Modern-day adventures in utopian living

"In Utopia": Modern-day adventures in utopian living

http://www.salon.com/books/nonfiction/index.html?story=/books/feature/2010/08/15/in_utopia_interview

J.C. Hallman traveled from rural communes to futuristic cities
looking for utopias that -- surprise! -- work

By Thomas Rogers
Aug 15, 2010

Off the coast of Korea, a utopian new city is rising. New Songdo
City, which is slated to be finished in 2015, is the most expensive
private real estate venture in the world. The city is being built on
reclaimed land in Incheon Bay (site of the famous Korean War
landing), and, when it is complete, will include the "world's largest
twin tower," a 100-acre "central park," full city-wide integration
into wireless technology (which one of its architects describes as "a
municipal concierge service"), and groundbreaking levels of
environmental sustainability (with wind turbine power and rainwater
collection, it aims to be the world's first LEED-certified city). If
all goes well, New Songdo will be the first of 20 privately built,
fully wired and ecologically friendly utopian cities built on six
different continents by the same group of architects.

New Songdo is the most ambitious of the six examples in J.C.
Hallman's "In Utopia," his new book about modern-day utopian
projects. Fascinated by the decline in utopian thinking over the past
century, and inspired by his own suburban upbringing, Hallman wanted
to look at far-fetched ideas that are pushing the boundaries of our
social imagination -- and, to varying extents, succeeding. Among
other places, he visits The World, a cruise ship co-op with a
permanent population made up of millionaires; Twin Oaks, a commune in
the Virginia woods that supports itself by making hammocks; and the
soon-to-be-built Front Sight, a town centered around universal gun
ownership that bills itself as "the safest community in America."

Salon spoke to Hallman over the phone about the reasoning behind New
Songdo, a project to introduce elephants into the United States, and
what it's like to live on a rural utopian commune.
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What's the idea behind New Songdo City?

The Koreans recognized that there was no central hub or city for
conducting business in northeast Asia, so they wanted to build this
place that would make them a central marketplace. They brought in
some Americans to build this city. It's distinct from, say,
eco-suburbs or bedroom communities or master planned communities in
that it's multiuse. People actually live there, but they also work
there. It's a relatively new thing, to build a city from scratch in
quite that way and at this scale. They're promising full
technological integration; lamps and tables and cars and everything
will be computerized and on a network. You won't even need a
BlackBerry or a laptop.

Cities like Dubai and Abu Dhabi, which were also built up from
scratch, seem much more dystopian than utopian. Everybody I know
that's visited has come back saying that they're soulless and scary.

Yeah, I think aesthetically these cities are huge playgrounds, and I
don't think that Songdo has that in mind. Songdo is a much more
modestly sized city -- with about 65,000 permanent residents and
300,000 workers. They conceived of it thinking a good bit about
utopian history. I met the lead architect, and he and I chatted about
Robert Owen and Charles Fourier.

Where does the term "utopia" come from?

The term itself comes from Thomas More's book "On Utopia," written in
1516, which describes a perfect society of Godless pagans in the New
World. The idea was that it would shame Christian England into
governing better than it was: "Look, if these pagans can do better
than you, shame on you." It gave birth to an entire genre of
literature. Now the term is retroactively applied to everything from
constitutions to manifestoes, fiction and nonfiction.

Why the fascination with utopianism?

I grew up on a street called Utopia Road in a master planned
community in California. In the same way that utopias tend to slip
away from their original visions, so did some of the ideas about
suburban planning, and by the time my particular community was born
it was much more driven by profit. For me, growing up meant coming to
realize that, right or not, the history of utopian thought has
something to do with my own personal heritage.

In the book you write about a project called Pleistocene Rewilding,
which proposed to reintroduce large animals -- including elephants
and lions -- into North America in order to reestablish the ecosystem
that existed several thousand years ago. Why didn't that take off?

Science shows that large animals are really good for ecosystems, but
North America, since about 12,000 or 13,000 years ago, has been
absent a lot of large species. You can't bring back extinct species,
like giant ground sloths, but what you can do is bring back a
surrogate that can perform the same ecological function. You can find
an endangered species of rhinoceros that, in a certain part of New
Mexico, might wind up performing the same ecological job as those
extinct species. A number of projects like this, where animals are
being reintroduced and having measurable positive effects, are
happening all over the world: musk ox in Alaska, horses in Mongolia,
and songbirds on various island chains.

