of course, but still
reasonable for the basic tools of survival: pots and pans, bicycles, quilts,
tents, storage boxes.<BR><BR>We all need to learn, or relearn, how we would keep
the rudiments of life going if there were no paid specialists around, or means
to pay them. Every child should learn elementary carpentry, from layout and
sawing to driving nails. Everybody should know how to chop wood safely, and
build a fire. Everybody should know what to do if dangers appear from fire,
flood, downed electric wires and the like. Taking care of one another is one
practical step at a time, most of them requiring help from at least one other
person; survival is a team sport.<BR><BR>Organize. Much of the American
ideology, our shared and usually unspoken assumptions, is hyper-individualistic.
We like to imagine that heroes are solitary, have superpowers and glory in
violence, and that if our work lives and business lives seem tamer, underneath
they are still struggles red in blood and claw. We have sought solitude on the
prairies, as cowboys on the range, in our dependence on media (rather than real
people), and even in our cars, armored cabins of solitude. We have an uneasy and
doubting attitude about government, as if we all reserve the right to be
outlaws. But of course human society, like ecological webs, is a complex dance
of mutual support and restraint, and if we are lucky it operates by laws openly
arrived at and approved by the populace.<BR><BR>If the teetering structure of
corporate domination, with its monetary control of Congress and our other
institutions, should collapse of its own greed, and the government be unable to
rescue it, we will have to reorganize a government that suits the people. We
will have to know how to organize groups, how to compromise with other groups,
how to argue in public for our positions. It turns out that “brainstorming,” a
totally noncritical process in which people just throw out ideas wildly, doesn’t
produce workable ideas. In particular, it doesn’t work as well as groups in
which ideas are proposed, critiqued, improved, debated. But like any group
process, this must be protected from domination by powerful people and also
over-talkative people. When the group recognizes its group power, it can limit
these distortions. Thinking together is enormously creative; it has huge
survival value.<BR><BR>Learn to live with contradictions. These are dark times,
these are bright times. We are implacably making the planet less habitable.
Every time a new oil field is discovered, the press cheers: “Hooray, there is
more fuel for the self-destroying machines!” We are turning more land into
deserts and parking lots. We are wiping out innumerable species that are not
only wondrous and beautiful, but might be useful to us. We are multiplying to
the point where our needs and our wastes outweigh the capacities of the
biosphere to produce and absorb them. And yet, despite the bloody headlines and
the rocketing military budgets, we are also, unbelievably, killing fewer of each
other proportionately than in earlier centuries. We have mobilized enormous
global intelligence and mutual curiosity, through the Internet and outside it.
We have even evolved, spottily, a global understanding that democracy is better
than tyranny, that love and tolerance are better than hate, that hope is better
than rage and despair, that we are prone, especially in catastrophes, to be
astonishingly helpful and cooperative.<BR>
<P align=left color="#000000" avgcert??><FONT face=Arial>more at the link
above.</FONT></P><!-- end group email --></DIV></DIV></DIV></BODY></HTML>