ERNEST CALLENBACH’S INTERTOPIA AND THE QUEST FOR DEEP TIME: ECOTOPIAN PATHS TO NATURAL PHILOSOPHY, NATIVE AMERICAN WISDOM AND THE HIGH ROMANTIC REPUBL
ERNEST CALLENBACH’S INTERTOPIA AND THE QUEST FOR DEEP TIME: ECOTOPIAN PATHS TO NATURAL PHILOSOPHY, NATIVE AMERICAN WISDOM AND THE HIGH ROMANTIC REPUBL

Summary/Abstract: Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975) is relevant for both the ecological paradigm and the emergence of a neo-Utopian cast of mind in our age. The novel is almost an anticipatory treatise of sorts on the question of the ongoing emergence and evolution of an ecological conscience of man, echoing old types of native American wisdom and associated with the rise of “deep ecology” or ecosophy and an interest in the concept of “deep time” (the temporality of deep germinal processes which are invisible if looked at from the surface of things) as opposed to “surface” temporality. The Ecotopian civilizational model imagined by Callenbach is not a perfect world, but one based on the opposition against the national philosophy of America grounded in the notion of perpetual technological progress. Through Ecotopia’s eco-philosophy, which we hereby propose to analyze, Callenbach proposes a model of the “deep time” quester (descending in the last analysis from the Amerindian model of the “vision quester”) and so attacks the technopolitan tendencies deriving from the so-called Second Scientific Revolution of the 20th century, with roots in the 19th century (ca. 1800), and associated with the Industrial Revolution.

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