Ecotopia 2121

A Vision for Our Future Green Utopia?in 100 Cities

Alan Marshall

• Publisher: Arcade
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781628726145
• Topic: Ciencias biológicas
• Subtopic: Ecología

A 2016 Green Book Festival "Future Forecasts" WinnerA stunningly original, lushly illustrated vision for a Green Utopia, published on the 500th anniversary of the original Big Idea. Five hundred years ago a powerful new word was unleashed upon the world when Thomas More published his book Utopia, about an island paradise far away from his troubled land. It was an instant hit, and the literati across Europe couldn't get enough of its blend of social fantasy with a deep desire for a better world. Five hundred years later, Ecotopia 2121 once again harnesses the power of the utopian imagination to confront our current problems, among them climate change, and offer a radical, alternative vision for the future of our troubled planet.Depicting one hundred cities around the globe—from New York to San Francisco, London, Tokyo, Sydney, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, Beijing, Vienna, Singapore, Cape Town, Abu Dhabi, and Mumbai—Alan Marshall imagines how each may survive and prosper. A striking, full-color scenario painting illustrates each city. The chapters tell how each community has found either a social or technological innovation to solve today's crises. Fifteen American cities are covered. Around the world, urban planners like to tailor scenarios for the year 2020, to take advantage of the metaphor of 20-20 vision. In Ecotopia 2121, the vision may be fuzzy, but its sharp insights, captivating illustrations, and playful storytelling will keep readers coming back again and again.

Beijing 2121 ¤ City of Gold, Part I

The Chinese have a special fondness for gold, regarding it as pure, lucky, noble, and glorious, and as being more trustworthy and incorruptible than just about anything else in the universe.

The Chinese government shares this feeling, and it has set about getting its hands on as much gold as it can. According to some, gold hoarding is part of China’s attempt to de-Americanize the world by challenging the trading power of the mighty US dollar. Currently, the exact total of government-owned gold in China is a mystery. However, someday in the mid-twenty-first century, Beijing will declare its gold holdings in the most conspicuous way: the Gold City of Beijing, a new commercial center where the buildings are fabricated from gold, will display for the world to see the glorious financial power of China.

At first, the Gold City is planned to be glamorous and showy. However, things may change a decade or so later, as China suffers from myriad large-scale environmental crises:

1. The air becomes so polluted that it’s no longer possible to hide the fact that it kills tens of millions of Chinese citizens per year. Even now, just by walking to school and home again, many urban Chinese children suffer the effects of smoking the equivalent of two packs of cigarettes a day. By the middle of the twenty-first century, with continued industrial expansion, it may be much worse.

2. A bunch of nuclear plants near China’s coastal cities are hit by violent natural disasters: cyclones, earthquakes, tsunamis, and storm surges, provoking multiple meltdowns, explosions, and the release of radioactive clouds into the atmosphere. As if that isn’t enough, soon after, hordes of rats and swarms of locusts come and go within the battered nuclear plants with gay abandon, and when they leave, they are contaminated with radioactivity, which they spread far and wide among urban and rural settings. Because of the contaminated clouds and the radioactive rats and locusts, entire cities have to be evacuated and abandoned.

3. Record-breaking monsoon rains during a single season cause the worst series of floods in Chinese history along the Yangtze, Yellow, and Pearl Rivers. These floods force the evacuation and eventual abandonment of China’s river cities, a process that affects many millions of people.

4. It is announced that the panda has become extinct in the wild, and the remaining zoo specimens die out because they are unable or unwilling to reproduce.

These calamities could very well play out in quick succession sometime in the mid-twenty-first century in the years set to become known as the Dirty Decade in China. Together, these disasters will force the Chinese populace into a massive reevaluation of industrialization and the way the country is governed. By the end of the Dirty Decade, confidence in the Communist Party will have shrunk beyond recovery and massive public dissent will become widespread. Because people will demand that their voices be heard in the actual management of the ongoing environmental crises, calls for democracy and human rights will become louder and more strident than ever before. The level of protest will be just too raucous for the authorities to contain or shut down, and they’ll be forced to concede to democratic reforms.

