Word: ecotopia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...passage to Ecotopia is impossible to buy, because this country of fiercely energized environmentalists exists only in the mind of Berkeley writer Ernest ("Chick") Callenbach, 59. Since his novel Ecotopia was first published in 1975, it has become an environmental classic. Now, after a summer of discontent -- ozone smog, sewage and medical wastes on beaches and fears of a global warming caused by the greenhouse effect -- the novel is winning new popularity. "It's a super book. It really gets students discussing solutions to our environmental problems," says William Hastings, a professor at San Diego Mesa College, who is using...
...Ecotopia is set in 1999, nearly 20 years after Washington, Oregon and much of California, sickened by environmental degradation, swollen military budgets and inflation in the U.S., have announced their secession from the Union. They have outlawed the internal-combustion engine, banned a host of consumer products, from microwave ovens to electric can openers, and expropriated all waterfront property. They have also encouraged such an independent spirit in women that they have become sexual predators and even control the ruling party. Into this world of spartan but sensual living comes a reporter, the first American to visit Ecotopia since independence...
Callenbach began by looking at sewage. "I come from a long line of Calvinist Dutch preachers, and I knew that throwing all of this valuable organic material down the drain was just plain wrong." What he created for Ecotopia was the "stable-state system" -- recycling food wastes and sewage into fertilizer to grow more food. "Then I thought, any group of people sensible enough to get their act together in this way would clearly do a lot of other things differently. So I began to think of things like extruded- plastic houses and wood architecture. And I moved on gradually...
...from America to Ecotopia requires a lot of social reconditioning. All companies are small, worker-owned co-operatives, and the distinction between work and play seems to have vanished. Possible, says Callenbach, when people have freed themselves from large corporations and from cars and TV -- what he * calls "isolating technologies." Americans, he complains, have become a nation of emotionally detached creatures. "Humans like to play and mess around, and yet we are trying to live in the lockstep mode of modern society. No other species would put up with having to sit at a desk all day. And yet here...
...author believes, have made an Ecotopian world a little more likely. "We have been messing about with the atmosphere in a truly Faustian way. That and the garbage on the shores have put people in a rotten humor." But what will really "be the key to the evolution of Ecotopia" will be a catastrophe at a nuclear plant. "One of these days a nuke is going to blow in the country, as surely as the sun goes up and comes down. It's practically bound to happen, and it will put a whole new complexion on environmental politics...