Datos obtenidos en la atención prestada por la Red

Some critics will say that urban growth lies at the heart of environmental degradation. Others will respond that you cannot blame rural extraction industries like logging or mining, because the extraction of these resources is just meeting the demands of urban space. This thesis is set up with the assumption that we have to live in cities; there are too many of us not to. Efforts such as the urban farming of the P-patchers in Seattle take on bioregionalism’s submission to community on a larger scale. Bioregional urban initiatives are good responses to the critique of bioregionalism’s inclination towards the countryside, and are small but important attempts at overcoming the urban-rural dichotomy that bioregionalism has been criticized for keeping alive. I will sketch out a short introduction of utopian thought and argue that bioregionalism is a part of this utopian thinking, and that it has a pragmatic side to it. There are fewer utopian aspirations in our current age than in the 1890s, 1960s, or 1970s. How should we consider the utopias of the past? Are they blueprints, models or merely sources of inspiration? Journalist and author of Cascadia: The Elusive Utopia, Douglas Todd, has high hopes for the change the imagined region of Cascadia can bring about.

Many believe that, while Cascadia might not be the launching point for a global revolution, there is a spiritually informed mindset of optimism, inventiveness, tolerance and ferment here that suggests the region could become a model for measured progressive transformation, especially regarding to how people of the planet interact with nature.148

Cascadia or Ecotopia provides a way of talking about bioregionalism in the Pacific Northwest. An older attempt at reimagining regions was The Culture of Cities (1938), a book

148

51 by one of the earliest regionalists of the United States, historian and urban critic Lewis Mumford, who early on imagined an eco-region. In this following quote, he sums up what this region could look like for the people:

We must create in every region people who will be accustomed, from school onward, to humanist attitudes, cooperative methods, rational controls. These people will know in detail where they live and how they live: they will be united by a common feeling for their landscape, their literature and language, their local ways, and out of their own self-respect they will have a sympathetic understanding with other regions and different local peculiarities.149

Mumford’s vision of a region lives on in bioregionalist Peter Berg’s definition of a bioregion as something both geographical and cultural: “A bioregion refers both to geographical terrain and a terrain of consciousness – to a place and the ideas that have developed about how to live in that place.” 150

Several environmental groups and initiatives, academics, and artists speak of Cascadia as a place and a culture. Not only environmentalists use ecological utopia as a selling point for the region – so does big business. A recent example of how the concept of Cascadia is seeping into the mainstream is an Adidas soccer commercial from 2012, which starts with the Cascadian flag – “The Doug” – waving in the wind. The Cascadia “scheme,” or “project,” is principally a boosterish trade and advertising alliance, capitalizing on Cascadia as a free trade heaven, says Geographer Matthew Sparke at the University of Washington. His article “Not a State, but More Than a State of Mind,” criticizes business for using the natural history of Cascadia to “brand and market it in the global circuits of consumption and investment.”151

So what is the potential of utopias based on ecological principles other than as marketing strategies for businesses? Utopian theorists like Tom Moylan and his conception of a “critical utopia” can explain how utopian thinking in general can contribute to political theory and debate. Moylan’s book, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (1986), introduces the term “critical utopia.” This idea is a response to the critics of utopianism, because critical utopias are “imperfect and in process,” writes David Landis

149

Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938). 386.

150 _{Berg, Reinhabiting a Separate Country: A Bioregional Anthology of Northern California}

151 _{Matthew Sparke, "Not a State, but More Than a State of Mind: Cascading Cascadias and the Geo-Economics}

of Cross-Border Regionalism," in Globalization, Regionalization, and Cross-Border Regions, ed. Markus Perkmann and Ngai-Ling Sum(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). 235.

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Barnhill (University of Wisconsin Oshkosh.)152 Barnhill upholds that this imperfection makes bioregionalism easier to defend as a utopian project.

This thesis is rooted in Moylan’s premise that Utopias can be useful as spaces where we can be different, and that Utopias can change the way we think. Lucy Sargisson (University of Nottingham) suggests using the theory in physical space as well as literary space: “I sought to pursue these ideas into the cultural text of experienced reality, as well as within the written texts of fictional and theoretical utopias.”153 Utopian theory can explain how ecological utopias in literature like Callenbach’s fantasy world Ecotopia can influence real space. Ruth Levitas (University of Bristol) writes about what leading utopian theorist Ernst Bloch154 saw as the functions of utopias:

There is a tendency to think of utopia as being one of two things: either a totalitarian political project, or a literary genre of fictions about perfect societies. Both these approaches are very different from that of Ernst Bloch (1986), whose 1400-page Das Prinzip Hoffnung (The Principle of Hope) is the most important theoretical treatment of utopia. Bloch’s argument was that the propensity to reach for a better life is manifest in everyday life, in popular culture, in “high” culture, and in religion. It is a way of expressing the experience of lack, of dissatisfaction, of “something’s missing”, in the actuality of human existence. 155

In this case, argues Levitas, utopias are mainly a longing for a better way of life. There is a difference between desire and hope here, between the expressive and the instrumental. Levitas explains how Ernst Block sees a “transformational power”156

in the movement from desire to hope. My argument then is that place, and ecological utopias, have a role to play in environmental thinking because of this transformational power and because of its pragmatic aspects.