Ecotopia (7 page)

THE UNSPORTING LIFE
OF ECOTOPIA

San Francisco, May 9. American sports fans would have a miserable time of it in Ecotopia. They would find no baseball and no football, no basketball, not even ice hockey. The newspapers have what they label “sports pages,” but these are devoted to oddball individual sports. Skiing, especially cross-country style, gets big coverage. Hiking and camping, which are usually lumped with fishing and hunting, are treated as sports. Swimming, sailing, gymnastics, ping-pong, and tennis get a lot of attention. So does chess! There’s no boxing or wrestling in Ecotopia, and no roller derby. In short, for the sports enthusiast Ecotopia is about as dull as you could imagine: the sports scene is set up purely for the benefit of the participants.

On the other hand, from a physical-fitness point of view ordinary Ecotopian citizens are remarkably healthy looking. An American like myself tends to feel a little flabby here. Ecotopians are used to walking everywhere, carrying heavy burdens like backpacks and groceries for long distances, and they have a generally higher level of physical activity than Americans. The women, especially, look marvelously healthy, even though they do not adhere to our standards of style. The fat and broken-down people we are accustomed to seeing on our city streets are absent here, and even oldsters seem surprisingly fit and hearty. To my questions about this, Ecotopians have replied, “Well, nature has equipped us well, and we lead active physical lives,” or some such phrases. It
apparently does not occur to them that human beings in other countries are
not
in equally good shape.

But my inquiries, pursued further, have turned up an extensive network of unobtrusive physical activities which, in fact, seem almost Spartan in their intensity, and participation in some kind of minor sport is virtually universal among Ecotopians. Even volleyball, God help them, is a favorite pastime, and at noon or indeed other hours you can see teams cavorting in factory yards or on the streets. It doesn’t look terribly competitive, but is obviously fun.

Ecotopians also love to dance, which is good exercise; and walking a lot, which is forced on them by the prohibition of cars, probably has the compensation of being good for the health. (Runners, whether for health or haste, are common sights here.) Ping-pong tables seem to be one of the commonest items of furniture, and I must confess that when I challenged an awkward-looking teenager to a friendly game, I got stomped!

Ecotopian schools, with their looser scheduling (and better climate) give children far more outdoor time than ours. So the youngsters have a high level of physical activity throughout their school years. School groups often go on expeditions: it’s common to see six-year-olds, with heavy backpacks, trudging along with older kids on hikes which, I am told, may last four or five days, and in quite forbidding country. As they move on into higher levels of school (the term “grade” is not used in our sense) much of the children’s time is allotted to training in fishing and hunting and survival skills, at the expense of basic educational skills. They are forced to learn not only the basic techniques but also how to improvise ecologically acceptable equipment in the wild: hooks, snares, bows, arrows, and so on.

Some parents and other adults participate voluntarily in the children’s field trips—for meat as well as sport, since wild game has returned to the reforested areas in great numbers. Thus mountain lions, wildcats, bears (including grizzlies), and wolves may now be hunted, along with deer, foxes, and rabbits. (Hunting is usually done with bows and arrows, not firearms, though most Ecotopian living units possess shotguns.) The experiences of the children are closely tied in with studies of plants, animals and
landscape. I have been impressed with the knowledge that even young children have of such matters—a six-year-old can tell you all about the “ecological niches” of the creatures and plants he encounters in his daily life. He will also know what roots and berries are edible, how to use soap plant, how to carve a pot holder from a branch.

A big sports role is played by Ecotopian rivers and lakes, which seem to be a magnetic attraction to young people even though the coastal waters are freezing cold. Shortly after Independence, an expropriation law made all waterfront properties into “water parks.” Beautiful exclusive estates were seized and turned into fishing communes, schools, hospitals, oceanographie and limnological institutes, museums of natural history. Public boating, fishing and swimming were permitted in lakes that had formerly been enclosed in fenced, guarded private developments. The new government even went so far as to dynamite some of the dams which had been built on the rivers—on the dubious grounds that they prevented “white-water” recreational boating or interfered with the salmon runs—which have been reestablished with great effort and enjoy much public support.

A curious physical fitness aspect of Ecotopian life is that in school the classes in carpentry and other tool work (which are taken by most students, girls as well as boys) carry out construction projects that often involve the handling of timbers, masonry and other heavy materials.

But the strangest thing about Ecotopian sports for an American is to understand how Ecotopians get along without the thrills, drama and suspense provided by our pennant seasons, the pageants of our bowl games, or the opportunity for boys to identify with star players. Apparently, the excitement we focus on our major sports has been entirely diverted in Ecotopia to what they call “the war games.” These are never described in the sports pages, however, nor indeed anywhere else in print. People have been evasive when I have asked about these “games,” but rumors that have reached us outside Ecotopia suggest that rather bestial practices are involved. From conversations I have overheard, especially among young men, it is clear that Ecotopians are intensely concerned with
these bloody rituals—in which it appears that hundreds of Ecotopian youths perish every year. Soon I hope to make an eyewitness report on one of these controversial spectacles.

(May 10) No progress in my efforts to set up an appointment with President Allwen. Her assistant friendly enough, however. Says it will happen in due course, but why don’t I look around the country some more first, “so you have something to talk about.” Asked me pointedly to make sure they get early copies of all my dispatches. Are they waiting to see what I write before they decide whether to give me my precious appointment?

