Ecotopia (18 page)

The culture of Soul City is of course different from that of Ecotopia generally. It is a heavy exporter of music and musicians, novels and movies and poetry, both to the rest of Ecotopia and to Europe and Asia. Black architects, bred in the ghettoes, have been leading proponents of rebuilding Ecotopian cities on people-centered rather than car-centered principles. Black enterprises, it is sometimes said, seem to be more naturally collectivist than those in white areas.

Since a high proportion of convicted criminals in early Ecotopia, as in the U.S., tended to be black, Soul City faced a major problem in this field. After Independence, with the legalization of marijuana and some other drugs, amnesties were declared for prisoners whose acts would no longer constitute crimes. A few guilty of “sex crimes” and crimes like loitering, drunkenness, and vagrancy were also freed. While the curbing of heroin traffic by taking it over as a government monopoly reduced the crime rate of Soul City as of other areas, a substantial black inmate population remained, and black penologists were forced to take the lead in prison reform.

What is most surprising to an American observer is the severity of current sentences for violent crime. An ordinary street mugging, of the type which in New York may bring a one-to-five-year sentence, and a time served of perhaps 18 months, here may bring a flat five-year sentence with no possibility of parole.

However, the serving of such sentences is quite different from its equivalent in our prisons. No large prisons of our type are maintained, either in Soul City or elsewhere in Ecotopia. Prisoners
are dispersed in many small institutions housing only a few dozen inmates each. During the day inmates participate (under light guard and sometimes none at all) in the general life of society—holding jobs with ordinary job rights and pay. However, they (together with their wives, husbands, or lovers if they so desire) are confined at other times. This curious policy is justified by arguing that people guilty of violent crimes generally commit another one when freed, and thus end up in prison again; indeed traditional prison life increases their tendency to commit violence. (Except for murderers, perhaps, who usually kill spouses or acquaintances, and seldom repeat.) In the American system, the argument goes, prisons were only training schools for the inmates’ next crimes. Soul City penologists, on the other hand, believe their relatively humane policies actually give inmates the time and opportunity to develop non-criminal modes of life in realistic life circumstances. They present impressive figures on the relative re-imprisonment rates for their inmates and ours, but naturally I have no way of verifying their accuracy.

Interestingly enough, ritual war games are practiced among the Soul City population also, but spears are considered too savage a weapon. Long, heavy sticks, rather like the quarterstaffs of Robin Hood’s men, are used instead, and the participants wear crash helmets. Thus the games are usually ended not by a messy wound, but by one of the participants suffering broken ribs or limbs, or being knocked out.

Although virtually all inhabitants of Ecotopia still regard English as their native language, the establishment of Soul City brought a considerable emphasis on Swahili in the schools, and many adults now speak it. Other blacks, however, regard this as an artificial and useless step; they point out that black youngsters are already in effect bilingual since they master both standard English and the street dialect—which is, however, steadily becoming more widely acceptable in business and professional dealings in Soul City. Swahili may be useful in the growing trade with African states. Awareness of Africa is acute among Ecotopian blacks, and I gather that Ecotopia is the source of considerable financial and munitions aid to revolutionaries in South Africa.

This, like other aspects of the Ecotopian race situation, is an uncomfortable irony for Americans. We look with horror on the apartheid society of South Africa, where the dominant white minority has enforced rigid segregation in every aspect of life. In Ecotopia, the black minority has itself enforced a similar segregation—though of course it makes some difference that this was voluntary whereas that of the Africans was forced upon them by the whites. But this admission that the races cannot live in harmony is surely one of the most disheartening developments in all of Ecotopia, and it clouds the future of our nation as well. Its example bodes ill for our own great metropolitan areas, whose black center cities are themselves already rife with talk of secession.