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In order to survive, the Gold City must adapt its image to these changing circumstances. Originally, the Gold City was designed to be a demonstration of Chinese success—of its glory, wealth, and power. But as the years roll by and the building plan is put into effect, these sentiments do not reflect the changing environmental concerns of the Chinese public, and the project has to be redeemed somehow. The answer is this: the Eco-gold City.

Currently, the world’s gold is pulled from the ground in environmentally and socially suspect ways, usually involving forest clearing, labor abuse, the destruction and removal of topsoil, the disruption of small communities, and the contamination of waterways both on the surface and underground. Chinese gold-mining companies are as bad as any with respect to these issues, whether operating at home or abroad. Chinese gold mines in Tibet and Africa, for instance, have caused landslides, land clearing, and heavy-metal contamination, and resulted in various social ills ranging from the trafficking of sex workers to the corruption of local governments. Chinese mining companies are usually among the most strident in rejecting any form of investigation into their practices or regulation of their activities. Meanwhile, they often make no discernible contribution to the economic improvement of the areas where they mine.

Gold mining is sometimes held to be one of those industries that are inherently dirty, and no amount of regulation or Greening will change that. However, if the business model is made to change, and if only nontoxic gold-mining techniques are used, and if the industry is policed according to international law and fair labor agreements, and if labor unions are allowed to organize, and if wilderness protection is undertaken (and supervised by top managers, local authorities, and national and international agencies, as well as by the local communities, nongovernmental organizations, gold traders, and consumers, all collaborating in the effort), then it is possible for gold mining to become far better than it is today.

Beijing 2121 represents this to some extent. Here, each brick is an eco-gold brick, produced by a gold industry universally adjusted by having adopted three fundamental policies:

1. The No Stench Policy: Gold mining should not change the natural scent of the air, thus the predominant flora must be preserved, noxious chemicals must be abandoned, lakes and fisheries must be conserved, and mining sites must be restored.

2. The Random Watchdog Policy: Randomly chosen community members are enlisted to supervise the operations and finances of gold miners (with guidance from randomly chosen international scientists, lawyers, and accountants).

3. The Common Heritage of Mankind Policy: Gold mined from publicly owned land should be declared the Common Heritage of Mankind, whereby gold can be rented year by year and shifted around the world, but it cannot be bought and sold. The ongoing revenue from gold rental can then be used for environmental benefits in the country of origin.

Bethlehem 2121 ¤ City of Gold, Part II

Bethlehem is a Golden City of an entirely different kind than Beijing—it is golden in terms of spirituality. Bethlehem is held to be the sacred birthplace of such divine figures as Lachama, the Canaanite God; David, the King of Israel; and Jesus Christ, the son of the Christian God.

Control of Bethlehem has shifted throughout its three-thousand-year history. Once the domain of the Canaanites, it later was ruled by Judea, Rome, Persia, and an Arab caliphate. Next it became part of Egypt, then it was claimed by Christian crusaders, followed by the Ottomans, and in the twentieth century it was governed by Britain, Jordan, and Israel. Since the 1990s, Bethlehem has been part of Palestine.

Bethlehem’s potential for future ecotopian status is profoundly linked to its increasing independence from Israel. Compared to many other parts of Palestine, Bethlehem is less reliant on Israel for water, trade, or security. With this comparative independence, Bethlehem utilizes its golden status in spirituality to appeal to a broad base of international tourists, from which industry most of its citizens can derive a healthy living. To preserve this economy, Bethlehem 2121 has banished industrial zones as unsuitable for the city’s character. Instead, only small craft and cottage industries such as the production of olive oil and date products are approved.

Bethlehem 2121 stands in stark contrast to the rest of Palestine, which has become a hodgepodge collection of industrial parks set up by foreign firms to take advantage of the cheap labor and lax regulations there. For some Palestinians, these industrial estates are considered zones of prosperity because the new industries offer jobs to locals. However, all too often they end up being zones of environmental injustice, populated by dangerous and polluting industries. In contrast, Bethlehem has clean air and clean water, and its people are healthier and happier as a result. And as long as the economy remains based on tourism, handicrafts, and small-scale agriculture, there’s not much pressure on infrastructure from population influx.

