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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Environmentalism has relentlessly warned about the dire consequences of abusing and exploiting the planet's natural resources, imagining future wastelands of ecological depletion and social chaos. But it has also generated rich new ideas about how humans might live better with nature.
Green Utopias explores these ideas of environmental hope in the post-war period, from the environmental crisis to the end of nature. Using a broad definition of Utopia as it exists in Western policy, theory and literature, Lisa Garforth explains how its developing entanglement with popular culture and mainstream politics has shaped successive green future visions and initiatives. In the face of apocalyptic, despairing or indifferent responses to contemporary ecological dilemmas, utopias and the utopian method seem more necessary than ever.
This distinctive reading of green political thought and culture will appeal across the social sciences and humanities to all interested in why green utopias continue to matter in the cultivation of ecological values and the emergence of new forms of human and non-human well-being.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
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Table of Contents
Title page
Copyright page
Acknowledgements
1: Introduction: Utopia, Environment and Nature
Other green worlds
Thinking with utopias
Ideal natures: entanglements of environment and utopia
Before and after the end of nature
Note
2: Environmentalism: From Crisis to Hope
Whole earth, new futures
The limits to growth and the apocalyptic horizon
Sustainable development: paths to a liveable future
From limits to sustainability
Notes
3: Deep Ecology: Wild Nature, Radical Visions
Crisis, culture and consciousness
Deep green philosophy and utopian desire
Ecopolitics and utopian visions
The value of the ecocentric utopia
Notes
4: Utopian Fiction: Imagining the Sustainable Society
Reading ecotopian fiction
Three ecotopias
Green utopias: critical and experiential
Inhabiting utopia
Notes
5: No Future: Green Utopias between Apocalypse and Adaptation
Rewriting crisis
Coming to terms with climate change
Apocalypse now and always
Green hope after the future
Ecological modernization and immanent apocalyptics
Utopia in Anthropocene fictions
Wicked problems and eternal return
Notes
6: After Nature: Ecological Utopianism from Limits to Loss
From no future to no nature
Mourning the end of nature: loss and hope
Celebrating the end of nature: new materialisms, new possibilities
Utopian prospects: nature's absent presence in speculative fiction
Green utopianism after the end
Notes
7: Conclusion: Long Live the Green Utopia?
Note
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Start Reading
CHAPTER 1
Index
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Copyright page
Copyright © Lisa Garforth 2018
The right of Lisa Garforth to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2018 by Polity Press
Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8473-4
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8474-1(pb)
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Acknowledgements
This book draws together research and writing from more than fifteen years of thinking about environmental utopianism. Over that time I have benefitted from the wisdom and ideas of many people. I want to especially mention Andy Tudor, Ruth Levitas, Steve Yearley for their early support, and Tom Moylan and Peter Phillimore for wise comments on the draft manuscript. For invaluable help along the way I thank Lena Eriksson, Shona Hunter and Christopher Barber.
1Introduction: Utopia, Environment and Nature
Other green worlds
Every day seems to bring more news of environmental disaster. Flooded streets don't just bring chaos and loss to those who live there. Their images resonate through media networks with the threat of widespread climate change effects. The news media explodes around the latest scientific statement on global warming and then turns away, creating a silence or indifference in which it seems impossible that anything can be done. Hollywood films rehearse spectacular environmental disasters which only a lucky (or unlucky) few will survive, or present grim, grey worlds of endemic environmental dysfunction. Booker prize-winning novelists write trilogies tracing the collapse of biodiversity and the rise of genetically engineered posthumans. Young adult fiction offers dystopias set on the rising waters of a warming world. A wildlife documentary presenter looks at us through the tv screen; he gestures at the blank white icescape behind him and tells us that it is irreversibly melting. We wince then turn off the television, put out our recycling, get on with the next thing.
