“Perhaps the greatest utopia would be if we could all realize that no utopia is possible; no place to run, no place to hide, just take care of business here and now.”
A utopia is not a state but rather a state of mind. Composers of utopian and dystopian literature offer an inherent political and social critique of their contexts which allow for an expression of the possibility of either hope or fear. These are two opposing conditions of thought, they are not physical entities in this or another world. The kinetic drive to improve is what will ultimately motivate society away from the predicted disastrous future towards sustainable living. We should fear a dystopian environment like Cormac McMarty’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road presents to us or we should engage in hope through the ideas of Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia for the utopia even if it may never exist.
Currently, the scientific evidence has not been enough to shift our beliefs and behaviours on a scale great enough to steer away from an environmental dystopian disaster. We humans have evolved to hyperbolic discount. INSERT DEFINITION/EXAMPLE. (back burner) Our cognitive biases are limiting our ability to respond to what could be the largest crisis humanity has ever created or had to face.
In the last century, storytellers who created fictional environmental dystopias, emphasise the impact of climate change, shaping the future attitudes of humans in ways scientists may not achieve as successfully. It has been proven that when facts are woven into stories they are more successful in evoking change. Ultimately, narratives affect viewers and this is why they play an important role in spurring climate change action. Greta Thunberg, a German youth environmental activist wants us to “panic, to feel fear everyday. And then act, act as if your house was on fire because it is.” Kinetic action and drive is what she’s after too.
Ecotopia, one novel I will explore, is a visionary piece of literature forming a blueprint of how a utopian state could exist. It generates a state of mind directed towards hope and to move further from a dystopian environment. Another text I will reference, is the post-apocalyptic novel, The Road By Cormac McCarthy who consistently displays what humankind is capable of destroying, in particular nature, in order to satisfy their desires. In recklessly pursuing this path, he highlights the high likelihood of total environmental degradation.
In McCarthy’s The Road, climate change is a backdrop to the narrative’s setting. Critical concerns about climate change being disregarded as high up as the American President, George Bush in 2001, prompted writers such as McCarthy to respond using scientific evidence framed in a fictional world. The Road depicts a realistic wasteland and imagines the reality of life when humanity is deprived of its social, ethical, and material support. The setting depicts a degradation of human morality under the conditions of survival. It lacks state order but envelopes the reader in a mood that dominates feeling anything but satisfaction. These ethical truths manifest in the novel - critiquing the way in which we value our current environment. As the Sydney Morning Herald’s David Astle rightly says “The dark glossary, a dialect forged to articulate our changing planet” is evident in the opening where it captures the dark setting through the hyperbolic simile “nights dark beyond darkness… like the onset of some cold glaucoma.” This mood of death and desolation establishes the characters’ initial struggle to be able to survive in an environmental dystopia. This evokes fear in the reader and hopefully motivates us to recalibrate our worldview. Further we notice McCarthy’s efforts to evoke change as the “gunmetal light” connotes the dull setting. The repetition of the color grey symbolises the bareness of the landscape. Moreover, we are presented with a critique of our current attitudes towards our environment as the punctuation is sparse. This is a metaphor for the sparseness of resources and therefore the ability to sustain life. The structure of diary entries, linear, with flashbacks is effective by further emphasising the limited days they survive. Ultimately, The Road successfully ensures we won’t become desensitised to our capabilities of destruction and hopefully evokes action such as those endorsed by Greta Thunberg.
Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia, both timely and prophetic, is a hopeful antidote to the environmental concerns of the 1970’s, set in an ecologically sound future society. Callenbach offers a visionary blueprint for the survival of our planet and our future. Unlike Hollywood, which has a knack for showing utopian worlds full of robots he challenges this view in the hope that this negative approach could be suppressed. Ecotopia challenges the popular ecological press which made numerous suggestions that weather changes were indicative of potential global cooling and perhaps even another ice age. Although it wasn’t backed up by scientific evidence popular opinion raised levels of concern. Ecotopia is a portrait of what a sustainable world might look like. It attempts to rethink standard processes: this could be household or industrial. It encourages its readers to invent something ‘better’, save money/ energy/ less space/ efficient. It also urges our world rethink this entire panoply of industrial operations that we have. It offers new narratives around the environment in order to focus on what is at stake and to decipher how humans and nature impact on each other. It considers the effect of human development and intervention on accelerating climate change. It considers the climate not just as an environmental issue but also a social, political and economic condition also. It provokes consideration of contemporary relations to the world, including how we might take care of the places we inhabit today. It investigate concrete solutions to environmental and social challenges. It bears witness to the changing character of a landscape under pressure from climate change and development. Thus, it recognise human behaviour is significantly and permanently affecting our planet. Ultimately, with its strength, optimism and urgency, woven through the novel it pushes the conceptual possibilities and accelerates a response to climate change.