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Environmental Utopia (Lisa Garforth, Green Utopias: Environment Hope…
Environmental Utopia
Lisa Garforth, Green Utopias: Environment Hope Before and After Nature, Chapter Two –Environmentalism: From Crisis to Hope, pp. 26-49.
The growth of technological understanding in the 1960s, as well as things like space travel, helped to develop various environmentally conscious attitudes and criticisms in the 1970s and 1980s
As we develop understanding of the damage we do to the environment, those industrial structures that cause the most damage continue out of our control. We recycle like that will stop pollution, but we have very little control over the biggest polluters that are causing the most damage.
As the Brundtland Report explores, we could make the means of production sustainable. But will those in charge of the means of production see that as something worth doing? They can continue on the destructive path, knowing they won't live through the worst of the damage they've done.
Some groups looked at the potential future of humanity based on the continued rate of industrialization and production and found that it was not sustainable in most models.
The Club of Rome's report explored the concept of a utopian future with a smaller population wherein every member of society could be taken care of economically, wherein arts and sciences can continue to be developed due to the problem of population and lack of resources being removed from the equation.
Using authoritarian means to control population and resource use seems like a fantastical solution. How can you ensure that those who are leading the government won't take advantage of that control to gain more power? Once you hand over that control, it would only mean fighting to get it back if those in charge take advantage. Obviously this wouldn't happen in the ideal society, but in any situation, can you really guarantee a good outcome?
When we talk about environmental damage, it's important to remember the ways in which certain people are more affected by these changes. People who can't afford to uproot themselves and move to higher land when the sea level rises, and those who are starving not because they don't grow food but because all the food they grow goes to "progressive" (are we really?) countries.
The idea of the green utopia isn't appealing to those who are rich - especially those who are rich from pollution - because they can afford to pretend it isn't happening, whereas the rest of the population is left to suffer the worst. That's probably why there seems to be so little large-scale change since these ideas in the 70s and 80s - those people are still in control and therefore maintain the damaging systems
Paul J. Ramsey, “‘Improving and Embellishing the Wilderness’: Spreading the Gospel of Proper Land Use, New Harmony, Indiana, 1814–1824,” Educational Studies 50, no. 2 (2014): 146–66.
Westward expansion used colonial land-use rules to try and build the ideal society, and Ramsey focuses on the Harmony Society as a case study.
This looks at how the European colonial standard of land use was implemented in the West and changed the ecological landscape permanently
The change of environment by the people living in it is inevitable, but the European mentality of being entirely separate from nature can allow for a greater exploitation of the land.
The concept of nature as something that needed to be dominated and controlled is something they brought with them, coming from Romantic origins.
Deforestation for crops and pastures ultimately changed the land significantly. While the original layout of the land may not have helped them with their way of living, their actions only really benefitted themselves and actively dismantled the already existing ecosystem
Bill Metcalf, “Utopian Fraud: The Marquis de Rays and La Nouvelle-France," Utopian Studies, vol. 22, 1 (2011), pp. 104-124.
Marquis de Rays bought heavily into colonial ideas, seeing himself as a saviour for disadvantaged groups like poor people. This thinking led him to believe he was meant to create a utopia, which he announced in 1877.
He chose an area near Western Australia but it was owned by the British Empire who refused to allow him to utilize the land. The land they ended up using, New Ireland, was already inhabited by various groups who tended towards conflict and cannibalism, but Marquis de Rays planned to establish a society there with him at the head.
Though the basis of the utopia was French, people from other countries were involved. As Metcalf describes, Italians and other nationalities which were meant to establish the colony based on orders from Marquis de Rays, were dying from diseases and conflict with the Indigenous peoples.
The idea that this was a utopia based on the change of landscape from Europe to the landscape of Papua New Guinea is interesting, as the illnesses and inability to work the land with their inexperience caused the colony to fail. Of course, this was also due to Marquis de Rays lack of leadership and care, but the concept of foreign land being utopia when European colonizers tend to destroy it for its resources rather than cultivate it, is an interesting point against the colonial method.
The colonizing methods used on foreign lands is interesting because it suggest ignorance to the functions of nature. If colonizing a new land meant you could use their resources, why did so many colonizers disregard the destruction that they caused to said resources? Functionally, it makes the colonizing mission much shorter if you exploit the land to the point that it's useless or changed beyond repair.
Marquis de Rays refusal to go to his colony is an indicator of how he saw this as a scam the whole time. For him, the utopia could have been the life he was living with the money he managed to get off of those he scammed, never really intedning to create a functioning utopia.