In the midst of these pessimistic, dystopian and apocalyptic narratives, it can seem that there are few hopeful images of or statements about greener futures in our culture. The environmental campaigner Jonathan Porritt (2011) has expressed concern that a lack of positive visions makes it hard to imagine what sustainability might mean. But in fact all sorts of hopes and desires for better socio-environmental futures are at work across contemporary Western philosophy, politics and literature. Since the 1960s, environmentalism has warned about the dire consequences of abusing and exploiting the planet's natural resources, imagining future wastelands of ecological depletion and social chaos. But it has also generated rich new ideas about how humans might live better with nature. Environmentalists have warned that natural resources may run out, but they have also tried to show how we might live happier and more fulfilling lives by consuming less and making our relationships more fulfilling. Ecological philosophers have criticized modernity's dominant technocentrism and its instrumental attitude towards nature, but they have also explored the pleasures that valuing nature for its own sake might bring. Speculative fictions envisage post-apocalyptic wastelands, but also moments of joy and hope, and even descriptions of life in sustainable society.
Sometimes these green hopes take the form of a clear, detailed and explicit blueprint for the future: a manifesto or an explicitly utopian novel. But desires for a greener future can also be more obscure, fragmented and fleeting. Sometimes green alternatives are framed in terms of a coherent set of ecological values or politics. Sometimes they speak more loosely to a desire to protect or love or ‘get back’ to nature. The content, the form, the values of this green utopianism are diverse – they express different hopes in different ways. They vary over time and between societies and social groups. But they are more common than we might initially imagine.
This book, then, is about green utopianism. It explores some of the ways in which Western cultures have imagined better futures for human societies with nature since the emergence of the idea of environmental crisis in the 1960s and 1970s. This was a time when public talk about the future of nature was dominated by ideas of imminent ends (of resources), physical limits (to growth), and looming catastrophe (environmental and social). Closely linked to this crisis sensibility was a powerful sense that things could be different, that we could build societies in tune with nature that would be more sustainable, more satisfying and more secure. In some ways those hopes have become familiar and mainstream. In other ways those futures seem more unattainable and more idealistic than ever in the face of grim climate predictions and arguments that we face the end of nature. So as well as the hopeful ideas that suffused early environmentalism, this book explores the kinds of green visions that are currently available in our culture. Green hope is more widespread, I argue, but at the same time less visionary and radical. Desires for a better greener future are still there, but they are less explicit and powerful, more fugitive and fleeting, often framed by narratives of loss and mourning.
Although the idea of utopia often gets a bad press, in this book I claim it unashamedly as an invaluable way of exploring images of and desires for a better way of living (Levitas 2010 [1990]: 9). Utopianism is about dreams and hopes for an alternative to the social arrangements that we currently have. Utopian thinking runs through art and politics, public debate and popular culture. I argue that it is critically important as we look forward to the possibility of a different environmental future and learn to take responsibility for what modern humans have done with and to nature in the past. Sometimes utopias are born of passionate and heartfelt political commitments, individual or collective. Sometimes the hope for a better world seems to happen despite conscious individual intentions (Garforth 2009). Either way, utopias are vital cultural spaces in which the taken-for-granted arrangements and practices of our everyday lives can be made strange, in which we can reflect critically on the big picture of what is happening in our social world, and through which we can explore alternatives. But it is not an unproblematic kind of thinking, so I also use the word utopia with some care. For many utopia is associated with rigid blueprints of perfection, totalitarian master plans or fantastical idealism. In what follows I will draw on less negative and more nuanced definitions to show how utopia should be understood as a social and cultural process that is partial and provisional, critical and creative.
