Sidebar
This is an old revision of the document!
Then and Now
Note by Richard Greeman
I originally wrote this rather crude attempt at describing a future ecotopian world ten years ago in the traditional form of a fictional dream. Aware of its inadequacies and believing in collective creation, I posted it on a Wiki and invited some friends to join in elaborating it; however, this project never really got off the ground. Today I am proposing it again, somewhat revised and updated, as a kind of outline or canvas which we Future Historians can use as a base for creating our own version of a possible “better world.” It is at best a bare-bones first draft, but it will probably be easier for us to change, elaborate, even transform it, than starting from scratch.
So go to it, comrades and colleagues! Register above and then refer to the instructions to edit existing pages or add new ones to this Wiki.
I have of course had to replace the traditional narrative frame of the time-traveler’s first-hand account of a visit to Ecotopia, to that of Future Historians looking backward from 2117 to 2017, and this in itself has proven to be a great improvement. It inspired me to propose a new title, Then and Now, and to use our historical perspective as Future Historians to contrast the conditions of 2017 to those of “today” in 2117. This method brings out one of the two main functions of utopian fiction, which - along with proposing an alternative world - provides an ironic critique of the present state of affairs. Thus, Thomas More’s 1515 Utopia famously begins with a description of Tudor England as a “barbarous land where “sheep eat men” because, through enclosures by landlords, thousands of peasants were being driven off their farms to make room for the profitable grazing of sheep, only to be hanged as thieves and vagabonds if they steal food to survive.
Similarly, on the same topic of agriculture, we can describe the world of 2017 as a place where peasants are driven off the land to graze cattle for McDonald's burgers, where peasants are legally deprived of the right to plant their own seeds and forced to buy them from global monopolies like Montsanto, where peasants routinely commit suicide to escape the overwhelming burdon of debt, where traditional subsistance farmers are ruined by the dumping of huge amounts of cheap industrially-produced corn into local markets, where vast factory-farms, owned by banks and conglomerates, transform inputs of petroleum-based chemical fertilizers and pesticides into mega-tons of uniformly tastless produce designed to attract the eye and to remain salable for weeks after harvesting, where agricultural products are transported thousands of miles to markets at a huge cost in carbon pollution, where monopolistic distribution chains pay farmers ridiculously low prices for their produce and suck up enormous profits overcharging custormers, where nearly half of this excess produce goes to waste while famines rage across half the world, where food riots break out periodically, and where the extraction of petroleum for industrial agriculture and the clear-cutting of forests for profitable luxury crops like palm oil contribute massively to global warming and climate catastrophe.
We Future Historians then present the world of 2117 as a place where vast desert lands have been reclaimed through irrigation and the revival of long-dormant native seeds, where new forests have been planted to halt erosion, prevent desertification, and absorb CO2 while releasing oxygen, where animal and vegetable waste matter is recycled as nature fertilizer, where permaculture techniques have replaced chemical fertilizers and pesticides, where small farmers flourish and provide fresh, healthy, seasonal produce to local markets which also serve to unite communities, etc, etc. All this is not only possible, it is already actually happening in the interstices of capitalist society, visible elements of the new world growing within the old.
NB: I just wrote this riff on agriculture off the top of my head in a few minutes, and I’m by no means a specialist! I assume the same “Then and Now” techniques could be applied to the subjects of energy (e.g. the Schwartzmans’ “Solar Communism”, transportation, democracy, and most of the other topics we will be studying.
R.G. NEW NOTE (Sept 30)
Eager to hear what you Future Historians think of the very amateurish sketchpad I am putting forward as a 'canvas' for first draft on which to elaborate our narrative, for after the collapse of Communism and now of neoliberalism, the world is in search of a new narrative.
I only just now converted it from the classic 'dreamer/visitor to utopia' formula to the Future Historians idea. An improvement.
Now if you look at the two parts of the WIKI, you will see that I originally wrote separately the Histories of Revolutionary Emergence and the sketch of ecotopian worlds (now titled “Then and Now”.
But later I had the idea of weaving the History narrative into the Ecotopia picture narrative, piece by piece. The dreamer/visitor is shown various wonders (e.g. solar energy etc everywhere) and his guide explains to him how humanity got from There (the dreamer's 21st Century) to Here. The great advantage of this method is that the History narrative does not have to be coherent and complete, just suggestive. We don't have to go into too much detail, but can get away with hinting.
Now that we're looking at “Then and Now” as the frame, a similar strategy might be possible. On the energy question, for example, we could combine two of Schwartzman's scenarios so as to satisfy different outlooks : social movements succeed in forcing some improvements before the overthrow of capitalism and then after the Emergence they get developed full force.
With this method, all we need to do put the various Topics in a certain order, gather our evidence, and then, as Historians present the narrative as a topically-organized history. Of course the idea of Revolutionary Emergence is always present as the hinge between Then and Now, but not necessarily spelled out chronologically as a day to day year to year chronicle, which it would be foolhardy to try to imagine (or would take the genius of an ES Robinson).
By Golly! I think this may be the solution to something that I was not happy with from the start. A single narrative only.
This plan came to me this morning emailing to Dickie! Thanks to the stimulation of him and the group, we are now better visualize what our finished product should look like and how to put it together. The invisible power of collective creation.
So we can cut up the present Histories narrative (including the Computer Game that Saved the World) into Topics (BvBt would go under “Internet”) and develop some new topics on the basis of episodes in the Histories (for example on Prisons and Crime, which we were missing). The Topic of Women is already big in the both the History narrative and the Study Group.
Basically, a scissors and paste job to begin with. Then we will have the kind of 'canvas' on which we can really go to town. Hooray!!!!!
All power to the imagination!
And Go Team!
