Three cheery visions of the future:
102. Joni Mitchell, “Big Yellow Taxi” (1970):
103. C. W. McCall, “There Won’t Be No Country Music” (1976):
104. Afrika Bambaataa and Time Zone (with John Lydon a.k.a. Johnny Rotten), “World Destruction” (1984):
Tag Archives | Free the Earth
Dialectical Utopianism: Who Said This?
There is no such thing as a pocket utopia.
Consider the French aristocracy before the revolution – well fed, well clothed, well housed, well educated – brilliant lives. One could say they lived in a little utopia of their own. But we don’t say that, because we know their lives rested on a base of human misery, peasants toiling in ignorance and suffering. And we think of the French aristocracy as parasites, brutal, stupid, tyrannical.
But now the world is a single economy. Global village, made in Thailand! And we stand on little islands of luxury, while the rest – great oceans of abject misery, bitter war, endless hunger. We say, But they are none of our affair! We have our island. …
What a cheat utopias are, no wonder people hate them. Engineer some fresh start, an island, a new continent, dispossess them, give them a new planet sure! So they don’t have to deal with our history. Ever since More they’ve been doing it: rupture, clean cut, fresh start.
So the utopias in books are pocket utopias too. Ahistorical, static, why should we read them? They don’t speak to us trapped in this world as we are, we look at them in the same way we look at the pretty inside of a paperweight, snow drifting down, so what? It may be nice but we’re stuck here and no one’s going to give us a fresh start, we have to deal with history as it stands, no freer than a wedge in a crack. …
Must redefine utopia. It isn’t the perfect end-product of our wishes, define it so and it deserves the scorn of those who sneer when they hear the word. No. Utopia is the process of making a better world, the name for one path history can take, a dynamic, tumultuous, agonizing process, with no end. Struggle forever. … Utopia is when our lives matter. …
I grew up in utopia, I did. California when I was a child was a child’s paradise, I was healthy, well fed, well clothed, well housed, I went to school and there were libraries with all the world in them and after school I played in orange groves and in Little League and in the band and down at the beach and every day was an adventure, and when I came home my mother and father created a home as solid as rock, the world seemed solid! And it comes to this, do you understand me – I grew up in utopia.
But I didn’t. Not really. Because while I was growing up in my sunny seaside home much of the world was in misery, hungry, sick, living in cardboard shacks, killed by soldiers or their own police. I had been on an island. In a pocket utopia. It was the childhood of someone born into the aristocracy, and understanding that I understood the memory of my childhood differently; but still I know what it was like, I lived it and I know! And everyone should get to know that, not in the particulars, of course, but in the general outline, in the blessing of a happy childhood, in the lifelong sense of security and health.
So I am going to work for that. And if – if! if someday the whole world reaches utopia, then that dream California will become a precursor, a sign of things to come, and my childhood is redeemed. I may never know which it will be, it might not be clear until after we’re dead, but the future will judge us! They will look back and judge us, as aristocrats’ refuge or emerging utopia, and I want utopia, I want that redemption and so I’m going to stay here and fight for it, because I was there and I lived it and I know.
Reign of Fire
[cross-posted at C4SS and BHL]
Are the wildfires that have been devastating California a gift from government? So argues William Finnegan in a recent article, “California Burning.”
According to Finnegan, the seeds of disaster were planted when the mission of the U.S. Forest Service was expanded in the early decades of the 20th century:
The Forest Service, no longer just a land steward, became the federal fire department for the nation’s wildlands. Its policy was total suppression of fires …. Some experienced foresters saw problems with this policy. It spoke soothingly to public fears, but periodic lightning-strike fires are an important feature of many ecosystems, particularly in the American West. Some “light burning,” they suggested, would at least be needed to prevent major fires. William Greeley, the chief of the Forest Service in the 1920s, dismissed this idea as “Paiute forestry.”
Finnegan explains the “Paiute” reference:
Native Americans had used seasonal burning for many purposes, including hunting, clearing trails, managing crops, stimulating new plant growth, and fireproofing areas around their settlements. The North American “wilderness” encountered by white explorers and early settlers was in many cases already a heavily managed, deliberately diversified landscape.
(These facts incidentally give the lie to the common notion that American indigenous peoples were not entitled to property claims to their lands because they had not engaged in sufficiently transformative labour upon them.)
William Greeley
Greeley’s sneering dismissal of “Paiute forestry” was ill-placed. As Finnegan reports:
The total suppression policy of the Forest Service and its allies (the National Park Service, for instance) was exceptionally successful, reducing burned acreage by 90 percent, and thus remaking the landscape again – creating what Paul Hessburg, a research ecologist at the Forest Service, calls an “epidemic of trees.”
Preserving trees was not, however, the goal of the Forest Service, which worked closely with timber companies to clear-cut enormous swaths of old-growth forest. (Greeley, when he left public service, joined the timber barons.) The idea was to harvest the old trees and replace them with more efficiently managed and profitable forests. This created a dramatically more flammable landscape.
In other words, an alliance between big business and big government is responsible for rendering America’s wilderness areas exceptionally vulnerable to massive wildfires.
Sun Lights Up the Daytime
Clarificatory note: I’m not making fun of global warming; I’m just making fun of Al Gore.
Carnality Elsewhere, Part 2
Race, gender, post-scarcity utopianism, and the philosophy of personal identity in my second Oz post.
iRad I.3 in Print, iRad I.2 Online
The third issue (Spring 2013) of The Industrial Radical will be back from the printers and on its way to subscribers shortly, featuring articles by Less Antman, Jason Lee Byas, Kevin Carson, Nathan Goodman, Anthony Gregory, Trevor Hultner, Charles Johnson, Joshua Katz, Thomas L. Knapp, Abby Martin, Chad Nelson, Sheldon Richman, Jeremy Weiland, and your humble correspondent, on topics ranging from NSA surveillance and whistleblowing, the Turkish revolt, the Boston lockdown, the Keystone XL pipeline, intellectual property, and the futility of gun control in an age of 3-D printing, to compulsory schooling, American militarism, conscription, worker exploitation, property rights, prison ethics, rape culture, the pros and cons of communism, and the dubious legacy of Margaret Thatcher.
With each new issue published, we post the immediately preceding issue online. Hence a free pdf file of our second issue (Winter 2013) is now available here. (See the first issue also.)
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