If I use the word ‘utopia’ unabashedly, I use the word ‘green’ more cautiously. In this book I look back over the short history of Western environmentalist thought and ecological philosophy from the 1960s to the early twenty-first century. As a political, social and philosophical movement, environmentalism has focused on the problematic ways in which Western societies have treated nature. It has produced powerful new ideas about how those societies could instead both protect the planet and enhance human well-being. It has explored ecocentric positions in which nature is held to have intrinsic value separate from human perceptions, needs and uses. But environmentalism has also tended to treat the category of nature as unproblematic, as conceptually separate from society and culture. In contemporary science, philosophy and social theory there are serious challenges to these distinctions and assumptions, and compelling proposals for rearranging our worldly ontologies. Some question the idea that nature is ‘One Thing with One Name’ (Cronon 1996: 35) and critique environmentalist attempts to defend nonhuman nature primarily on the basis of its separation from human societies. Some argue that we can imagine an ‘ecology without nature’ (Morton 2007); some celebrate nature's end as the beginning of a new kind of ecological politics (Latour 2004). I use the word ‘green’, then, to suggest the complicated, dissonant bodies of thought that take part in ongoing contestations and debate about political and cultural ideas of the environment, rather than working with a strict or narrow definition of deep ecology or environmentalism.
I also argue that as arguments about the end of nature and the beginning of the Anthropocene circulate around Western cultures, the conditions for green utopianism have changed significantly. Where once environmental debates focused on the prospects for continuity and recuperation – sustainable development, ecological caution and protecting nature – now the dominant problematic is how we are to learn to live in a fundamentally different and unpredictable era. In what follows I take this transition seriously and try to trace green utopias before and after nature. The Anthropocene refers to a new geological era in which human activities are the dominant influence on the natural environment. It is also a cultural era in which we constantly reflect upon this state of affairs. The end-of-nature proposals that I discuss here are part of debates about what anthropogenic climate change means to and for us – materially, conceptually, politically, affectively – and how it changes our sense of the histories and futures we are making and have made. As I have noted above, the idea of a separate nature has been crucial to ecological political philosophy as well as to modern Western science and culture. Once we start to think about the mixed-up, hybrid worlds that we have made and that we must live in and with (Latour 2004), and about the complex ways in which we ourselves are simultaneously matter and culture (Haraway 1991; Bennett 2010), we need new ontologies, new ethics and new ways of thinking about better greener worlds.
So in this book I trace a shift from utopias of sustainability to postnatural visions and try to locate the prospects for green hope when there is no separate nature in which to root it – and arguably a limited sense of the future in which green alternatives might unfold. I focus on a relatively limited body of utopian thinking and ideas: environmentalism, ecological political philosophy, and speculative fiction. This is not to deny the existence or value of a much broader field of green utopianism. Below I will sketch an argument about the ubiquity and formal diversity of utopian desires and expressions. A broad and inclusive definition of utopianism would include: ideas about better greener futures informing innovative technologies from genetic modification to the internet of things to zero-emission buildings; ecotopian experiments from eco-villages to smart cities to re-wilding urban spaces; movements such as slow food, permaculture farming or carbon-rationing groups; activist and local green visions; climate action plans. I have focused primarily, however, on discourses and representations relating to better greener worlds as they have emerged in mainstream environmentalism, well-established ecophilosophy and theory, and in self-consciously environmentalist fiction.
Other reviews and analyses have explored utopias beyond concepts and texts and examined how utopia is performed and enacted individually and collectively at a variety of scales and in multiple spaces. Attention to the material, physical, interactional and practised dimensions of green utopianism has been growing in recent years. Studies have looked at intentional communities, including environmental ones (Pepper 1991; Sargisson and Sargent 2004; Sargisson 2007a, 2007b, 2012; Miles 2008; Fremeaux and Jordan 2010; Andreas and Wagner 2012). Analyses of utopias in relation to lifestyle, everyday practice and embedded citizenship are increasingly prominent in the field (Gardiner 2001; Firth 2012; Cooper 2014). Social and political scientists have explored utopian strands of ‘transitions to sustainable living’ (Leonard and Barry 2009): green urban and community projects including the transition towns movement; green co-housing initiatives; autonomous urbanism and squatting movements; alternative economies; sustainable architecture and planning practices; temporary ecological occupations of public spaces (Kraftl 2006; Miles 2008; Jamison 2010; Pickerill 2010, 2012; Brown et al. 2012; Davies and Leonard 2012; Bradley and Hedrén 2015).