Some of the media response to the project was sensationalistic, and
some of the knee-jerk negative response to the idea can partly be
blamed on "Jurassic Park." We now know that Michael Crichton was a
right-wing propagandist who attacked sexual harassment legislation
and climate change in his novels. "Jurassic Park's" argument, that
you can't possible attempt to manage nature on this scale, is a
classically dystopian response to a very utopian idea

You spent several weeks in Twin Oaks, a rural commune in Virginia.
When I think of rural communes I generally think of cults and doomed
'60s experiments in free love.

Twin Oaks is very much a commune model -- they prefer the term
intentional community these days, in part because of the stigma
that's been attached to utopian ideas -- but it functions. They had
some clothing optional parts of the grounds, and there was a fairly
broad range of possibility in terms of monogamy and polyamory. But,
you know, you were free. Unlike religious communities, you could do
what you wanted. It's been around for 40 years. It's outlived its
founder now and it's thriving. I spent three weeks going through the
process of becoming a member, and there were moments where I thought
to myself, "Wow, this is a viable life."

There have been a number of large-scale attempts at utopian living
in the U.S., but many seem to have failed pretty dramatically.

The most famous failed utopian community was Brook Farm. It started
when a New York journalist named Albert Brisbane convinced what was
already a pretty active community of transcendentalists near Boston
to embark on an experiment. It included a number of well-known
personalities, most prominently Margaret Fuller. Emerson dabbled with
it. Thoreau famously quipped about it in his journals. Hawthorne
visited for a while. There was this idea that the ideal living
structure would be a large community hall with lots and lots of rooms
and saloons and so forth, sort of like a grand hotel. Brook Farm
tried to build one of these and it burned to the ground before they
ever finished it. It became a symbol of their failure.

There was New Harmony in Indiana, based on the thinking of Robert
Owen. It didn't go the way Owen had originally planned, and Owen
pretty quickly gave up and went back to England. And then starting in
the 19th century, there was Oneida in upstate New York. They lasted a
good long time, but not quite as long as Twin Oaks has lasted.

Where did they go wrong?

The vision doesn't always live up to its promise. Sometimes utopias
don't fully account for the frailty of human psychology, and a lot of
utopias are actively attempting to change human psychology to adjust
for that very problem. I think that utopias fail for the same reason
that a lot of plans can potentially fail, simply because you don't
always get it right the first time.

All of the houses, the residences at Twin Oaks, are named for utopian
experiments of the past. So a very viable hypothesis is that Twin
Oaks is managing because they're cognizant of all of the utopian
history, and they've striven to perfect it.

The New York Times ran an article not too long ago about the decline
of separatist lesbian communities. [see below] Do you think other
utopian communities are also disappearing?

I don't think that they're disappearing. I think that the commune
idea has been sort of hovering beneath the radar. If you look around
online, you can see evidence of there being a thousand intentional
communities in the United States, or simply several dozen, depending
on how you define them.

Utopian ideas don't seem to be plausible in the same way they used
to be in the '60s, for example. There aren't that many people
clamoring for "peace on Earth" these days.

Utopian thought fostered all of the isms -- fascism, communisms,
socialism and capitalism -- that emerged in the 19th century. In the
20th century you had the duking-out of those four ideologies. Despite
the utopian bubble of the 1960s the 20th century was a more dystopian
era. Even just looking at novels, the 20th century is much more
defined by dystopian writing.

The stigmatization of utopia has been such that people now think of
them as idealistic, naive plans that always go awry. At the moment we
have any number of major crises to confront -- whether it's global
warming or overpopulation -- that require large-scale solutions. If
the dystopian era of the 20th century leaves us with a hobbled
imagination then we're not going to be able to imagine, let alone
embrace, the kinds of solutions, utopian or not, that are going to be
able to confront those at an adequate scale.

America is built on this utopian idea that you can remake yourself
into anything you want, but it's also built on individualism, which
tends to undermine a lot of big-picture thinking. Do you think
Americans are more or less likely to be utopian than people in other
parts of the world?

Well, I think now we've slipped into a dystopian mood. These days,
it's hard to imagine the United States taking on anything as grand a
project as the New York City subway system or the interstate highway
system. We have enough trouble reforming healthcare or pushing
through financial reform.

But you really can't escape the idea that the United States is itself
a pretty utopian endeavor. A lot of the rights that are built into
our founding documents are ideas that would have been considered
fanciful and impossible when they were first written. The criticism
of utopia is that it's impossible to achieve perfection, so why try?
But the impossibility of perfection does not absolve us from the path
of pursuing a more perfect union. I think that in a nutshell gets at
what I think utopian literature does -- it keeps you moving forward.

