Word: callenbach
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...When Callenbach began researching the book, he recalled a work he had read while a student at the University of Chicago, Science and Sanity, in which author Alfred Korzybski talked about man's capacity for "non survival" behavior. "He used the term largely in a social sense, but it seemed applicable to a wide range of things that we started doing in this century and that seemed like a good idea at the time, but now persist even when circumstances have changed and the habits have become self-defeating." Callenbach mentions things like nuclear plants and chemical fertilizers that...
...Callenbach began by looking at sewage. "I come from a long line of Calvinist Dutch preachers, and I knew that throwing all of this valuable organic material down the drain was just plain wrong." What he created for Ecotopia was the "stable-state system" -- recycling food wastes and sewage into fertilizer to grow more food. "Then I thought, any group of people sensible enough to get their act together in this way would clearly do a lot of other things differently. So I began to think of things like extruded- plastic houses and wood architecture. And I moved on gradually...
...from America to Ecotopia requires a lot of social reconditioning. All companies are small, worker-owned co-operatives, and the distinction between work and play seems to have vanished. Possible, says Callenbach, when people have freed themselves from large corporations and from cars and TV -- what he * calls "isolating technologies." Americans, he complains, have become a nation of emotionally detached creatures. "Humans like to play and mess around, and yet we are trying to live in the lockstep mode of modern society. No other species would put up with having to sit at a desk all day. And yet here...
Scientists have given Callenbach credit for technical accuracy, and he does seem to have been remarkably prescient in writing about the spread of the garbage- and sewage-recyling ethic, and the growing public demand for "natural" foods. But he doesn't believe America will be ready for some of the more startling sociological changes he predicted until at least 2025. "I am a constitutionally optimistic chap, and I thought at the time I wrote the book that change at those levels would take only a generation -- perhaps it was because of the heady influence...
...Callenbach likes to shock students by telling them, "The challenge of modern life is to make it as emotionally healthy as life in a Stone Age village." Keep that in mind next time you fume over foul air and blaring traffic. Think of your Ecotopian future, smoking a joint on some peaceful municipal waterfront, watching the biodegradable plastic boats...