Searching for Utopia
Introduction by Casey Mills
Northern California possesses a rich history of utopian thinkers and attempts to turn utopian ideas into reality. But lately this stream of activity seems to have slowed considerably. It’s been some time since a utopian novel has caught the public’s attention as much as B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two, which sold more than two million copies and sparked multiple real-world attempts in the 1950s and ’60s to create the utopia Skinner described. Today, mainstream books and articles about California focus almost exclusively on documenting our imminent downfall rather than outlining positive visions for our future. And young people graduating college now seem far more interested in working for Google than heading out into the forest with twenty friends and a belief that too much technology might get in the way of actually living.
There is, of course, a dark side to utopia. Imagining a perfect world is one thing, but trying to achieve it at all costs can lead to dangerous myopia. Jim Jones, the leader of the San Francisco–based Peoples Temple, envisioned a Christian socialist utopia, and his attempt to create it ultimately led him to instruct nine hundred people to kill themselves in the Jonestown Massacre. More mundanely, I know countless idealists who, after a few failed attempts at actualizing the perfect worlds in their heads, became disillusioned and bitter at a world they grew convinced could never change.
But there is perhaps nothing darker than a society that has lost its ability to dream of a better future. Without such dreaming, we lose hope, and without hope, we begin to view increasingly adverse circumstances as acceptable and even inevitable. As our standards decline, our attention turns to mere survival, to eking out our own existences without regard for others. Our region is facing a variety of serious challenges—challenges that test our capacity for hope. It may seem there are only two choices; giving up on change, or playing some bleak role in the endless round of stalemates and half-measures that comprises our state governance. But there is, and always will be, a third option: reinvention.
This term has lost some of the power it once had. The Silicon Valley has done a remarkable job of defining human progress as technological innovation, to the point where the drive to augment our gadgets has superseded our drive to improve the basic structures upon which our society is built. Yet more often than not, the fruit of the Silicon Valley’s innovation is merely new techno-baubles delivering low-grade entertainment and endless bits of disconnected information with increasing speed.
We now need true invention, and we need it from people willing to think not at the level of building new microchips, but instead of reimagining cultures, political systems, and economies. In an effort to start this conversation, we asked writers from throughout the region to share their thoughts on the possibility of utopia in Northern California—what one might look like, how it could be achieved, and what roadblocks we might find along the way. While we defined utopia loosely, stating that it could encompass the entire region or exist within the boundaries of a small community, we also asked that contributors grant the basic premise of utopian thought: that a perfect society can exist, and that it’s worth our time to consider what such a society would look like.
Those who consider such an undertaking naive are usually those who have run out of new ideas. Our region is desperate for individuals unafraid to say that there could be a better life than the one we’re living, for those willing to think through what that life would look like, and for those brave enough to try to live it.
The individuals included in this symposium are such people, and I’m thankful they walk among us.
This is an excerpt of Casey Mills’ introduction.
A Model for Utopia [excerpt]
By Julia Halprin Jackson
I grew up in Village Homes, a seventy-acre sustainable housing development in Davis built by Mike and Judy Corbett in 1975. The neighborhood includes a community center, swimming pool, nursery school, dance studio, and restaurant, as well as twenty-three acres of greenbelts, orchards, vineyards, common areas, and parks. Two-thirds of the 225 homes use solar energy. Homes have open backyards connected to common areas that link neighbors lawn-to-lawn, garden-to-garden. As kids, we were given free rein to wander, to pick cherries, apricots, oranges, berries, and grapes in shared orchards and vineyards. We never had to go far to find a friend.
Every spring, our common area would host a massive Easter-egg hunt that wove through the gardens, wandered up the cherry trees and ended on my parents’ lawn, where we would all congregate for brunch. Seasons were marked by a change in produce—we knew that once the oranges and persimmons were weighing down the trees, it was autumn. There were weekly potlucks, homemade skateboard ramps on the street, Halloween parties at the nursery school. Even as a young child, I had the sensation that this neighborhood belonged to everyone, that if there was some project I wanted to undertake, something I wanted to learn, or something I wanted to see change, all I had to do was ask.
Might this be utopia?
Julia Halprin Jackson is a writer and instructor at UC Davis’ MA in Creative Writing program. Her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in anthologies by SMITH Mag, Flatmancrooked, Beyond Words Publishing, Scribes Valley Publishing, the American Diabetes Association, and literary journals such as Fourteen Hills, sPARKLE & bLINK, Catalyst, and Spectrum.
