Ernest Callenbach's [Author of Ecotopia] Last Words to an America in Decline

Just finished reading a fantastic unpublished article found on the computer of Ecotopia author Ernest Callenbach after his death, it's titled 'Epistle to the Ecotopians: Last Words to an America in Decline'. Callenbach's novel Ecotopia, published in '75, changed the paradigm of millions. In his last few months, knowing his ultimate fate awaited ,as it does for all of us, he wrote another excellent visionary treatise full of truth but less optimistic than his famous novel which was so influential on the counterculture, and the green movement then and now.

The last 3 paragraphs of this article, quoted below, encourage us to "embrace decay, for it is the source of all new life and growth":

Humans tend to try to manage things: land, structures, even rivers. We spend enormous amounts of time, energy, and treasure in imposing our will on nature, on preexisting or inherited structures, dreaming of permanent solutions, monuments to our ambitions and dreams. But in periods of slack, decline, or collapse, our abilities no longer suffice for all this management. We have to let things go.


All things “go” somewhere: they evolve, with or without us, into new forms. So as the decades pass, we should try not always to futilely fight these transformations. As the Japanese know, there is much unnoticed beauty in wabi-sabi -- the old, the worn, the tumble-down, those things beginning their transformation into something else. We can embrace this process of devolution: embellish it when strength avails, learn to love it.


There is beauty in weathered and unpainted wood, in orchards overgrown, even in abandoned cars being incorporated into the earth. Let us learn, like the Forest Service sometimes does, to put unwise or unneeded roads “to bed,” help a little in the healing of the natural contours, the re-vegetation by native plants. Let us embrace decay, for it is the source of all new life and growth. - Ernest Callenbach (1929-2012)

Epistle to the Ecotopians: Last Words to an America in Decline by Ernest Callenbach - Let us embrace decay, for it is the source of all new life and growth.