A Beacon of Its Forms

Depending on one's definition of a political form, this book is either utopia or manifesto. The literary critic, Fredric Jameson, has described utopian thinkers as tinkers in a workshop of the imagination. As such, this book delves into the fantasy that new and different political and social and cultural and economic forms can be experienced and lived. This book provides a vision that unites environmentalism with some form of leftist economics and politics: an eco-socialist or eco-collectivist vision of the future. But it draws from the past, most specifically from the life and works of a U.S. Forest Service manager named Bob Marshall. Marshall had been employed by the U.S. government in the 1920s and 1930s, where besides engaging in wilderness advocacy, he worked for the advancement of civil rights and the legitimacy of labor unions. This protean commitment of content determines the hybrid form of this book. It is both poetry and prose, a prosimetrum that seeks to combine fancy and reality.