Garforth - Green utopias: environmental hope before and after natue

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

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

101 Station Landing, Suite 300

Medford, MA 02155, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8473-4

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8474-1(pb)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typeset in 10.5 on 12 pt Sabon

by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited

Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website:

politybooks.com

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.

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.