Just over a month ago, a sad event was overlooked amid the general nonsense distracting the country. Part of the tragedy is how petty most of today’s squabbles may seem compared to the vision of Ernest Callenbach, who passed away on April 16:

Ernest Callenbach, the author of the 1975 novel “Ecotopia,” the tale of an awakening paradise in the Pacific Northwest that developed a cult following as a harbinger of the environmental movement, died on April 16 at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 83.

I read Ecotopia in 1997, when I was around 23 years old and ridiculously idealistic. The book’s concept of a utopian society built around sustainability was irresistible to me.

Written in the throes of the Vietnam War, “Ecotopia” tells of a secessionist nation — carved from what was once Oregon, Washington and Northern California — that by 1999 has evolved toward a “stable state” of bioregionalism, in which each territory cultivates its distinct ecological character.

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The novel is told through the accounts of a newspaper reporter who is sent to Ecotopia two decades after it seceded from an economically collapsing United States. Ecotopians realized just in time, the reporter writes, that “financial panic could be turned to advantage if the new nation could be organized to devote its real resources of energy, knowledge, skills and materials to the basic necessities of survival.”

The book describes a society in which recycling is a way of life, gas-powered cars are replaced by electric cars (although most people walk or commute on high-speed magnetic-levitation trains) and bicycles are placed in public spaces to be borrowed at will. In Ecotopia, solar energy is commonplace, organic food is locally grown and, instead of petrochemical fertilizers, processed sewage is used to cultivate crops.

It’s been almost 15 years since I read the book, and I still have that same copy (I tend to hoard books). I will admit that the more overtly harmonious aspects of the book do not seem as plausible to me now as they did in my just-out-of-college, let’s-go-change-the-world afterglow, but I still admire the mind that conceived it.

After his death, a document was found on his computer that has been published several places. I’m not sure if he had titled the document. It appears on AlterNet as “Surviving America’s Decline” and on the Huffington Post as “Epistle to the Ecotopians.” He lists five principles people should follow, and it is as good a list as any I’ve seen.

First, he talks about the importance of hope:

We cannot know what threats we will face. But ingenuity against adversity is one of our species’ built-in resources. We cope, and faith in our coping capacity is perhaps our biggest resource of all.

Next he discusses the need for mutual support:

Those who survive social or economic collapse, or wars, or pandemics, or starvation, will be those who manage scarce resources fairly; hoarders and dominators win only in the short run, and end up dead, exiled, or friendless. So, in every way we can we need to help each other, and our children, learn to be cooperative rather than competitive; to be helpful rather than hurtful; to look out for the communities of which we are a part, and on which we ultimately depend.

Practical skills, of course, are a necessity, and something in ever-shorter supply:

We all need to learn, or relearn, how we would keep the rudiments of life going if there were no paid specialists around, or means to pay them. Every child should learn elementary carpentry, from layout and sawing to driving nails. Everybody should know how to chop wood safely, and build a fire. Everybody should know what to do if dangers appear from fire, flood, electric wires down, and the like. Taking care of each other is one practical step at a time, most of them requiring help from at least one other person; survival is a team sport.

We need to organize, because nothing we ever do is truly done alone:

Much of the American ideology, our shared and usually unspoken assumptions, is hyper-individualistic. We like to imagine that heroes are solitary, have super powers, and glory in violence, and that if our work lives and business lives seem tamer, underneath they are still struggles red in blood and claw…But of course human society, like ecological webs, is a complex dance of mutual support and restraint, and if we are lucky it operates by laws openly arrived at and approved by the populace.

Finally, he says, we must “learn to live with contradictions:”

These are dark times, these are bright times. We are implacably making the planet less habitable…We are multiplying to the point where our needs and our wastes outweigh the capacities of the biosphere to produce and absorb them. And yet, despite the bloody headlines and the rocketing military budgets, we are also, unbelievably, killing fewer of each other proportionately than in earlier centuries. We have mobilized enormous global intelligence and mutual curiosity, through the Internet and outside it. We have even evolved, spottily, a global understanding that democracy is better than tyranny, that love and tolerance are better than hate, that hope is better than rage and despair, that we are prone, especially in catastrophes, to be astonishingly helpful and cooperative.

He goes on to offer a “capsule history” based on the course of American from his birth in 1929 until today. He says he was born at a time when rural American populations tended to be “poor, barely literate, ill-informed, short-lived.” The cities, meanwhile, had all the manufacturing, under the control of the “‘robber baron’ capitalists.”

World War II brought wide-scale industrialization to parts of the country that had not seen it, and sparked the birth of the American middle class. “Thanks to strong unions and a sympathetic government,” he says, “this prosperity was widely shared: a huge working middle class evolved — tens of millions of people could afford (on one wage) a modest house, a car, perhaps sending a child to college.”

This persisted, he says, until around 1973, when wages began to stagnate and both politics and the economy began to shift again, in a series of changes that persist today:

In the next epoch, which we are still in and which may be our last as a great nation, capitalists who grew rich and powerful by making things gave way to a new breed: financiers who grasped that you could make even more money by manipulating money. (And by persuading Congress to subsidize them — the system should have been called Subsidism, not Capitalism.) They had no concern for the productivity of the nation or the welfare of its people; with religious fervor, they believed in maximizing profit as the absolute economic goal. They recognized that, by capturing the government through the election finance system and removing government regulation, they could turn the financial system into a giant casino.

This has put us, as a country, between the needs of both current and future generations, and the whims of a dying elite:

And so we have returned, in a sort of terrible circle, to something like my boyhood years, when President Roosevelt spoke in anger of “one third of a nation ill-housed, ill-fed, ill-clothed.” A large and militant contingent of white, mostly elderly, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant right wingers, mortally threatened by their impending minority status and pretending to be liberty-lovers, desperately seek to return us still further back.

He is not without hope, but he identifies a central facet of what I might call the current “conservative” mode of thought, namely American exceptionalism, as both a scam and an impediment to real progress:

Americans like to think of ours as an exceptional country, immune through geographical isolation and some kind of special virtue to the tides of history. Through the distorted lens of our corporate media, we possess only a distorted view of what the country is really like now. In the next decades, we shall see whether we indeed possess the intelligence, the strength, and the mutual courage to break through to another positive era.

He may not have had the same level of optimism as when he wrote and published Ecotopia, and he says as much. His prescription for how to move forward is rather vague, but then it would be impossible to articulate a single solution, or even a set of solutions, to such a complex set of problems. He hits on some major points, though:

Since I wrote Ecotopia, I have become less confident of humans’ political ability to act on commonsense, shared values. Our era has become one of spectacular polarization, with folly multiplying on every hand. That is the way empires crumble: they are taken over by looter elites, who sooner or later cause collapse. But then new games become possible, and with luck Ecotopia might be among them.

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.

Further reading:

The Ecotopiast Who Glimpsed the Future, Mark Bittman, New York Times, May 8, 2012

Technology has proved it can transform the world overnight — so why not be optimistic? Charlie Jane Anders, io9, October 27, 2011

Whither Utopia? Angie Smibert, The League of Extraordinary Writers, June 10, 2010