My approach does not capture these important and innovative strands of green utopian thought and practice. But my more selective focus enables me to look closely at some of the most dominant narratives and frameworks for understanding environmental dilemmas and green hopes. This allows a modestly interdisciplinary focus that moves across politics and policy discourses, philosophy and social theory, developments in mainstream environmental ideas and radical ecopolitical thought, speculative literature and literary criticism. It also allows me to pay attention to important changes in major environmental discourses and cultural articulations of green ideas over the last fifty years or so. The successive constellations of green utopian ideas that I have analysed are necessarily indicative and partial rather than exhaustive and systematic. I have not sought to make hard and fast periodizations, but attempted rather to feel out historically situated clusters of concerns and concepts and analyse continuities and differences. Looking across a loosely chronological and overlapping set of ideas reveals something new about the nature of green hopes and the changing contexts in which we articulate and express them in particular periods.
What I offer here, then, is a new reflection on some well-known strands of green thinking over the last fifty years. One way of looking at this is that utopia offers a novel lens through which to understand debates and developments in green political thought in that period. Ecopolitical philosophy frequently touches on the value and relevance of utopian ideals to green political ideologies and political movements (Eckersley 1992; Dobson 1995; Torgerson 1999; Harvey 2000; Pepper 2005). But identifying a wider stream of green utopianism enables us to trace the ebbs and flows of hope and future visions across environmental discourses and situate more radical ecocentric visions in relation to their broader environmentalist context. Adding utopian and speculative fiction to this mix offers to enrich our understanding of green political thought. Fiction does not simply illustrate ecological ethics and ideas. Narrative offers a distinctive approach to exploring alternative green values, translating them into social experiences and ways of life. As Moylan argues, it is not just the content of ecological ideas that matters here. The form is crucial. Science fiction world-building creates new possibilities for estranged speculation, visioning beyond ‘the limits of the present’ (Moylan 2011: 26). If science fiction is ‘our culture's vast, shared polyvocal archive of the possible’ (Canavan 2014: 16), examining that archive's traces of ecotopia brings a fresh perspective to green political debates.
The book can also be seen as a synthesis of otherwise disparate approaches to green hope in utopian studies. Previous studies of green utopias have mainly emerged from debates in political science and philosophy and from studies of science fiction. Some have focused on describing and comparing the content of ecological visions across a long history of utopian texts (De Geus 1999). Some, as I note above, have discussed the value of utopian ideas for ecological political ideologies and practical environmental politics. Others have examined the transgressive utopian ideas of radical ecocentric philosophy (Sargisson 2000, 2012). A growing number of studies have focused on speculative fiction (Murphy 2000; Yanarella 2001; more recently, Otto 2012; Canavan and Robinson 2014). These approaches are surprisingly divergent, however, covering different historical periods, texts and genres. I hope to suggest a contextualizing framework within which the connections between them might be understood and to offer a more synthetic approach to the recent history of green utopias than currently exists in the field.
It will be clear even from this brief outline, then, that the concepts of both utopia and nature are rich, contested and shifting. The relationships between them are necessarily various and complex. Even since the 1970s, there have been marked shifts in the green futures that it has been possible to imagine. Continuing threads of green hope can be traced throughout this period, but there have also been reversals, reinventions and renewals. Environmental utopias develop in relation to specific political, social and intellectual contexts. Different green visions emerge in response to new framings of social-natural problems and dilemmas, and from changing experiences of living in and with different kinds of environments. To understand how this works, we need to look more closely at what we understand by utopias and utopianism, and how we can think with them.
Thinking with utopias
Utopias are often dismissed as rigid blueprints linked to totalitarian attempts to impose a new way of life on a nation or people. They are associated, as Jameson remarks sardonically, with ‘a will to power over all those individuals for whom you are plotting an ironclad happiness’ (2000: 383). For some, the very idea of a perfect society constitutes a denial of fundamental human qualities (fallibility, creativity). Pursuing the vision of an ideal republic amounts to a denial of democracy and the open society (Gray 2008; Popper 2013 [1945]). Here utopia is an attempt to achieve perfection and freeze social life forever in one static arrangement. It is contrasted with the lively, messy reality of politics and social change. For others, utopia is equated with impossible and impractical dreams and fantasies. Here utopia is a grand scheme for human betterment that is too big and too far-fetched to come about, a whimsical pipedream for social improvement or moral enhancement that distracts from practical politics and reform. Popular ideas of utopia, then, are associated with the two equally off-putting poles: totalitarian violence and dreamy ineffectuality. Utopian thinking is also seen, albeit perhaps implicitly, as a minority interest: something for politicians, demagogues, dictators, drop-outs or fantasists, not something that most of us indulge in.
