| Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston | |
|---|---|
30th Anniversary Edition cover |
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| Author(s) | 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 | 0553348477 |
| OCLC Number | 20169799 |
| Dewey Decimal | 813/.54 20 |
| LC Classification | PS3553.A424 E35 1990 |
| Followed by | Ecotopia Emerging |
Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston is the seminal utopian novel 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 thereafter.
Contents |
The impressive, environmentally benign energy, homebuilding, and transportation technology described by Callenbach in Ecotopia was based on research findings published in such magazines 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, for example, 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. To draw an example, Callenbach's fictional Crick School was based upon Pinel School, an alternative school located outside Martinez, California, and attended for a time by his son.
The author’s Ecotopian concept does not reject high technology as long as it does not interfere with the social order and serves Ecotopian objectives, but members of his fictional society prefer to demonstrate a conscious selectivity of technology, so that not only human health and sanity might be preserved, but also social and ecological well being. Interestingly therefore, Callenbach’s story anticipated the development and liberal usage of videoconferencing.
During 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 shared a common aim: 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 targets the fact that many people did not feel that the market and the government were serving them in the way they wanted them to. This book was “a protest against consumerism and materialism, among other aspects of American life[3]”.
The term "ecotopian fiction", as a sub-genre of science fiction and utopian fiction, refers to this book.
The book is set in 1999 (25 years in the future, as seen from 1974) and consists of the diary entries and reports of William Weston, a mainstream media reporter who is the first proper American to investigate Ecotopia, a newly formed country that broke from the USA in 1980. Prior to Weston's investigative reporting, most Americans had not been allowed to enter the new country, which is depicted as being on continual guard against revanchism. The new nation of Ecotopia consists of Northern California, Oregon and Washington; it is hinted that Southern California is a lost cause. The book is presented as a combination of narrative from Weston's diary and dispatches that he transmits to his publication, the mythical Times-Post.
Together with Weston (who at the beginning is curious about, but not particularly sympathetic to the Ecotopians), the reader learns about the Ecotopian transportation system and the preferred lifestyle that includes celebrating gender roles, official encouragement of maintaining racial separation, discouraging monogamy, promoting sexual freedom. A disdain for television and mass-spectacle sports is manifested in a preference for local arts, participatory sports, and general fitness. The Ecotopians also have a peculiar ritual of (voluntary) mock warfare, fought with actual weapons and often resulting in injuries. Liberal cannabis use, as well as about decentralized and renewable energy production, green building construction, a defense strategy focused both on developing a highly advanced arms industry while also allegedly maintaining hidden WMD within major US population centers to discourage reconquest. Thorough-going education reform is described, along with a highly localized system of universal medical care. (The narrator discovers that Ecotopian healing practices may include sexual stimulation.)
The narrative is told through both Weston's official cables back to the United States and through his diary which he keeps and later sends to his editor at the end of his assignment. In the diary we learn of observations he does not include in his columns, including his personally transformative love affair with an Ecotopian woman. These parallel narrative structures allow the reader to see how his internal reflections, as recorded in his diary, are diffracted in his external pronouncements to his readers. Despite Weston's initial reservations, throughout the novel, Ecotopian citizens are characterized as clever, technologically resourceful, emotionally expressive and even occasionally violent, but also socially responsible, patriotic. They tend to live in ethnically separated localities, and they live in extended families. Their economic enterprises are entirely employee-owned and -controlled. The government is dominated by a woman-led but not exclusively female party, and government structures are highly decentralized. The novel concludes with Weston's finding himself enchanted by Ecotopian life and deciding to stay in Ecotopia as its interpreter to the wider world.
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" (= "All women + all men"?), the President and spokeswoman for Ecotopia - suggest the degree to which the author intended the book to be 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 as a fact for another 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 addressed the needs and desires of the viewers.
Another interesting feature in the novel is "print on demand" (POD) publishing. In the novel, customers could choose approved print media from a jukebox-like device that would then print and bind the book. In the 21st century, POD services that print, bind and ship books for customers who order on-line, have become commonplace.
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, combined with intense moral pressure toward sustainable practices, both in private life and in business.
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.
Ecotopia is now required reading in a number of colleges (see NY Times article The Novel That Predicted Portland referenced below)
Ralph Nader praised the book, noting that "None of the happy conditions in Ecotopia are beyond the technical or resource reach of our society."[4]
| “ | ...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... | ” |
In his 1981 book Nine Nations of North America, Washington Post editor 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 reflect 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 resources such as hydropower and forestry.
Outside of the written word, Callenbach's "Ecotopia" novels have also inspired real change through its influence on the Cascadia movement.
Since 1989 in Europe an annual youth gathering has been organised under the name Ecotopia.
There is a British "ethical online supermarket for everyday products" named Ecotopia.co.uk.
In the shared alternate history of Ill Bethisad, "ecotopism" is an important political movement, and a number of nations and subnational entities use the word "ecotopic" in their formal names.
Video game Civilization: Call to Power has Ecotopia as one of the government types. This government type produces the least pollution among all government types. Within Facebook, there is a video game called Ecotopia.