Remembering Ernest Callenbach

It was a little more than two years ago when I first discovered Ecotopia. I happened upon it while browsing through someone's personal library. At first, the format was a little disorienting, but it didn't take long to pick up on the brilliance and hope hidden away on the pages of this 40-year-old novel.

At the time, I did not yet know that I was electrosensitive, or that radio frequencies and electromagnetic fields in my office and home were making me sick. All I knew was that I seemed to feel much better when walking in the woods. Then, something in Ecotopia jumped out at me and permanently changed my life.

San Francisco, May 10. Ecotopians claim to to have sifted through modern technology and rejected huge tracts of it, because of its ecological harmfulness. However, despite this general technological austerity, they employ video devices even more extensively than we do. Feeling that they should transport their bodies only when it's a pleasure, they seldom travel "on business" in our manner. Instead, they tend to transact buiness by using their picturephones. These employ the same cables that provide television connections; the whole country, except for a few isolated rural spots, is wired with cable. (There is no microwave broadcasting.)

A couple months would pass before the significance of this passage would hit me. When it did, I began researching, measuring and avoiding EMF practically full time, since I could no longer work in an office. The more I learned, the more I wondered, why has our society ignored the decades of knowledge that EMFs are harmful to humans and the environment?

Last December, I was reading a newer edition of Ecotopia and noticed something interesting. "There is no microwave broadcasting" had been changed to "There is no ordinary broadcasting."

I decided to write to the author to ask him about the change. He was kind enough to write back within a few days.

Thanks for the blog post. I tried to play the Ecotopia game in its early phase, reluctantly entering the clutches of Facebook (which it turns out you can never really escape) but it seemed feeble; have you tried to actually play it???

When I wrote the original, I was suspicious about having a lot of EMF around in any form, and the change (which I must have made---nobody else edited anything) was probably to emphasize that Ecotopia didn't like emissions of ANY kind much.

I don't really know much about microwaves, and it sounds like you do, so dunno what could come of a conversation. I'm having health problems, but if you want you could email me a couple of questions.

Do you know the EON website? They have been following the Smart Meters controversy and much else.

Best wishes for 2012, EC

A few months later, Mr. Callenbach passed away at the age of 83. A message was discovered on his computer afterwards, called Epistle to the Ecotopians.

In part, it reads:

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.

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.

IT IS NEVER EASY OR SIMPLE. But already we see, under the crumbling surface of the conventional world, promising developments: new ways of organizing economic activity (cooperatives, worker-owned companies, nonprofits, trusts), new ways of using low-impact technology to capture solar energy, to sequester carbon dioxide, new ways of building compact, congenial cities that are low (or even self-sufficient) in energy use, low in waste production, high in recycling of almost everything. A vision of sustainability that sometimes shockingly resembles ECOTOPIA is tremulously coming into existence at the hands of people who never heard of the book.

Humans tend to try to manage things: land, structures, even rivers. We spend enormous amounts of time, energy, and treasure in imposing our will on nature, on preexisting or inherited structures, dreaming of permanent solutions, monuments to our ambitions and dreams. But in periods of slack, decline, or collapse, our abilities no longer suffice for all this management. We have to let things go.

All things “go” somewhere: they evolve, with or without us, into new forms. So as the decades pass, we should try not always to futilely fight these transformations. As the Japanese know, there is much unnoticed beauty in wabi-sabi — the old, the worn, the tumble-down, those things beginning their transformation into something else. We can embrace this process of devolution: embellish it when strength avails, learn to love it.

There is beauty in weathered and unpainted wood, in orchards overgrown, even in abandoned cars being incorporated into the earth. Let us learn, like the Forest Service sometimes does, to put unwise or unneeded roads “to bed,” help a little in the healing of the natural contours, the re-vegetation by native plants. Let us embrace decay, for it is the source of all new life and growth.

Ernest Callenbach, 1929-2012