Do you want to live in a place where equality reigns? With zero crime and zero jails? Where workers fully own their labor and income inequality doesn’t exist? Well, then, your future is now. Hop on a Greyhound and head over to Louisa County, Virginia, where you’ll find the tofu-making, hammock-weaving community of Twin Oaks. You can join that commune or any of the surprisingly numerous utopian experiments in the US. All you have to do is give up a sizable chunk of your individual identity, and prepare for the reality that you probably won’t be much happier than you are now.
The joke about “utopia” is that the word deconstructs itself. But within Utopia Drive’s first few pages, Erik Reece, an environmental journalist and professor of English at the University of Kentucky, quickly and constructively kills that joke. One of the Greek roots of the word, “ou topos,” means “no place.” But Reece points out that the other Greek root, “eu topos,” means “good place.” When thinking about ways to organize ourselves as a society—a task made increasingly urgent by the rise of wealth disparity and swift environmental decline—the best need not be the enemy of the good.