In Search of Ecotopia

In the book of Genesis, the Garden of Eden is home to Adam and Eve and contains numerous fruitful plants and abundant natural resources. Originally, the word

“Eden” means “pleasure” in Hebrew. The Garden of Eden is also called “paradise,” a place that symbolizes the harmonious relationship among God, mankind, and nature.

In Genesis chapter two, we see the natural environment of Garden of Eden is full of serenity and harmony with the ecological system, since “the Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food.

In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2:9). However, when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruits from the tree of knowledge and escaped away from God, they were banished out of the Garden. God has prepared bountiful food for men, but it is men who rejects God first and follow their own ways. In the story, Adam and Eve had the choice not to eat the forbidden fruits. But when they made mistakes, instead of admitting their faults, they blamed the others first. Thus, when God asks Adam whether he had taken the forbidden fruits, Adam replied “the woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me the fruit of the tree and I took it” (Genesis 3:11). In Adam’s reply, he did not admit his mistakes; instead, he blamed the faults on God. Hence, because of the original sin, people are inclined to blame the faults on the others. In the biblical

allusion, the Garden of Eden can be seen as an ecotopia, a harmonious place where we’ve lost and have been dreamed of for a long time.

Therefore, the desire to search for an ecotopia becomes the deepest longing in the man’s hearts. In order to find such an ecotopia, it is necessary to study our interactions and connections with the natural environment. In other words, when we study the “environment,” we are examining the complicated interactions with our lives and nature. Throughout the history, the worst issue of the contemporary world has been the communal animosity, which spawns from social abjection, particularly alienation from the underprivileged and the wretched. What’s worse, “conformity and passivity also result from social rejection and intolerance; people fail to take responsibility or to learn from others” (The Pursuit of Ecotopia 196). Thus, the environment is agonized by human acrimony and repudiation. In this way, the idea to build up a self-sustainable community would be merely an illusion. So, the potential annihilation to the tranquility of an ecotopia is suggested by Anderson, who writes

standardization, mindless conformity, intolerant hate, and mutual jealousy have combined to produce a worldwide cultural trend hostile to all difference, all deviance, and all variety. This is, at present, the more extreme and direct threat to the environment, as it is to human life and to the human spirit. (The Pursuit of Ecotopia 26)

Specifically, it is harmful to pursue a collectively pure society. If we do not learn to cooperate with one another, we would fail to establish an ideal place. That is, if we want to maintain a healthy ecological management, we should strive to accommodate ourselves to the diverse ecosystem.

The solution to the problem is to reach the consensus that we are all connected together. So, how can we establish a perfect ecotopia? According to Anderson, “the morality of a perfect world would be a basic one of concerned citizenship: Care, care

for, care about. It would be an ethic that could be accommodated easily in any religion or political ideology, without interfering too much with process of living” (The Pursuit of Ecotopia 45). Nevertheless, the exclusion of a community would hinder the

progression of any society. The healthy and pleasant eco-community cannot afford to be shackled by the excluded ideologies; thus, it is essential to subvert such concept and learn to be compatible with diverse ecosystem. Specifically, if we want to build up an ideal eco-community, one should learn to revere the diversification of the biosphere and esteem one another with different cultures. In Paradise, building a community of Haven on the Indian’s land is a search for freedom, as the narrator describes it,

to the Old Fathers it signaled luxury—an amplitude of soul and stature that was freedom without borders and without deep menacing woods where enemies could hide. Here freedom was not entertainment. . . . Here freedom was a test administered by the natural world that a man had to take for himself every day. And if he passed enough tests long enough, he was king.

(99)

In this sense, the building of a community is a quest for freedom, a shelter and a homeland. In short, the black people are longing for an ecotopia where they can be protected from harm, where they can gain autonomy and freedom without suppression, and where they can rest in peace as a home.