Utopia is Only a Breath Away [full text, web exclusive]
By Sherry L. Ackerman
There I was, hand-washing my clothes in a bucket in the front yard, when a friend of mine pulled into the driveway. She’d been raised in the inner city of Detroit and still carried a little chip on her shoulder about that, feeling that because she’d been raised poor she’d been dealt a short hand. She took one look at me and quipped, “One woman’s voluntary simplicity is another woman’s poverty.” I thought about it for a minute and replied, “I dunno, they’re both just ‘washing clothes,’ aren’t they?” And, there you have it: utopia.
The word “utopia” comes from the Greek words for “not” and “place.” It means, literally, “no place.” So, I am saying that the concept of utopia as a literal space in time is unrealistic. It assumes permanence, which is the very enemy of sustainability, a goal that requires constant adaptation to new circumstances. Many of my intellectual predecessors did try it. Plato banged out the Republic, Thomas Campanella wrote City of the Sun, and, of course, there was Thomas More’s classic, Utopia. Most of these didn’t get much further than the paper they were written on. They had nice visions and great worldviews, but the pesky human ego always got in the way of any of them being implemented. The ego assumes its own primacy. It believes that it is separate from others and, therefore, somehow entitled to having its own way. So, there really can’t be a single vision for utopia, since a single vision necessarily comes from one person, thus making it ego driven. Any single vision is more invested in “me” than “we,” and a utopian vision requires a heavy investment in “we.”
So, we’re back to scrubbing clothes in the front yard. If it’s either “voluntary simplicity” (desirable) or “poverty” (undesirable), then we’re stuck in the oversimplified world of dualities, which is the playing field for the ego. Utopia isn’t going to happen here. If, on the other hand, it’s just “washing clothes,” plain and simple, there’s a chance to create utopia. Utopia is “no place.” Instead, it is a state of mind, not a spatial structure—a perspective, a transformation of consciousness. A shift. It requires a change in social values from “me” to “we.” And, when groups of people begin to think in terms of “we,” utopian values emerge quite organically, naturally.
When something is allowed to be just “what it is”—nothing more, nothing less—without all of our judgments and opinions, we can begin to see the incredible beauty of the moment. Clarity ensues. Gratitude develops. When we are clear and grateful, our hearts open. When our hearts open, we can step, quite naturally, into the kinds of values that utopias require: gift culture, resource sharing, care for the earth and all sentient beings, and doing less harm.
Utopias begin with the understanding that we each have the power of choice—that we can choose to create good lives. We are not victims of our circumstances. Circumstances are simply circumstances. As long as we can choose, we are free to navigate circumstances skillfully. But, this means that we have to get rid of a lot of old baggage, the noise in our heads. It’s about letting go of old, limiting belief structures; our comfortable neuroses and self-defeating habits and patterns; and our enculturation, conditioning, and childhood wounds. None of these serve us in utopia. Utopia is about this moment, right here, right now, in full awareness. It’s about what is happening, not what we think is happening. We have to take off our narcissistic glasses and see simply—just what’s there, without our ideas about it. With that level of clarity, we can make sustainable, informed, other-inclusive choices that fuel utopian good lives.
Achieving utopia doesn’t begin with doing something out there. Sure, we can (and should!) get involved in our communities and offer our gifts and expertise. But, the real work starts in here—inside of ourselves. As we engage in introspection, looking inward, and contemplation, the gifts that we offer out there will spring from authenticity and not from ego. They won’t spawn divisive conflict, drama, exploitation, or greed. They will be nestled into a context of consensus, mediation, harmony, and generosity. Utopia is only a breath away.
Sherry L. Ackerman, Ph.D., is the author of The Good Life: How to Create a Sustainable and Fulfilling Lifestyle. She serves on the Core Group of Shasta Commons, as a part of Mount Shasta’s Transition Town initiative.
Why it Can Happen Here [excerpt]
By Megan Prelinger
Northern California is a fertile ground for utopian ideas and practices. Some reasons for that are known, or at least widely conjectured. I’m interested in the less well-known reasons, especially those that I see as having the power to push us toward a utopian future.
It’s common knowledge that Europeans arriving in the nineteenth century were drawn here by a vision of abundant wealth. But many traveled here as much to escape as to move toward something. Men and women alike were opting out of the Victorian manners and rules of social mobility that prevailed on the East Coast. During the 1840s and early 1850s, when San Francisco’s origin myths were being written, there was little local authority of any kind, much less enforcement of social norms. The personalities and visions of those drawn to put down stakes in such a place had a lasting impact on the culture of the region, even as the rule of law developed. In light of this history, it’s unsurprising that many twentieth-century utopian communities followed these early visionaries.
The major earthquakes of 1865 and 1906 introduced another impetus toward utopian thought, albeit an indirect one. Pervasive awareness of long-term geologic instability forms an unusual frame around everyday life. Within this frame our human historical narratives seem to be forever writ small. This has a benefit: it causes those narratives to seem more malleable and less eternal than they would be if geologic precariousness were not a constant.