Birmingham 2121 ¤ The Green Heart of England

Birmingham is England’s second-largest city. During the Victorian period of the nineteenth century, it was famous worldwide for being Britain’s manufacturing heartland. Some nicknames coined for the city at that time include “The Workshop of the World” and “The City of a Thousand Trades.” Nowadays, the manufacturing sector of the city has dwindled and been replaced by a service economy. Even the iconic Mini Cooper automobile, once made in Birmingham, is now produced abroad. The “heartland” tag applies only to the city’s geographical location, for it is approximately in the middle of England.

Before it grew into an enormous manufacturing center, Birmingham was just a small hamlet within the medieval Forest of Arden. During the Middle Ages, the Arden woodland contained oak trees intermingled with chestnut trees, and many birch and linden trees as well. These are long-lived species that host all kinds of animals—large and small, rare and common.

For three thousand years, the density of the Forest of Arden made it nearly impossible for succeeding civilizations to settle within or build roadways though this woodland. The Celts, the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, and the Vikings all left it intact. There were clearings—leighs, they were called—among the oaks and birches, and many tiny villages were located in them. For millennia, these villages utilized the resources of the forest sustainably at a small scale. By long tradition, much of the Arden during this time was common land: open equally to all village families and guaranteeing them certain rights to graze animals, to collect wood and char, and to hunt and forage.

After the Norman invasion of England, toward the late eleventh century, a slow, five-hundred-year colonization of the forest took place. The new king, William the Conqueror, was not really of an egalitarian persuasion, and he stratified the medieval society of middle England by granting power and resources only to those most acquiescent to his goals. This included the very Catholic Arden family, who were given the right to control vast tracts of the Arden.

Slowly, as the centuries passed, most of the forest was enclosed within fences, then privatized and converted into farmlands—mainly for the lucrative wool trade. Sheep and wool made England a wealthy nation by the end of the Middle Ages, but they also led to the decimation of its largest forest.

More than five hundred years after the Norman invasion, in the decades of the late sixteenth century, the Arden family had grown to be very large and wealthy in the English Midlands. However, because they were Catholic, they lacked significant political influence, since by this time the English monarchy had changed to being Protestant, while Catholics were actively marginalized.

One of the members of the Arden family at this time was Mary Arden, the mother of William Shakespeare, and he too was born in the area that would have been within the boundaries of the ancient forest. However, by the time Shakespeare achieved fame, there was virtually nothing left of the forest—save for some isolated stands of woodland.

This wouldn’t stop Shakespeare from waxing lyrical about the Arden on numerous occasions, though. For example, here’s a passage from the comedy As You Like it, wherein an overthrown duke has exiled himself to the Forest of Arden to escape the clutches of the new, warmongering, tyrannical duke, who also happens to be his brother:

Sweet are the uses of adversity,

Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,

Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;

And this our life exempt from public haunt

Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,

Sermons in stones and good in everything.

If that’s not expressive enough, later on another character, Orlando, is found singing about the Arden to his faraway love:

Under the greenwood tree

Who loves to lie with me,

And turn his merry note

Unto the sweet bird’s throat,

Come hither, come hither, and come hither:

Here shall he see

No enemy

But winter and rough weather.

Shakespeare wrote these lines about the Arden being a haven in 1601, but—just four years later in a village not far from Birmingham—the same area served as the birthplace of England’s most illustrious revolutionaries, the conspirators behind the Gunpowder Plot. The plotters, who included in their ranks the now notorious Guy Fawkes, aimed to assassinate King James, the Protestant head of England, whom the plotters regarded as an oppressor of their Catholic faith. Their plan was to travel from Birmingham to London on horseback on the night of November 5, 1605, then blow up the entire House of Lords from underneath, thereby killing King James and all his Protestant ministers. The plot was foiled when Guy Fawkes was caught guarding more than twenty barrels of gunpowder in the basement. The rest of the Gunpowder plotters rode back to the Arden and hid out in a small settlement near Birmingham before being hunted down and killed by a militia loyal to the king.

Shakespeare’s father was actually good friends with the leader of the Gunpowder plotters. However, nobody has yet found out Shakespeare’s true religious convictions and whether he sympathized with the Gunpowder plotters or not. But in both fiction and history, the woodlands around Birmingham have served as a green haven from corrupt authority.

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Four hundred years on, in the twenty-first century, the story of the Gunpowder Plot survives as Guy Fawkes Night, whe...