(May 30) At first Marissa refused to come to city with me, almost as a matter of principle. “It’s the weekend,” I said, “surely you can get away for two days!” “Why should I be the one who has to get away? Why don’t
you
get away? Why should I have to come to you? I
live
here—you’re just visiting at the Cove!” Our arguments become surprisingly bitter, punctuated by shoves, curses, growls, venomous looks: there is much at stake. I tried to patch things up and get a little warm feeling going with a hug; she slapped at me, took her sleeping bag and went out into the forest somewhere to sleep. I lay down, glumly, and got to sleep very late. Sometime near dawn I felt her slide into bed beside me. She laid a cool hand on my shoulder. “We must learn to take turns,” she said. We circled arms around each other, and fell asleep.

But nothing is resolved, of course. Her sense of self determination is unshakable. Later in the day she said she still didn’t want to go into the city with me now, even if it
was
her turn. I had invited her to come along tomorrow to Punta Gorda where they’re going to show me a thermal sea-power set-up. This is a welcome development—seems to show a certain warming up in my official reception, and makes it more likely I’ll get to see Vera Allwen soon.

But the whole idea displeased Marissa: she came out with a crack about “foreign dignitaries.” The train ride north is supposed to be inordinately beautiful—through lush farmland, mountain
passes, orchard country, but none of that appealed to her. She said, though, she’d like to come to the Cove when I’m back from the trip. This dispelled my glumness a little. But it is hard to take her insistence on coming and going only as she pleases. Which is strange, because that is after all how Francine operates: is it maybe that I have never wanted anything more from her? Can’t imagine what it would be like to live with someone like Marissa: the notion is exhilarating but scary, like an earthquake. (Felt my first one the other day, and broke out in a sweat though it just jiggled the room a little.)

ENERGY FROM SUN AND SEA

Punta Gorda, May 31. One of the least known and yet staggering achievements of Ecotopian science and technology is the massive thermal-gradient power plant at Punta Gorda, which I have just been allowed to visit. (Similar but smaller plants also exist near Monterey and at other points along the coast.) This is perhaps the most impressive of the means by which the Ecotopians have pursued their ideal of pollution-free sources of energy.

Like the rest of the world, Ecotopia is watching closely the ever more promising attempts to harness atomic fusion energy for practical purposes. The prospect does not entirely overjoy the Ecotopians, however, for they have a sentimental dislike of stringing power lines over their landscape and believe there is something unnatural in processes that concentrate gigantic quantities of energy at any one point; they are more interested in the technologies of generating energy near where it is needed.

Nonetheless, in this as in other matters, they are not exactly the senseless romantics some Americans think. When I visited the Ministry of Energy I discovered that officials there are well aware of the historical tendency for energy-rich cultures to conquer or dominate energy-poor ones. The Ecotopians are
not
, contrary to popular belief, headed back toward a Stone Age life. They use far
more power than would be expected from travelling across their countryside—but both its sources and its uses tend to be diffused, concealed, and novel.

The Ecotopians inherited a system of oil- and gas-fired power plants (which they closed within a few years) and a number of atomic-fission plants. They believe that ultimately fission cannot be tolerated because of radioactive byproducts and heat pollution, but they have been willing to live temporarily with the fission plants located in remote and little-inhabited areas—though they have redoubled engineering precautions against nuclear explosions and extended hot-water discharge pipes more than a mile to sea. (With what I am beginning to realize is typical Ecotopian ingenuity, the seacoast plant discharges are carried in huge pipes made of rigid plastic which is extruded with air bubbles in it so that it is slightly buoyant. Thus it tends to float, and is anchored in place just below keel depth by cables to the ocean floor.)

Also inherited from pre-Independence days is an unconventional, and ecologically respectable, source of geothermal power. In the hot-springs region north of San Francisco, turbines are spun by steam coming up from the bowels of the earth. It is a hellish scene—billows of steam issue from pipes and wells, with loud hissing noises; the earth seems ready to explode. Despite the contrast with our quietly humming powerhouses, this geothermal system has advantages: cost is low, it adds virtually no pollutants to the atmosphere, and only a small amount of warm water to the run-off in nearby streams—one of which has become the site of swimming resorts that are open even in winter.