3.1.1 The Pursuit of Ecotopia in Paradise

Throughout Paradise, most of the characters are searching for home, an ecotopia that they can obtain freedom and true love. Such an ecotopia is a lost paradise that people attempt to establish. As Karen F. Stein suggests, “Paradise depicts several journeys in search of home: two of them, in past tense, are epic in scope and led by men; the others, in present tense, are the less purposeful wanderings of five women”

(Stein 157). The pursuit of an ideal home can also be shown in Morrison’s conversation with Farnsworth, as she put it:

They had left a home. So they’re seeking for another home, while other people are doing the same thing, except the other people were leaving a home that they didn’t want to be in any longer, or couldn’t be in any longer.

Native Americans were being moved around in their home.

African-Americans were looking for a second one and hopefully one that would be simply up to them, their own people, their own habits, their own culture, and to contain themselves in that. (Farnsworth 156)

That is, having experienced certain sense of trauma, most of the characters attempt to search for an ideal home. The people in Ruby tend to build up a utopian city to fulfill such a dream. Nevertheless, in “Reading and Insight in Toni Morrison's Paradise,”

Linda J. Krumholz pinpoints the ironic problem of Paradise as that “repetition without a difference maintains itself through rigidity and exclusion and thus destroys the ideal it seeks to preserve; an unchanging Paradise inevitably loses its paradisiacal nature” (Krumholz 21). Besides, in Reading, Learning, Teaching Toni Morrison (2009), Karen F. Stein points out that “the isolated, exclusive, utopian city of Ruby becomes unstable precisely because it resists change. Locked into their nostalgia for the past, the founding fathers seek to keep the external society’s changing values out of their small paradise” (Stein 158). The truth is, the founding fathers’ unwillingness to change in Ruby fails to establish the paradise they dream of. In addition, in Toni Morrison: Playing with Difference (2003), Lucille P. Fultz investigates the

community in Paradise, as she writes, “it is a community splintered not by white racism but by intraracial caste based on color and gender, and a community further diminished by intolerance based on fear of a women-centered enclave” (Fultz 11).

As a whole, I think the ideal to build up an ecotopia can be realized in the

Convent because this community, unlike the isolated Ruby town, functions as a self-reliable and self-sustainable ecotopia for the mentally-traumatized women.

Therefore, the Convent women, as Magali Cornier Michael proposes in

“Re-Imagining Agency: Toni Morrison's Paradise,” maintain an amiable, collective and reciprocal affiliation within the community; each of them is nurtured by the dynamic and organic eco-community. (Michael 650). The Convent, as Jill Matus has described it, provides “freedom to come and go, the plenty of the miraculous gardens, and as a result of Consolata’s mediations, consolation, relief from pain, and saving”

(Matus 157). Apparently, the Convent serves as a dynamic ecotopia flowing in an endless stream. Such an idea is brought up by Anne Primavesi’ in From Apocalypse to Genesis: Ecology, Feminism and Christianity (1991). As Primavesi observes,

it is the power which creates and sustains ecological community. It enables us to exercise power-with: the power to cooperate, to share, to change. It also embodies a particular kind of consciousness: it is conscious of the world as a pattern of relationships between men, women, and Nature which can be shaped and shifted. It values beings, forces and people according to their effects on others and the appropriateness of their actions. It takes account of the effects of its own actions in relation to the largest number of systems possible. (Primavesi 221)

This interconnection based on the mutual support in the eco-community can achieve the effect of healing. In other words, “it is power aligned with love. It is the combination of both power and love and which makes a community workable and sustainable. It is the combination of power and love which Christians call the Spirit, and which empowers us to shape our common future for the good of all” (Primavesi 221). In a sense, ecotopia is a place where people can be connected with the power of love and create a better future for the people within it.

To sum up, the search for an ecotopia explicates people’s aspiration for an ideal paradise in the fulfillment of autonomy. In Paradise, these wretched women found their sanctuary in the Convent. Since human beings are connected with nature so deeply, the establishment of an ecotopia needs mutual respect and support with nature in the ecosystem.