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Setting the scene

Utopianism is almost a dirty word these days. So it should be. The word derives from two Greek words which mean ‘no place’. This smacks of ‘pie in the sky’ except that a utopia is a formula for something still harder to believe in: pie here and now.
There are still millions of people around the world who are prepared to believe, with at least part of their minds, in some sort of heaven hereafter. Presumably suicide bombers are in this category since they seem, for the most part, convinced that their victims are hell-bound whilst they themselves have an assured place in heaven.
Their logic is difficult to fathom but at least they attest to a widespread despair of anything good happening here and now. They only differ from most other humans in their unwillingness to make the best of a bad job and their eagerness to get off the planet.
In Encyclopedia Britannica, one reads that ‘“utopian” and “utopianism” are words used to denote visionary reform that tends to be impossibly idealistic.’ This book will be accused by its critics of being ‘utopian’ even though it makes no claim to be ‘visionary’ and fiercely rebuts any suggestion that it is ‘impossibly idealistic’.
What does need to be made clear is that the book sets out to do much more than simply make the best of a bad job. Its goal could be described as utopian only in the sense that it seeks to map out a clear pathway to the best of all possible worlds - with the accent on the word ‘possible’.
This is a topical book. Interestingly, ‘topical’ derives from the same Greek root as ‘topia’. The Greek parent word means ‘place’ and, whilst ‘utopia’ means ‘no place’, ‘topical’ means ‘what is taking place’. ‘Ourtopia’ means what needs to take place, to become literally, ‘our place’ - our planet.
It is a sober fact that our options are limited and pretty stark. If we fail to move steadily in the right direction we run a serious risk of having no habitable planet at all. One could compare the whole evolutionary story to date with a mountaineering expedition. We either press on to the peak or fall to our doom - and the higher we climb, the further we have to fall.
We shall never achieve a world where illness, ageing and death have been eliminated, where there are no earthquakes or natural disasters, no accidents, no people born with appalling disabilities or a genetic predisposition towards psychotic behaviour. We can never guarantee our planet will for ever avoid an asteroid or catastrophic climate change. Imperfection is irrevocably built-in to our situation. Anybody who talks of a utopia in which ‘everything in the garden is lovely’ is simply dreaming.

But a great deal of the imperfection which frustrates us is not ‘built in’. It is the result of botched human attempts to improve on nature, what we sometimes optimistically refer to as ‘civilisation’. Homo Sapiens is endowed with an alarming capacity to interfere with ‘nature’. As the technological reach of that capacity increases, so does our alarm. What are we doing to the planet?
Ecology is not a traditional science like physics or chemistry but, over the past fifty years, it has come to dominate our thinking. We now hear a great deal about ecosystems which are seriously threatened by the arrogant assumption we can run the planet better than it ran itself before we arrived.
Excellent televised programmes about the animal world - the name of David Attenborough springs to mind - have demonstrated how, over millions of years, various life-forms have adapted to their environment in ways which have equipped them to survive through countless millennia, often against heavy odds.
It is a peculiar business. They have not thought it out and caused it to happen. Their manner of life is programmed into them. It is often rough and tough, but at least it guarantees to them corporately an indefinite future.
Animals can suffer heavy losses in forest fires or when an ice age creeps up on them, but most of them still manage to survive as species because there are still areas where the lucky escapees can find a viable habitat. It is only when human beings arrive that the spectre of an entire planet rendered uninhabitable becomes a real threat.
If animals could talk, they would have some devastating things to say to homo sapiens, so fond of priding himself on being at the top of the tree, so boastful about his higher intelligence and greatly refined sensibility.
A dog might be a bit scornful of a column of ants but what would it think if it could have an aerial view of gridlock on a motorway, so uncomfortably like a column of ants except that it does not move? Which other animal would willingly go to sit in one of those cars or trucks?
It would be tedious to enumerate yet again all the ways in which we are despoiling our environment. We often do this for unbelievably vapid reasons, felling areas of rain forest just so we can have outsize newspapers or mega beef burgers (courtesy of cattle grazed where, a few years before, there was rainforest). What does this surfeit do for those daft - and wealthy - enough to buy into it except help them grow gross in body and flabby in mind?
Aside from human activities which foster greenhouse gasses, erode the ozone layer, stockpile toxic waste, poison waterways, and so on, we have other habits which pose an even greater threat to the planet. These are bound up with inherited social, political and economic structures which have long outlived their usefulness.
If we were to look for a word which points to the root of our problems in these areas, that word would be tribalism. What makes most of our inherited structures so perniciously outdated is the tribalism they embody and engender.
The antidote to tribalism can be summed up in two simple propositions:

1. All people are human.
2. Every human being has rights.

Our task is to fashion structures which do more than pay lip service to these propositions. All human institutions must be embedded in both to such an extent that their very existence safeguards and promotes them.
In each of the following chapters we shall investigate an aspect of our inherited structures, glancing at their history, noting their strong points but pinpointing deficiencies, gauging the extent to which they are already being remedied, and indicating what remains to be done.

There is an element of artificiality about all such exercises since the complexity of actual physical reality defies all attempts to tidy it up by manipulating words. This book will only have been worth writing if its readers emerge feeling impelled to do what they can to make the changes advocated actually happen.
There is also a certain artificiality about trying to separate one thing from another, the social from the political for example.
All the things we are dealing with are inter-related. The only justification for trying to talk about just one thing at a time is that it can help clarify thought and facilitate effective action. But it is the whole picture which has to be the constant backdrop. In an age of ‘experts’ and ‘specialists’ it is more important than ever to realise that nothing in real life can safely be dissociated from anything else.
Failure to do what we are advocating risks surrendering to an all-too-prevalent feeling of impotence in the face of problems which look so vast and various there seems no hope of ever cracking them.
It is only by isolating different aspects of the over-all problem, then seeing how they link up with each other, that we are in a position to assess the value of our own or anyone else’s contribution towards building a human world which makes at least as much sense as the natural world.
The human animal’s flair for tool-making is now so advanced it is easy to forget that we are, after all, a part of the natural world. City-dwellers live much of their lives in a man-made environment and even farmers often run a highly mechanised industry these days. Woe betide us if we allow our technology to divorce us from the natural rhythms which sustain us as much as they sustain any other animal.

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