Ecotopia also took over numerous hydroelectric installations at dams in its great mountain ranges. However, these are regarded as temporary expedients too, since they tend to silt up after a few generations, and have unfortunate effects on salmon and other wildlife. Ecotopian thinking has moved uniformly toward power sources which, like solar energy, earth heat, tides, and wind, can be tapped indefinitely without affecting even the local biosphere. (Ecotopians thus take a childish delight in the windmills and rooftop wind-driven generators that are common in both cities and remote areas.)

The major thrust of Ecotopian energy research and development has involved two main sources. One is the energy of direct solar radiation, and several systems now exist for capturing it. Some require large installations and some small, but most are impressive in size. One type is a silvered parabolic mirror about 30 feet across that focuses the sunlight. Since the sun moves during the day, the receptor at the rays’ focus must move too—so this odd-shaped device sits like a spider on a web of thin cables on which it pulls itself about, seeking maximum warmth, and sending steam through a flexible pipe to drive a generator on the side. Much of the southern part of Ecotopia is virtually desert, but these installations have reportedly proved effective in more northerly areas as well.

Another type is a bank of massive photo-cells, similar to those used on satellites but enormous in size. I have visited one cell-bank south of Livermore, which uses a secret type of receptor material. The softly rolling grassy hills are faced on their south sides with literally city blocks on end of a glassy substance, in squares about two meters on a side. Narrow aisles run along the hillside, evidently mostly for the convenience of cleaning crews, whom I saw one evening wetting and wiping down the plates.

During the day the heat and glare are intense, but the setting is silent, placid and peaceful. Grass continues to grow in the aisles and under the plates, which are mounted a few feet off the ground. I heard a meadowlark, and noticed the tracks of field mice underfoot. This cell bank must cover an area several miles on each side, perhaps 20 or 30 square miles in all: it’s the size of a major airport. It generates enough power for a chain of minicities, and Ecotopian planners believe that in cloudier climates too such installations are becoming economically feasible.

Even this huge set-up, however, is hardly remarkable beside the Punta Gorda thermal sea-power station, which might be taken for a reconstruction of some mad duke’s medieval fortress. It squats on the shoreline at a point where deep and very cold water lies only a few miles offshore, and sucks up seawater through a monstrous pipe. Smaller pipes run this way and that, connected to generators and pumps. Engineers explained to me that the system is something like a giant refrigerator running in reverse. Since water can
store enormous quantities of heat energy, even a relatively small temperature differential can be made to yield large amounts of power if suitably ingenious heat exchangers are employed—but great quantities of water must be pumped up to take advantage of this principle. The sheer architectural mass of the plant is overwhelming; it seems almost an extension of the tides themselves. (The deep cold water is very nutrient-rich. Some of it is therefore pumped into nearby ponds to warm up before being injected into the system along with already warm surface water—but while in the ponds it feeds fish and shellfish, which are an important byproduct of the plant.)

Going from the sublime massiveness of this great project, which must win the admiration of anyone who sees it, to the ridiculous, I must describe a peculiarly Ecotopian power-generating device, which in its way also helps to explain what a fanciful people we are dealing with. Recently I visited an Ecotopian “family” in their country house. (Many Ecotopian living groups either have some kind of shack in the woods or are associate members of a country commune, where they spend some of their time.) This delightful retreat was located in an utter mountain wilderness, many miles from the nearest power line; but when I got there I found a radio was pounding out music. This radio, it turned out, was powered by a
waterwheel!
Some clever inventor has built a small wheel which floats in midstream suspended from cables, thus avoiding costly and ecologically damaging embutments. It generates 24-volt power which, stored in a couple of batteries, is plenty to run the radio, a pump, and the few electric lights needed in a country place where people go to bed early. My hosts expressed great glee when I admired this incredible contraption. In fact they tried to give it to me to take home, but since it weighs about 30 pounds, this is fortunately out of the question.