Ecotopia
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| Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston | |
| Author | Ernest Callenbach |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Utopian novel |
| Publisher | Ernest Callenbach (first self-published as Banyan Tree Books) & Bantam Books (1977) |
| Publication date | 1975 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 181 pp |
| ISBN | NA |
| Followed by | Ecotopia Emerging |
Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston is the title of a seminal book by Ernest Callenbach, published in 1975. The society described in the book is one of the first ecological utopias and was influential on the counterculture, and the green movement in the 1970s and after.
The impressive, environmentally benign energy, homebuilding, and transportation technology Callenbach described in Ecotopia was based on research findings published in such journals as Scientific American. The author's story was woven using the fiber of technologies, lifestyles, folkways, and attitudes that were being reflected (from real-life experience) in the pages of, say, the Whole Earth Catalog and its successor CoEvolution Quarterly, as well as being depicted in newspaper stories, novels and films. Callenbach's main ideas for Ecotopian values and practices were based on actual experimentation taking place in the American West. As an example, Callenbach's fictional Crick School was based upon Pinel School, an alternative school outside Martinez, California once attended by his son.
The author’s Ecotopian concept does not reject high technology, but rather members of his fictional society show a conscious selectivity about technology, so that human health and sanity might be preserved, as also social and ecological health might be. For instance, Callenbach’s story anticipated the development and liberal usage of videoconferencing.
In the 1970s when Ecotopia was written and published “many prominent counterculture and new left thinkers decried the consumption and overabundance that they perceived as characteristic of post-World War Two America[1]”. The citizens of Ecotopia were of the same mind, they were looking for a balance between themselves and nature. They were “literally sick of bad air, chemicalized food, and lunatic advertising. They turned to politics because it was finally the only route to self-preservation[2].” In the mid-20th century as “firms grew in size and complexity citizens needed to know the market would still serve the interests for those it claimed to exist[3]”. Callenbach’s Ecotopia is a shot at the fact that many people did not feel the market and the government was serving them in the way they wanted them to. This book was “a protest against consumerism and materialism, among other aspects of American life[4]”.
The term "ecotopian fiction", as a sub-genre of science fiction and utopian fiction, refers to this book.
Contents |
[edit] Plot summary
The book is set in a 1999 future (25 years in the future, seen from 1974) and consists of the diary entries and reports of William Weston, a reporter who is the first American proper to investigate Ecotopia, a newly formed country that broke from the USA in 1980. This country consists more or less of the territory of the former states of Oregon and Washington, plus Northern California. The book is a combination of narrative from his diary and reports he sent to his publication, the Times-Post.
Together with Weston, who at the beginning is curious about, but not particularly sympathetic to, Ecotopia, we learn about the ecotopian train system, life style, war sports, politics (the president is a woman, Vera Allwen), gender relations, sexual freedom, energy production, agriculture, education, and so on. Ecotopian citizens are characterized as free-thinking, creative and energetic, but also socially responsible and often inclined to work in team configurations. In the end, Weston becomes an Ecotopian himself.
The importance of this book is not so much to be found in its literary form, as in the lively imagination of an alternative and ecologically sound lifestyle on a greater scale, presented more or less realistically. It expressed on paper the dream of an alternative future held by many in the movements of the 1970s and later. Even the names of the two characters most reflective of their respective viewpoints - "Will West(on)", the representative for materialist American culture and "Vera Allwen" (= "Truth for All Time"), the President and spokeswoman for Ecotopia - suggest the degree to which the author intended the book as a reflection of American ecological and cultural deficiencies.
Worth mentioning is Callenbach's speculation on the roles of TV in his envisioned society. In some ways anticipating C-SPAN, which would first be broadcast in 1979, and reality television, which would not emerge into recognition for two decades, the story mentions that the daily life of the legislature and some of that of the judicial courts is televised in Ecotopia, and even highly technical debates met a need and desire among viewers. In a way, the book also anticipated proposed "polar cities" for survivors of global warming in far distant future.
Another concept worth noting from the novel is "print on demand" publishing. In the novel, customers could choose a book from a jukebox-like device, and then the book would be printed and bound by the machine. Today, there are services like Lulu.com that print, bind and ship books for customers who order on-line.
In contrast to much of the Green movement in contemporary America with its preference for regulation, however, Callenbach's Ecotopia has relatively laissez-faire economic tendencies.
In 1981, Callenbach published Ecotopia Emerging, a multi-strand "prequel" suggesting how the sustainable nation of Ecotopia could have come into existence.
In 1990, Audio Renaissance released a partial dramatization of Ecotopia on audiocassettes in the form of recordings of a radio network broadcast (the Allied News Network replacing the Times-Post). The tape-recorded diaries of William Weston were read by the book's author, Ernest Callenbach. Weston's reports were read by veteran news reporter Edwin Newman.
[edit] Quotes
| “ | ...if you reflect on our change from thoughtless trash-tossing to virtually universal recycling, or from the past in which smokers didn't hesitate to blow smoke in anybody's face to our present restrictions on smoking in public places, it's clear that shared ideas about acceptable or desirable behavior can change markedly. Such changes occurred without anybody getting arrested in the dark of night. Further changes will come... | ” |
[edit] References to Ecotopia
In his 1981 book Nine Nations of North America, author Joel Garreau named one of his nations Ecotopia after Callenbach's book. Garreau's Ecotopia consists of Northern California, Western Oregon, Western Washington, coastal British Columbia, and southeastern Alaska and is one of the nine economic-cultural nations into which Garreau believed North America should be divided to correctly understand the true regional dynamics of the continent. This Ecotopia, like Callenbach's, is characterized culturally by its environmental sensibilities and focus on 'quality of life', and economically by its focus on renewable resources such as hydropower and forestry.
Outside of the written word, Callenbach's "Ecotopia" novels have also inspired real change in its influence on the Cascadia movement.
There is a British "ethical online supermarket for everyday products" named Ecotopia.co.uk.
[edit] See also
- Ecotopia gathering - an annual summer camp for activists in Europe
[edit] Further reading
- Ernest Callenbach, "Ecotopia in Japan?," in: Communities 132 (Fall 2006), pp. 42-49.
- R. Frye, "The Economics of Ecotopia", in: Alternative Futures 3 (1980), pp. 71-81.
- K.T. Goldbach, "Utopian Music: Music History of the Future in Novels by Bellamy, Callenbach and Huxley", in: Utopia Matters. Theory, Politics, Literature and the Arts, ed. F. Viera, M. Freitas, Porto 2005, pp. 237-243.
- Matthew Hilton, "Consumers and the State Since the Second World War." The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 611, no. 66 (2007): 66-81.
- Heather Murray, "Free for All Lesbians: Lesbian Cultural Production and Consumption in the United States during the 1970s." Journal of the History of Sexuality 16, no. 2 (2007): 251-68.
- H. Tschachtler, "Despotic Reason in Arcadia. Ernest Callenbach's Ecological Utopias", Science-Fiction Studies 11 (1984), pp. 304-317.