Saw Allwen on a TV event—dedication of a solar-energy plant. Altogether unlike our ribbon-cutting ceremonies. Here the people who do the ceremony are the people who did the work. Cameramen wander around among everybody; it’s all quite helterskelter, there seem to be no passive bystanders, everybody is talking to everybody else. The camera has been with various groups for a while, one of them including this rather plain but strong unidentified woman who’s chatting and laughing with them. They’re showing her some papers, she’s joking with them. After a while it turns out she is Vera. But nobody calls on her for a speech. She turns to a woman nearby and says, “Why don’t you tell everybody how this all got started?”

Seriously but with absolutely no pompousness, the woman describes the background of the plant—why it was needed here, how the people involved in the communities it would serve decided what kind of plant it should be, how some novel scientific developments got worked up. Then she turned to other people, and they talked about the actual construction—funny stories, mainly, not at all our kind of solemn, contribution-to-the-ages sort of stuff. Certain aspects of the installation are evidently far from perfect—at least in some eyes—and the criticisms weren’t kept under cover in the slightest. When this got a little heavy, Allwen re-entered the conversation. But she didn’t play the heavy arbiter or mother role, she talked about some other case where something had gone wrong, and told a political anecdote about how the people had finally
gotten together and more or less fixed it up. The mood lightened, mutual confidence returned.

And then, when everybody seemed to have said what they wanted to say, the group just sort of amorphously decided it was time to turn on the switch. Amid jokes that maybe it wouldn’t work after all, a child was brought forth to actually push the switch. It worked. Lightbulbs lighted; people cheered and hugged each other; and then, as champagne was brought out, the camera crews put down their equipment and picked up glasses, and we saw no more.

I’ve also been using spare time watching some of Allwen’s collected speeches on my videodisc player. (Bought a full set to take back with me.) Clearly a remarkable woman: a powerful personality with a gift for folksy yet highly political speaking. There is a lot of warmth, yet a certain menace too: you wouldn’t want to be her enemy. Maybe the old Queen Elizabeth was like that? At the same time Allwen never seems to rely on the us-against-them gambit. The underlying point is always some kind of unity; there’s a family feeling even when she’s chastising someone. I doubt if anyone, whatever their politics, could be entirely in her bad graces! She has a way of seeming to take the viewer into her confidence, so that you share the logic and conviction of her argument. It would be hard to feel she was
selling
you something, the way too many of our television speeches do. Instead she seems to be
giving—
clarity, strength, wisdom. Maybe as much a religious leader as a politician? Head of the state ecological church, chief priestess? Doesn’t look it, God knows! But anyway a force to be reckoned with.

ECOTOPIAN TELEVISION
AND ITS WARES

San Francisco, May 10. Ecotopians claim to have sifted through modern technology and rejected huge tracts of it, because of its ecological harmfulness. However, despite this general technological austerity, they employ video devices even more extensively than we do. Feeling that they should transport their bodies only when it’s a pleasure, they seldom travel “on business” in our manner. Instead, they tend to transact business by using their picturephones. These employ the same cables that provide television connections; the whole country, except for a few isolated rural spots, is wired with cable. (There is no ordinary broadcasting.) Video sets are everywhere, but strangely enough I have seldom seen people sitting before them blotted out in the American manner. Whether this is because of some mysterious national traits, or because of the programming being markedly different, or both, I cannot yet tell. But Ecotopians seem to use TV, rather than letting it use them.

Some channels are apparently literal parts of the government structure—something like a council chamber with a PA system would be. People watch these when the doings of local governments or the national legislature are being transmitted. (Virtually no government proceedings are closed to press and public anyway.) Viewers not only watch—they expect to participate. They phone in with questions and comments, sometimes for the officials present, sometimes for the TV staffs. Thus TV doesn’t only provide news—much of the time it
is
the news. The routine governmental fare includes debates that involve public figures, or aspirants to public office; many court proceedings and executive meetings; and meetings of the legislatures and especially of their committees. Running comment is interspersed from a variety of sources, ranging from the narrators to vehemently partisan analysts. There is no rule of objectivity, as with our newscasters; Ecotopians in general scorn the idea as a “bourgeois fetish,” and profess to believe that truth is best served by giving some label indicating your general position, and then letting fly.

Other channels present films and various entertainment programs, but the commercials are awkwardly bunched entirely
between
shows, rather than scattered throughout. Not only does this destroy the rhythm we’re used to on TV—commercials giving us timely respites from the drama—but it increases the tendency for the commercials to fight each other. And this is bad enough anyway, because they are limited to mere announcements, without impersonated housewives or other consumers, and virtually without adjectives. (Some prohibition must exist for all the media, since ads in magazines and newspapers are similarly bland.) It’s hard to get excited about a product’s specifications-list, but Ecotopian viewers do manage to watch them. Sometimes, I suspect, they watch merely in hopes of a counter-ad to follow—an announcement of a competing product, in which the announcer sneeringly compares the two.

Also, the commercials may seem watchable because they are islands of sanity in the welter of viewpoints, personnel, and visual image quality that make up “normal” Ecotopian TV fare. Some channels even change managements entirely—at noon, or 6 p.m., a channel that has been programming political events or news will suddenly switch over to household advice, loud rock music, or weird surrealistic films bringing your worst nightmares to garish life. (Ecotopians don’t seem to believe overmuch in color tuning. The station engineers sometimes joke around and transmit signals in which people deliberately come out green or fuchsia, with orange skies.) Then again you may come upon a super-serious program imported from Canada or England. And there are a few people who tune in American satellite signals and watch our reruns, or laugh it up at our commercials. But this seems to be an acquired, minority taste—and it also requires an expensive special adapter to pick up the signals directly.