Perhaps because human history gets squeezed between the lines drawn by geologic episodes, the past and the present sit closer together in Northern California than elsewhere. The State of Jefferson, the ranches of the Californios, the forts of the Russian empire, and the range of speakers of Costanoan form layers of human history here like bands of exposed chert in the Marin Headlands. The process by which history becomes the future is inescapable.
Megan Prelinger is a co-founder of the Prelinger Library, a San Francisco–based public research library of American history. She is the author of the recently published Another Science Fiction: Advertising the Space Race 1957–62, a visual history of the early space era.
A Future of Food Sovereignty [excerpt]
By Kristen Alina Sbrogna
Somewhere in our history we lost the capacity to feed ourselves. By this I mean that while most of us know how to send an e-mail, drive a car, and make a sandwich, very few of us actually meet the most basic of our human needs by planting, growing, and harvesting our own food.
As the human population balloons and our consumptive habits continue to exhaust the planet’s resources, increased urban density is expected and necessary. If you’re like me, the thought of thickening urban areas invokes a shudder, conjuring up images of endless highway and concrete. But if we are able to concentrate expansion within people-friendly, walkable urban centers that provide a range of public transportation options and meet a portion of our communities’ food needs locally, urban areas might not be such bad places to spend our time. A utopian vision of food sovereignty in Northern California imagines a radical reappropriation of space to be used to cultivate organic produce on a very localized level. Dense urban villages surrounded by large areas of agricultural land, combined with smaller food production and distribution sites integrated within public spaces, could house and feed us all.
In many ways, encouraging people to live in one place—like keeping hikers on designated trails—makes sense. Smart growth and urban village models emerged in the 1970s in response to sprawl, but are based on traditional development practices that have been around since the village itself. Instead of neighborhoods cropping up on the constantly expanding borders of cities, where residents are completely car- and big box store–dependent, dense urban areas offer resources and services all within reach by foot, bike, or public transit. Many people would be “living smaller” without three-car garages and expansive lawns and yards, but in exchange would enjoy ample shared outdoor space, less traffic, stronger communities, and Main Streets—places where independent businesses thrive and people gather, work, and go to school. If we evolve toward this urban village model, I believe people will eventually view these trade-offs as favorable.
Kristen Alina Sbrogna is a poet, writer, and educator originally from Worcester, Massachusetts, who now calls Berkeley home. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Saint Mary’s College of California, where she currently teaches courses on sustainability and social justice as part of the January Term program.
A Model for Utopia [excerpt]
By Chris Carlsson
Utopia is a useful mirage. It recedes as we approach, always promising a better future. Once upon a time, I might’ve written “shinier and brighter than today” to describe it, but these days our utopian visions are necessarily more prosaic, more earth-bound, and more skeptical of a metallic techno-future than ever before. Decades of “progress” (powered by coal, oil, and nuclear fuels that poison our air and water while enabling industrial production) gave us massive, chemically soaked food surpluses and a denatured urban environment. A hunger for “natural” permeates our culture and already thousands of people are choosing to garden, to bicycle, to pursue sustainable fuels and energy sources, to employ non-pharmaceutical medical solutions, and so on.
While it probably won’t be full of smokestacks and twentieth-century industries, a utopian future in Northern California will most certainly be technologically sophisticated. But what sort of technologies might be included, which ones would be shut down and terminated, and why? This line of questioning doesn’t arise in our world—and all utopian speculations are first and foremost a critique of the world as it is. Our society leaves it to investors and scientists working for corporations and the military to explore basic scientific research, and then to choose how to apply scientific knowledge to practical goals, without any democratic consultation whatsoever. If someone will pay for it—usually with an eye toward monopolizing a technical advantage—the technology might be developed. Otherwise, probably not.
Northern California’s coming utopia needs a real democracy powerful enough to direct the purposes of technology, a democracy beyond the wildest conceptions of anyone currently engaged in “politics.” Resource allocation, technological development, the direction of scientific inquiry—all would be subject to the widest possible democratic process. It wouldn’t stop there. A vigorous democracy would have to evaluate and decide upon everything we do, since a utopia worth its name must recognize that together we make the world we live in.
Chris Carlsson, co-director of the multimedia history project Shaping San Francisco (www.shapingsf.org), is a writer, editor, and historian. He is the author of After the Deluge and Nowtopia, and has edited five other books, including Reclaiming San Francisco and Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968–78. He is also a co-founder of the San Francisco–based CounterPULSE, where he has produced weekly public talks since 2006.