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My Sister's Keeper

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/fashion/01womyn.html

By SARAH KERSHAW
Published: January 30, 2009

THEY called it a lesbian paradise, the pioneering women who made
their way to St. Augustine, Fla., in the 1970s to live together in
cottages on the beach. Finding one another in the fever of the gay
rights and women's liberation movements, they built a matriarchal
community, where no men were allowed, where even a male infant
brought by visitors was cause for debate.

Emily Greene was one of those pioneers, and at 62 she still chooses
to live in a separate lesbian world. She and 19 other women have
built homes on 300 rural acres in northeast Alabama, where the
founders of the Florida community, the Pagoda, relocated in 1997.

Behind a locked gate whose security code is changed frequently, the
women pursue quiet lives in a community they call Alapine, largely
unnoticed by their Bible Belt neighbors ­ a lost tribe from the early
'70s era of communes and radical feminism. "I came here because I
wanted to be in nature, and I wanted to have lesbian neighbors," said
Ms. Greene, a retired nurse. She hopes the women, ages 50 to 75, will
be able to raise enough money to build assisted-living facilities on
the land and set up hospice care.

She walks each day in the woods with her two dogs, Lily, a border
collie mix, and Rita Mae, a Jack Russell terrier and beagle mix named
for Rita Mae Brown, the feminist activist and author of the lesbian
classic "Rubyfruit Jungle." Ms. Greene trims branches of oak, hickory
and sassafras trees and stops by the grave of a deer she buried in
the woods after it was hit by a car. She named it Miracle. "I talk to
Miracle every day," Ms. Greene said. "That is one of my joys of living here."

These days, she and other members worry about the future of Alapine,
which is one of about 100 below-the-radar lesbian communities in
North America, known as womyn's lands (their preferred spelling),
whose guiding philosophies date from a mostly bygone era.

The communities, most in rural areas from Oregon to Florida, have as
few as two members; Alapine is one of the largest. Many have steadily
lost residents over the decades as members have moved on or died. As
the impulse to withdraw from heterosexual society has lost its appeal
to younger lesbians, womyn's lands face some of the same challenges
as Catholic convents that struggle to attract women to cloistered lives.

"The younger generation has not had to go through what we went
through," Ms. Greene said. She and other Alapine women described
leading double lives when they were younger, playing the role of
straight women in jobs and even marriages. "I came out in the middle
'60s, and we didn't even have the word lesbian then," Ms. Greene said.

"We are really going to have to work at how we carry this on," she
added. "In 20 to 25 years, we could be extinct."

BEHIND the gate at Alapine, about five miles from the nearest town in
the southern Appalachian mountains near Georgia, the women live in
simple houses or double-wide trailers on roads they have named after
goddesses, like Diana Drive. They meet for potluck dinners, movie and
game nights and "community full moon circles" during which they sing,
read poems and share thoughts on topics like "Mercury in retrograde ­
how is it affecting our communication?"

The women agreed to be interviewed on the condition that the exact
location of their homes not be revealed because they fear harassment
from outsiders. Many in the network of womyn's lands have avoided
publicity, living a sheltered existence for decades, advertising
available homes and properties through word of mouth or in small
newsletters and lesbian magazines.

But the women at Alapine were willing to be interviewed because of
their concern that their female-centered community would disappear if
they did not reach out to younger women.

Winnie Adams, 66, who describes herself as a "radical feminist
separatist lesbian," sold her house in Florida in 1999 to move to
Alapine. Earlier in her life, she had been married and had two
daughters (neither of whom would be permitted to live with her now
because they are not lesbians). She worked as a management
information systems consultant for government agencies, she said, but
when she came out as a lesbian was driven from her job by stress and
discrimination.

Ms. Adams's partner, Barbara Moore, 63, was in the Army in the 1960s,
when what she described as a "witch hunt" for gay men and lesbians in
the military forced her out.

Both women, who like most of the others at Alapine were once married
and had children, said they were deeply scarred by their experiences.

"I did everything I was supposed to do," Ms. Adams said. "I went to
college, I got my job, I got my man, I got my two kids. But it still
didn't feel right. I didn't know that I was a lesbian because I
didn't know what that was. It was the '50s and '60s and nobody ever
talked about it. It took me a long time to come to terms with it and
come out."

