Utopies Ecologiques

A short study of ecological utopias in literature. After a brief consideration of the pastoral tradition from classical times up to the Romantic Age, the essay considers the American pastoral tradition, from Jefferson up to the present day. In most of this literature pastoral hankerings are solitary matters, with lone heroes fleeing the onrush of civilisation by escaping into the fast-disappearing wilderness. Utopian visions of a transformation of society as a whole tended, in American literature, to be on the side of technology, as in Edward Bellamy’s LOOKING BACKWARD. The first true Ecotopian novel was written in England in response to Bellamy’s vision: William Morris’s NEWS FROM NOWHERE (1890). Morris’s vision is of a re-countrified England. The central concept of the novel is the notion that contact with nature will ensure a fruitful and healthy life. There is undoubtedly an escapist element in the novel, which fails to convince the reader, for example, that the society depicted could actually manage to feed, clothe and heat itself adequately throughout the year. There were no immediate successors to Morris’s ecological utopia. In the 20th century, as environmental problems grew more pressing, writers voiced their concerns by writing dystopian visions of the future, as in the works of Huxley, Orwell, Brunner, Dick, Walter Miller and David Brin. Propositional imaginative writing is much rarer. The major work in this sense is Ernst Callenbach’s novel, Ecotopia (1978). Callenbach adopts the traditional device of the sceptical narrator who is gradually converted to the ideals of the society he observes. The novel has a sharper and more practical edge to it than Morris’s, as he even finds a way to accommodate the aggressive instinct in man, which is allowed to expend itself in ritual tribal wars.