In Utopia: Six Kinds of Eden and the Search for a Better Paradise (review)

J. C. Hallman's In Utopia is an engagingly peripatetic examination of various attempts at utopian living. The author takes his readers on six different journeys in a quest not to only broaden the definition of utopia but to rehabilitate the concept. Hallman makes it clear from the start that he believes utopia to be a possible dream, not an impossible one. He brings to his project the tools of a journalist and the heart of a poet—he is well versed in the history of utopian literature and thought, he's a good storyteller, and he combines these qualities with a lively curiosity and an earnest appreciation for coincidence and unexpected connections.

The book's eight parts are essentially linked essays. One serves as a prologue, one serves as an epilogue, and the remaining six are each devoted to a distinct utopian project. In addition to this broad structure, the entire book is sequenced into consecutively numbered sections, some as brief as one or two sentences, others extended into several paragraphs. It thus reads like a kind of traveler's notebook, its lively reportage interspersed with quotations from utopian-themed fiction and philosophy, as well as brief discursions into history. It also includes helpful historical photographs, illustrations, and maps.

In his prologue, "A Joke," Hallman makes much of the fact that he grew up on a street called "Utopia Road" in a planned community in Southern California in the 1970s. Acknowledging this as "some real estate developer's idea of a joke," he thus begins the book's extended overview of utopian literature. Central to this effort is, of course, Sir Thomas More's Utopia. Hallman explicates the layers of jest inherent in More's novel, and throughout the rest of the book he evaluates various utopian projects (both realized and unrealized) in terms of those who "got the joke" or "didn't get the joke" of More's imagined nation. Hallman is enough of a realist to know that "as a rule, utopias slip." Yet guiding his quest is his belief that "the utopian flame should not be snuffed" and that the current stigma attached to the word utopia is a failure of hope, a readiness to give up on utopia too quickly because utopian endeavors seem so prone to disintegration.

For the most part, Hallman follows a pattern in discussing each of his six "kinds of Eden"—he interviews the key visionaries behind the idea, he describes the literary and philosophical traditions that inform it, and he presents these in a kind of intellectual collage without necessarily drawing any firm conclusions about each would-be utopia or even tying up all of the story's loose ends. Though that sounds like it could be disorienting, the overall effect is provocative and even charming.

One way that Hallman stretches the definition of utopia (in a productive way) is to equate it with the concept of pure, precivilized wilderness. Typically, the concept of utopia involves some form of engineered community, even if it entails a chosen, deliberate absence of structure or government. To postulate pure nature as a form of utopia seems like a divergence from the main currents of utopian thinking, and Hallman devotes the essay "A Wilderness" to establishing whether or not this is in fact a utopian scheme.

The crux of this discussion is a controversial plan, championed by a group of conservation biologists, called "Pleistocene Rewilding," which would repopulate select areas of North America with predators, since their presence is deemed essential for healthy ecosystems. In addition to trying to connect the idea of "rewilding" to the utopian tradition, Hallman also uses this essay to explore the relationship between utopian thought and environmentalism in general. He recounts the story of a homegrown wildlife sanctuary not far from his childhood home, and he spends time with Dave Foreman, one of the founders of Earth First! the...