But we can and should understand utopias and utopianism differently. The field of utopian studies that has developed over the last thirty years has generated new definitions and approaches. It has shown how widespread utopianism is, and how utopias might matter for and to everyone. Utopian scholars insist that utopias are not reducible to blueprints or pipedreams. They invite us to think of utopias instead as visions that stimulate critical and creative reflection on alternatives to the way things are. In Levitas's concise and persuasive formulation, utopia is simply ‘an expression of desire for a different way of living and being’ (2010 [1990]: 9). The inclusive definitions of utopia that now dominate the field of utopian studies emphasize ubiquity (Sargent 1994; Jameson 2005; Levitas 2010 [1990], 2013). Utopias and utopian desires are seen as ordinary and everyday rather than unusual or esoteric (Gardiner 2001; Cooper 2014). As Lefebvre put it, ‘[w]e are all utopians, so soon as we wish for something different and stop playing the part of the faithful performer or watchdog’ (1990 [1971]: 75). Utopia involves, then, a capacity to be critical of present social arrangements and to creatively imagine alternatives, however briefly and superficially. On these grounds we can see it as commonplace. It emerges from everyday experiences of dissatisfaction, inequality or lack (Bloch 1986; Levitas 2010 [1990]).
Within this broad definition, it is useful to distinguish between utopianism and utopias (Jameson 2005), or similarly between the broad phenomenon of ‘social dreaming’ and the particular ‘faces’ through which these dreams are expressed (Sargent 1994: 1). On the one hand we can think about a general capacity and tendency of humans individually and collectively to desire something different and better (utopianism, a utopian impulse). On the other, we can identify the particular visions through which these desires are expressed (utopias, utopian programmes). Utopias become objects or things when desires for something different are articulated and elaborated into a detailed vision of a social alternative. But they are part of a wider process of utopianism, acts and moments of desiring something different that are not reducible to any particular utopian plan or vision. Utopia therefore is a processual affair. Engaging with any particular utopian vision is part of a wider process of expressing desires for something different, encountering the possibility of otherness, and changing individual consciousness and cultural frameworks.
For some theorists, the propensity to imagine the world otherwise and desire a better way of living is a ‘defining, constitutive’ aspect of the human psyche (Bauman 2003: 11; see also 2009 [1976]; Bloch 1986; Geoghegan 1987). Others reject the idea of an essential utopian impulse and prefer, like Levitas, to frame the capacity to imagine and explore alternatives as a response to the experience of lack or absence. Utopia is the outcome of needs and wants generated but unfulfilled by a given set of social arrangements (Levitas 2010 [1990]: 9). When we are unhappy, unfulfilled or alienated, we imagine to fill the gap. Those dreams and desires, however fantastical, speak to and keep in circulation the possibility of other, better ways of being. We do not need to speculate about a hard-wired utopian impulse in order to recognize that cultures throughout history and across the globe are suffused with utopian hopes and dreams. Christian narratives imagine a return to the innocence of Eden or the journey to a paradise after death. Folksongs, poems and paintings depict worlds of sensual satisfaction, lands of Cokaygne in which bodily desires are immediately fulfilled (Sargent 1994). Novels detail the structures of an ideal commonwealth or a perfect technocracy; fantasy films draw us into images of vivid unspoilt natural landscapes that speak of a simpler and more fulfilling existence. Adverts suggest that happiness is a new kitchen; political parties promise a brighter future. Utopianism is at work across politics and popular culture and linked with experiential and affective aspects of ordinary experience (Anderson 2006a, 2006b).