For Ms. Adams, every choice she makes today ­ which restaurant to go
to, which contractor to hire, which music to listen to ­ is guided by
a preference to be around women.

"To me, this is the real world," she said. "And it's a very peaceful
world. I don't hear anything except the leaves falling. I get up in
the morning, I go out on my front deck and I dance and I say, 'It's
another glorious day on the mountain.' Men are violent. The minute a
man walks in the dynamics change immediately, so I choose not to be
around those dynamics."

In addition to the 20 women living at Alapine, some single and some
in couples, 15 more own property with plans to retire there or to
build a second home. Two-acre plots cost $25,000, with seven still
for sale. Some residents grow fruit and vegetables, and one couple,
Ellen Taylor, 75, and her partner, Mary, 63, who did not want her
last name used, keep four chickens they call the Golden Girls.

Residents keep a low profile among their neighbors, including many
Baptists, and say there have been no hostile incidents, unlike at
some other womyn's lands.

"We just don't announce our lesbianism," said Morgana MacVicar, 61,
one of the Alapine founders, who lives with her partner of 20 years.
"People know who we are. We don't want somebody who's making a
political statement here."

The women said they sometimes heard references in town to "those
women artists" or "those craftswomen." At a recent dinner at a local
restaurant, 15 Alapine members, speaking in hushed voices around a
table, drew curious glances.

One obstacle to drawing younger women is employment. Many of the
lesbian communities are located far from cities and other job
sources. Only one Alapine resident has a full-time job, as a social
worker in town. The others live on savings or income from consulting
or piecemeal work.

There is strident debate within and across the womyn's lands about
who should be allowed to join. Many residents subscribe to strict
lesbian separatism, meaning that men are permitted only as temporary
visitors and that straight, bisexual and transsexual women are also excluded.

Recently when an Alapine resident received a visit from a 6-month-old
grandson, an e-mail message went out to all residents, perhaps only
partly in humor: "There's a man on the land."

JANE R. Dickie, a professor of women's studies and psychology at Hope
College in Michigan, who has studied one of the womyn's lands, in
Missouri, said she was struck by the differences between the
residents ­ feminists of an earlier era ­ and her students.

"There was a real sense of the need to strongly identify as a woman
and have women's space," Dr. Dickie, 62, said of the women's movement
of the '60s and '70s. "We really felt the need to be apart, to draw
on our strength and our own empowerment. But young feminists today
recoil at the idea of identity politics, of being in this one
category." Among the few younger women who are part of the movement,
there is concern that the old-guard lesbians are too rigid at a time
when they need to be more flexible, if for nothing else than
self-preservation.

"I see the whole picture and the idea of a womyn's land utopia,
unless you have unlimited amounts of finances for yourself, I've
watched one after another go belly up," said Andrea Gibbs-Henson, 42,
who lives at Camp Sister Spirit, a womyn's land in Ovett, Miss.,
where she became executive director when her mother, one of the
founders, died last year. "The bottom line is the world is too
diverse. The whole idea of a feminist utopia, it's just an ideal. We
would not survive here if all we did was cater to lesbian separatists."

Camp Sister Spirit has more flexible policies on who is allowed on
the land; even at Alapine, some of the women do not believe in pure
separatism.

But Rand Hall, 63, one of the newest Alapine residents, whose
50-year-old stepdaughter has joined her on the property, said
separatism still makes sense today.

"Outside the gate, it's still a man's world," said Ms. Hall, who
retired as the publisher of a gay and lesbian newspaper in Tampa and
St. Petersburg, Fla., and moved to Alapine in 2006. "And women are
not safe, period. It's just that simple."

"I don't have curtains," she said. "I don't have to worry about
someone watching me dress or undress. There's also a sense of
community, a sense of supporting each other."

Ms. Hall added: "It's not as competitive. Women, when they're
together, tend to be more cooperative. They don't look for one to
succeed and all the others to fail. In the mainstream world that's
what it is. Somebody has to be on top so everyone else has to be on
the bottom."

At Alapine, the development corporation owned by three women who
started the earlier women's community in Florida sells plots to
individual owners. If someone who owns decides to resell, the
development corporation has the right to buy the property. The women
at Alapine have agreed that they want to remain a lesbian-only
community. They acknowledge that this could make them vulnerable to a
legal challenge from a nonlesbian, but they say no such challenges
have arisen.

"We don't want to spend the last 20 years of our lives fighting about
another big issue," Ms. MacVicar said. "It was hard enough fighting
for the last 30 years. But now it's a family that wants to be here
and die here."

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