The Ecological Utopia

Guest Opinion

The Garden of Eden, described in the Book of Genesis in the Bible, includes “every tree that is pleasing to the eyes and good for food.” The departure of Adam and Eve after eating from the prohibited tree was the end of the ecological utopia. Later, in the Book of Isaiah, a future kind of ecological utopia is described: “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together; . . .” But this peaceful dynamic would leave the apex predators in this scenario starving to death; so our ideas of ecological utopia may have unintended consequences.

We thought that planting a hardy ground-covering vine, called kudzu, from Japan and eastern China would save the southern United States from erosion. It was first introduced to the United States in 1876 during the first official World’s Fair as an ornamental plant. Then it was planted widely in the southern United States by the Soil Conservation Service from the 1930s to the 1950s to stop erosion. It was more successful than imagined and often grows at the rate of one foot a day, killing any plant life in its path, including trees by shielding them completely from sunlight. It is an invasive species that is still out of control and spreading. The ecological vision for stopping erosion turned dystopic.

Also in the 1930s, the cane toad, or Bufo toad, was introduced into Florida to kill beetles in sugar cane fields, but it failed to reach the grubs in the ground. Instead, it proliferated and can kill predators and pets with its highly toxic neurotoxin and cardiotoxin — bufotoxin.

Legal Response

The first action was an executive order in 1977, signed by President Jimmy Carter, to prevent the introduction of “exotic species” into the United States. It also extended to states and private citizens. In 1999, President Bill Clinton signed an executive order creating a National Invasive Species Council, with the objective of controlling invasive species and restoring the ecology that these invasive species had disrupted, while revoking the 1977 executive order.

In 2016, President Barack Obama signed an executive order maintaining the council and extending its considerations to include climate change and other policy priorities. Legislative action has been limited to the Invasive Species Act of 1996, which is narrowly focused on preventing zebra mussels and other aquatic invasive species from being brought into United States waters. But these actions fall far short of reversing the damage done by mistaken plans toward an ecological utopia.

Ecological Utopia Literature’s Influence

An early experiment in living simply with nature is Henry David Thoreau’s two-year stay at Walden Pond (1845–1847) and his record of it, Walden (1854). A recurring theme is his effort to be in harmony with nature, not against it. The book has been ranked 64th among the top 100 best nonfiction books of all time.

A genre of ecological utopian literature arose during the environmental revolution of the 1970s. One of the first modern influential texts was Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston (1975). The plot is based on the secession from the United States of Northern California, Oregon, and Washington in 1980. William Weston, a skeptical mainstream media reporter, goes to report on the new region in an imagined future, 1999.

This ecological utopia relies on closed-loop recycling, a ban on cars in city centers, environmentally benign energy, as well as a steady-state economy. A second book, Richard Grove’s Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860, was written in 1995 and argued that environmentalism was intertwined with historical colonialism and that resource extraction was always the priority. He also claimed that he saw tropical islands as ecological utopias that should be saved, despite the fact that they had been sustained over the millennia by the Indigenous people who lived there. This provided the grounding, in many ways, for what has become green theory.

All of these works sought to influence the way humans related to the environment and argued that it should be done differently to reach this ecological utopia. The first part of American exploration by colonists had an objective of conquering nature, overcoming the environment and wrangling it into providing tobacco and food — an idea that continued through the nineteenth century. This, of course, ran contrary to the philosophy of American Indians, who saw humans as part of nature and as students of nature, seeing every part of the ecology as having a lesson to contribute.

The Deep Ecology movement prioritized ecology over human existence, finding that the environment would be better off if humans simply did not exist — the other extreme end of the spectrum. This movement ignored the importance of humans as a part of the ecology, while the colonial approach saw the environment as something to conquer, defeat and subdue.

Today’s Green Movement

Looking to the ecological utopian literature of the 1970s and nonfiction historical accounts, today’s green movement has been formed. Thomas Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded (2008) was the first to use the term “Green New Deal” to describe a radical change from fossil fuels to other forms of energy. Other writers built on this idea, and after a series of extreme weather events in 2018 and 2019, a legislative proposal called the Green New Deal was introduced that captured many of these ideas rooted in Ecotopia and Green Imperialism. In fact, Marius de Geus, a Dutch political philosopher, argues that ecological utopias, or “ecotopias,” are not just idle science fiction but vital sources of inspiration and practical visions for the Green Movement.

The ecological utopian literature quite naturally does not include counterpoints, like the need to maintain an economy that does not plunge the country into economic collapse while seeking ways to move forward with visionary ideas.

A Cautionary Tale

Although none of these books explain how to finance the required federal support for subsidizing green energy and abandoning fossil fuels, it has been largely overlooked that it is our capitalist success that allows us the luxury of subsidizing and experimenting with new technologies that will have less impact on the ecology. In fact, in Callenbach’s Ecotopia, the premise is that states have to exit the existing country to achieve Green nirvana, rejecting America.

Further, these initiatives miss the lessons of attempts to create an ecological utopia by intervening in a problem — in this case, climate change — to change it through geoengineering or the abrupt end of the use of fossil fuels on which our entire economy depends. These examples are analogous to the introduction of an invasive species, with serious consequences, as with kudzu, and even deadly consequences, as with the cane toad, that are likely irreversible and catastrophic.

While a science-fiction ecotopia can provide a starting point for a discussion, the unintended consequences and lessons from the past cannot be overlooked without risking catastrophic results.

To read more articles by Professor Sutton go to:  https://profvictoria.substack.com/ 

Professor Victoria Sutton (Lumbee) is a law professor on the faculty of Texas Tech University. In 2005, Sutton became a founding member of the National Congress of American Indians, Policy Advisory Board to the NCAI Policy Center, positioning the Native American community to act and lead on policy issues affecting Indigenous communities in the United States.