The argument that utopian hope and anticipation is part of the fabric of everyday life was powerfully and persuasively developed by the German philosopher Ernst Bloch. In The Principle of Hope (1986), Bloch identified utopian impulses at work in literature, religion and high art, but also in people's idle daydreams, in advertising, in the desires inculcated and organized by commodity capitalism. Utopian images of the good life are part of the hope mobilized by communist, fascist and nationalist movements. For Bloch, both human experience and social reality are always unfinished. Anticipatory consciousness and an orientation towards the future are part of the human psyche; likewise, the material reality that shapes us is incomplete, always unfolding. Bloch insists that utopia is not something transcendent, outside ordinary experience. It does not require a special epistemology to access the possibility of things being otherwise. The desire for a different and better way of being does not require the full-blown projection of an alternative (Gardiner 2001; Cooper 2014). Utopias are not (only) esoteric visions or projections confined between the covers of a book; they are part of our social, cultural and imaginative equipment.
For Bloch, utopias mattered most insofar as they kept alive the possibility of an unalienated existence. As a Marxist philosopher and critical theorist, for Bloch this entailed the restoration of human subjects to freedom from material conditions of alienated labour and the ideological prison of the commodity fetish. He sought to identify and add to the currents in history that would lead from the oppression and exploitation under capitalism to the universal freedom of socialism. While Bloch's unwavering commitment to the concrete utopia of communism is now difficult to embrace, his insistence that both history and human beings are unfinished and unfulfilled, existing in a state of becoming and therefore open to an unfolding not-yet, remains invaluable for thinking about and thinking with utopias, and for understanding what utopianism might do to and for us. Bloch suggests that in periods of acute transformation, societies generate a profusion of images and narratives of freedom and alternative social arrangements that continue to suffuse cultures and keep alive the possibility of radical change even in less tumultuous times.
Bloch's work, along with that of Bauman (2000, 2003, 2009 [1976]) and Levitas (2010 [1990], 2013), also highlights the irreducibly social nature of utopias and utopianism. Utopias are doubly social. They are a product of, expressive of, particular social conditions, and they are about the possibility of a transformed society. The content of any utopian expression is irreducibly shaped by its social context. Utopias appear to be about an elsewhere or an alternative future – but the very act of imagining otherwise points to problems, lacks and issues in the present. Utopias reveal what is wrong with the societies we have. Jameson goes so far as to argue that utopias are only and entirely about the present and its limits. Rooted in a Marxist reading of culture as ultimately constrained by capitalist ideology, he argues that ‘even our wildest imaginings are hostage…to our mode of production’ (2005: xiii). Utopia, then, cannot create genuinely new or other ideas; ‘at best’ it serves ‘the negative purpose of making us more aware of our mental and ideological imprisonment’ in a complex socio-economic totality (2005: xii).
But even if the utopian imagination is limited by what is thinkable within current social and cultural horizons, it nonetheless has the capacity to work critically and creatively with that material. As a minimum, the articulation of utopian alternatives opposes and resists the widespread idea that major social transformation is not possible. It therefore functions to unsettle the status quo. Indeed, for many utopian theorists it is precisely this function that defines utopia (Suvin 1979; Moylan 1986; Levitas 2010 [1990]). On these readings, utopias temporarily unmoor reality from its overwhelming sense of taken-for-grantedness. They gesture towards the possibility of another way of being. As Levitas has argued (2010 [1990]), this can be a conservative or escapist moment: utopian dreaming can console or compensate us for a difficult reality. But utopias always have the capacity to estrange us from the social arrangements we inhabit, to contest the idea that they are necessary and even normal. Utopias imply that any given set of social, cultural and political structures are contingent and therefore changeable. Their function is critical: they offer a negative reflection on what is.1
Utopia is a very particular – perhaps even peculiar – kind of critique, however. Utopias do not merely say ‘that's wrong’, or ‘that's unfair’, or ‘that makes people unhappy’. They express critique through the detailed imagination of or momentary desire for an alternative. Utopias say ‘this would be right’ and ‘men and women would be more equal if work were rearranged thus’ and ‘happiness feels like that’. Utopias describe or indicate ‘the look and feel and shape and experiences of what an alternative might and could actually be’ (Fitting 1998: 14). In gesturing at alternatives, utopias are creative, expressive and affirmative (Sargisson 2012). As Moylan argues, citing Badiou, utopian figurations offer a ‘supplement or “going beyond” the current situation, the “what there is” ’. They therefore invite us to seriously contemplate another way of being (Moylan 2011: 29).
