From Utopia to Ecotopia

A closer look to the contemporary world screams out the sturdy interdependence faced by the human societies. Financial, economic, ecological and social crises characterize, on global scale, the current human activities. These problems grew from the failure of strong ideology and political utopias laid down on 20th century. Our work highlights the need of setting a new theoretical framework to overcome these crises through building new experiments of human association and new environmental solutions. The ultimate challenge relies on managing the complexity of the environment, promoting a new vision for alternative and naturally sustainable collective behaviors. We suggest to approach it merging the ecological perspective envisioned by Naess’s deep ecology with McLuhan’s media theory. Ecology is the discipline that studies ecosystems and, therefore, nature, while human ecology is the study of ecosystems that include humans. However, the environments inhabited by humans are not merely natural: they are strongly modified by technology. Furthermore, the technological explosion of the West caused the separation of the domains of nature and technique, creating an opposition between them. We suggest that humanity needs to overcome this dichotomy in favor of a total-field image. Electromagnetic, nuclear and digital technologies are, in fact, more complex forms of adaptation to the environment that render the distinction between the natural and the artificial obsolete. In addition, recording and real time communication technologies have changed the way we connect to each other and how we relate to the environment. The thinking changes are, in fact, reshaped under the influence of such modifications in the communication systems. In particular, we need to change the models of human collective behavior. One way to pursue this aim implies a rethinking of the role played by each local community: technology offers the possibility for a broader and effective communication. This scenario could favor cooperation through the building of a decentralized network society. Why looking for golden age utopian societies when we can already pursue hi-tech ecotopian communities?