Ernest Callenbach | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Ernest Callenbach in 2008 | |
| Born | Ernest William Callenbach (1929-04-03)April 3, 1929 |
| Died | April 16, 2012(2012-04-16) (aged 83) Berkeley, California, U.S. |
| Philosophical work | |
| School | Green Philosophy |
| Main interests |
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Ernest William Callenbach (April 3, 1929 – April 16, 2012) was an American author,film critic, editor, andsimple living adherent.[1] Having many connections with a group of noted creative individuals in Northern California, Callenbach's influence beyond the region began with the publication of his utopian novelEcotopia in 1975.
Born into a farming family inWilliamsport, Pennsylvania,[1] Callenbach attended theUniversity of Chicago, where he was drawn into the then 'new wave' of serious attention to film as an art form. After six months in Paris at theSorbonne, watching four films a day, he returned to Chicago and earned a master's degree in English and Communications.
Callenbach then moved to California. From 1955 to 1991, he was on the staff of theUniversity of California Press (Berkeley). A general copywriter for a number of years, he edited the Press'sFilm Quarterly from 1958 until 1991.[1] He also occasionally taught film courses at U.C. and atSan Francisco State University.
For many years Callenbach edited the Natural History Guides at the U.C. Press. He began to take environmental issues and their connections to human value systems, social patterns, and lifestyles just as seriously as he had taken film. He was heavily influenced byEdward Abbey. Callenbach talked publicly about being influenced, during work on his novelEcotopia, by numerous streams of thought: scientific discoveries in the fields of ecology and conservation biology; the urban-ecology planning movement, concerned with an approach to urban planning; and the soft-energy movement, championed byAmory Lovins and others.[2]
Callenbach is known as an author ofgreen books, namely as author of the ecological "utopias"Ecotopia (1975) andEcotopia Emerging (1981), and alsoThe Ecotopian Encyclopedia (1981),Bring Back the Buffalo! (1995), andEcology: A Pocket Guide (1998). (While his first novel popularized the term "ecotopia," the term was actually coined by the ethnographer E. N. Anderson.)[3]
In terms of concepts of human involvement with the ecology, as well as some of the economic and social concepts, the Ecotopia books are related to what is known as thesustainability movement.[2] Callenbach's Ecotopian concept is not "Luddite" — he does not reject high technology, but rather his fictional society shows aconscious selectivity about technology. In Ecotopia ecologically compatible high-technology exists alongside postmaterialistic attitudes and lifestyles.[4] As an example, with its emphasis on personal rather than impersonal interaction, Callenbach's Ecotopian society anticipates the development and liberal usage ofvideoconferencing.
Indeed, for all his involvement with print publishing, Callenbach remained quite interested in visual media. Aspects of his bookEcotopia in some ways anticipatedC-SPAN — which came into being a few years later — because in the story the daily life of the legislature and some of that of the judicial courts is televised in this fictional society, and televised debates (including technical debates concerning ecological problems) meet a need and desire among citizens.
Callenbach was a part of the circle of West Coast technologists, architects, social thinkers, and scientists which includedUrsula K. Le Guin,Sim Van der Ryn,Peter Calthorpe,Stewart Brand,Kevin Kelly,J. Baldwin, andJohn Todd.[5] As with some of these others, he was often a speaker, discussion panellist, and essayist.
In 2006 Callenbach introduced the story of a real-world community movement in Japan that is reminiscent, in its aims and practices, of his Ecotopian society. He visited Japan and investigated theYamagishi movement. He found that it encompassed some three dozen intentional communities founded on the same underlying principles: living an ecologically based integration of people with agriculture (pig, cattle, and chicken livestock raising, and organic-vegetable and fruit farming), and living a social life based on principles of democracy, mutual understanding, support, and health. Each individual settlement is referred to asjikkenji ('demonstration community for the world').[6]
In 2009, Callenbach was awarded anhonorary doctorate by theUniversity of Freiburg.[7]Freiburg is noted for itsrenewable energy industry and has been called a "green utopia".[8] He died of cancer on April 16, 2012, in Berkeley, California.[9]
...if you reflect on our change from thoughtless trash-tossing to virtually universal recycling, or from the past in which smokers didn't hesitate to blow smoke in anybody's face to our present restrictions on smoking in public places, it's clear that shared ideas about acceptable or desirable behavior can change markedly. Such changes occurred without anybody getting arrested in the dark of night. Further changes will come...