In some social and historical contexts, the expression of desire for a better world is highly valued and the production of detailed plans for alternative societies flourishes. In early modernity the emergence of the natural sciences generated a spate of formal utopias; More's Utopia (1965 [1516]) gave a name to the literary genre and began a tradition of thinking about this paradoxical thing, the ‘good place’ that is nowhere. Enlightenment thinking and later progressive currents in Western democracies were also extremely hospitable to the utopian imagination. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw a proliferation of utopian political programmes, movements and novels. Important voices in the emerging social and political sciences were proudly forward-looking, with a faith in the power of positive knowledge to uncover laws of social development that would enable rational minds to build a more fair and more just future (Kumar 1987; Levitas 2013). By the mid-twentieth century, however, utopia had become a much less comfortable idea, associated with totalitarian programmes from fascism to communism. There was a sense that modernity had brought violence and inhumanity as much as prosperity and progress.
Against this apparent retreat from utopia, the 1960s and 1970s saw a revival of utopian thought in politics and culture (Kumar 1987; Levitas 2008). It was strongly associated with new social movements – the countercultural left, second-wave feminism and nascent environmentalism. It was also marked by discomfort with the confident progressive ideologies of modernity, especially insofar as they were tied to capitalist projects of economic expansion and narrow models of liberal individual freedom. Rejecting rigid blueprints for social improvement, the new utopianism was reflexive and critical (Moylan 1986; Bammer 1991). My analysis of the history of environmental utopianism begins with ideas rooted in this period. It ends in our current time of what Bauman has called ‘liquid’ modernity (2000), an era committed to change but only for the sake of change – open-ended, never settling, driven by restless currents of globalization, projects for personal improvement, and the aggressive expansion of capitalism. In such contexts, many argue, collective utopian visions and goals disappear, or play only a muted counterpoint to wider discourses of cynicism, despair and indifference. Utopianism is colonized by capitalist logics; desire is attached to commodities; future dreams become individualized lifestyle aspirations (Levitas 2000; Bauman 2003; Jameson 2005; Thompson 2013). Utopias must reinvent themselves in a ‘post-political’ era wherein technocracy and management squeeze out the spaces of contestation and demands for fundamental change (Wilson and Swyngedouw 2015). In such contexts, dreams of a better life might become only the ‘cruel optimism’ that Berlant discusses (2011). Attachment to utopian desires, written in the language of post-war liberal visions of the good life but cut off from material and social opportunities to achieve them, might now be the cause of pain and a block to real fulfilment and freedom.
All the features of utopianism that I have discussed above help us to understand environmental utopias. We can see that utopias persist but change what Levitas (2010 [1990]) calls their form and function. In some periods there is explicit hope for a sustainable future; at other times fear, doubt and indifference seem more dominant. Seeing utopias as ubiquitous directs our attention beyond formal blueprints to identify multiple expressions of green hope. Understanding utopianism as a process of estrangement from taken-for-granted social arrangements makes clear that there cannot be a single utopia of sustainability but rather a range of ideas, expressed in diverse forms, about how we can live better with the natures we have and have made. The idea that utopias respond to and articulate lack is particularly important (Levitas 2010 [1990]). As Soper explains (2000), consumer capitalism appears to offer choices that can fulfil all desires. But it cannot offer a world in which objects are not reduced to their economic and instrumental values, and in which human well-being is not tied to consumption. Similarly, imaginations and epistemologies in modern and postmodern contexts have refused or struggled to articulate a world that is not relentlessly separated into nature and culture, humans and environment. Acknowledging that utopianism responds to specific social and historical contexts helps us to think carefully about the changing content, form and significance of green utopias during a period when environmental issues have shifted from the radical margins of public debate to the political and popular mainstream.
Ideal natures: entanglements of environment and utopia
The distinctiveness of utopia as a mode of thought depends both on the impulse to imagine a better way of living and the capacity to add some kind of substance to the notion of ‘better’. Utopias communicate a sense of how life might be improved, how societies might be more usefully, ethically or beautifully arranged. When we articulate (implicitly or explicitly) what a good or better world might consist of, nature often comes into the picture. The ideal of a better life in harmony with the natural environment is common in Western cultural history (Pepper 1984; Soper 1995). In Judeo-Christian traditions, the very idea of a good or moral life emerges from Edenic visions of innocent humans at one with the giving, abundant, unspoilt Earth of God's creation. For Merchant (2003), Eden myths have been among the most powerful narrative lenses through which Western and particularly American societies have understood their relationship to their environments. Such narratives are powerfully nostalgic. In their most recognizable form they tell a backward-looking story of innocence lost, of unalienated and liberated existence before a fall, of better times in the past when humans were part of nature. Even when they look forward with hope to a better world to come, the goal of Eden narratives is restoration and return rather than the desire for something genuinely radical or new.
Christian narratives, along with classical myths and literatures, suffuse pre-modern cultures with pastoral utopian tropes wherein the good life is innocent and lived in harmony with a pure and enriching nature. In modernity the relationship between nature, human well-being and the good life is fundamentally rewritten. Modernity can be characterized as a decisive shift away from the state of nature in both material and epistemological terms. It promised a new understanding and control of nature through scientific knowledge. The Enlightenment ushered in social and political systems devised by science and rational thought and responsive to democratic ideals of individual human rights and representation, no longer in thrall to tradition and faith in a divine or natural order. Industrial capitalism relied on a newly expansive capacity to exploit natural resources to generate material abundance and profit. Many environmentalist thinkers characterize modernity precisely in terms of the increasingly distant relationship of humans from the natural world – and argue that these are the ultimate roots of the environmental crisis that became visible in the twentieth century. But they also note a counter-tradition to powerful discourses and ideologies of technocentric instrumentalism and control. In transcendentalist philosophy and religion, in Romantic aesthetics, in nature writing and pastoral socialism, oppositional voices in culture and politics have called from the early days of modernity for the value of nonhuman nature and for the idea that human experience and subjectivity are enhanced by the capacity to experience and make connections with wild nature.
De Geus works through these complicated currents to identify two opposing utopian traditions in modernity with contrasting ideas about the relationship between nature and human societies. He argues that ‘utopias of abundance’ have dominated in Western culture, counterposed by a minor tradition of ‘utopias of sufficiency’ (De Geus 1999: 21–2). Progressive anthropocentric dreams of expansion and growth have been central to the forward-looking currents of modernity. In these utopias, the good life for humans is envisaged in terms of the instrumental and industrial exploitation of natural resources to generate surplus. Environmentalist thinkers argue that these attitudes cause environmental chaos and damage human well-being. They create narrow, consumerist ways of life that lack connections with others and with nature. Utopias of sufficiency envisage instead modest, careful ways of life that value proximity to nature and conserving resources. De Geus discusses variants of this tradition going back to More's Utopia with its vision of enough for all but excess for no-one. He examines Thoreau's idealization of solitary simplicity, Kropotkin's proposals for an anarchist-ecological state, Morris's pastoral vision of socialism in News from Nowhere, 1905, Howard's plans for garden cities, and twentieth-century green utopian fictions including Huxley's Island, 1962, and Callenbach's Ecotopia, 1975. De Geus traces an unbroken thread of desire for a modest way of life in communion with the natural environment that contests modernity's expansionist ambitions and offers an alternative vision for a sustainable future.
