Escape from 'Ecotopia'

In the afterword to the 30th-anniversary edition of his 1975 novel, Ernest Callenbach writes, "Looking back, it seems clear that Ecotopia was the first attempt to portray a sustainable society, and that this, more than its modest literary merit, explains its durability." Sadly, there is no false humility in that statement.

Ecotopia is ostensibly about a secessionist Northwest -- northern California, Oregon, and Washington -- founded on ecological principles. In this independent land, cars are abolished, everybody recycles, and sewage is turned to fertilizer. More fundamentally, Ecotopia is a "stable-state" society, where old notions of economic progress are retired and "biological stasis" becomes the ultimate goal. That sounds good, as far as it goes; however, the vision is weighed down by so much extraneous cultural baggage -- Marxism, paganism, free love, ritual warfare, communal living, abortion on demand, legalized drugs, gamelan orchestras -- that readers coming to Ecotopia for the first time will find both more and less than they bargained for.

I say the novel is ostensibly about the Northwest because, in fact, all the action takes place in California, and most of it in the Bay Area. We see a good deal of Ecotopian San Francisco and Berkeley, but nothing at all of Ecotopian Portland or Seattle, let alone, say, Ecotopian Klamath Falls or Forks. The story is narrated by William Weston, a New York journalist, by way of his notebooks and dispatches -- the first filed by an American reporter from inside the breakaway republic in 20 years. Weston's stranger-in-a-strange-land observations are, by turns, ludicrously detailed (he dutifully reports that electric carving knives are unknown in Ecotopia) and impossibly obtuse, as when the reader is hit with this: "Thus the Ecotopian federal structure, which superficially resembles the small government bodies found under primitive capitalism, makes the most of its outlays on uncontroversial activities that benefit all citizens absolutely equally."

Few novels can survive that kind of thing; yet, somehow, Ecotopia has thrived, having now sold nearly a million copies in nine languages. Were it otherwise, there would be no sense in reissuing the book -- nor, indeed, in reviewing it -- except perhaps as a cultural artifact. But even today, the novel is assigned reading for college courses in political science and environmental studies. You need only google "ecotopia" to get a glimmering of its far-reaching influence: there's ecotopia.org, ecotopia.com, ecotopia.biz, ecotopia.co.uk, etc. And it may even be true that some pillars of the modern environmental movement were built upon Ecotopian ideals. Callenbach boasts that his book was an inspiration to the founders of the German Green Party, and Judi Bari's Mendocino chapter of Earth First! was named after it. Whatever else you might say about Ecotopia, it can't be dismissed as a relic.

The novel stands in sharp contrast to another enduring eco-classic from 1975, Ed Abbey's wildly successful (and also Earth First!-inspiring) The Monkey Wrench Gang. As a writer, Abbey was in another league, but his sensibilities were also a world apart. While the two books share a deep disdain of progress (so-called), Abbey's eco-saboteurs were not starry-eyed radicals so much as fed-up rednecks, beer-fueled Quixotes who leveled their lances at billboards and bulldozers and dams. While they aimed to merely throw a wrench in the works of industrial civilization, Callenbach conjured a model society -- a City on a Hill, so to speak -- where humans could live in balance with nature. As Callenbach recently told The San Francisco Chronicle, "Then, as now, people didn't have easy hope, and Ecotopia served as a beacon."

Therein lies both its appeal and its fatal weakness, for while Callenbach dared, at least, to envision human history as something other than a forced march to oblivion, his characters, stuck as they are within the utopian framework, seem like little more than the self-satisfied minions of the newly dawned Aquarius. Abbey's desert rats may be doomed, but at least they're heroic. The citizens of Callenbach's republic, by contrast, display an eerie sameness that makes all human interaction in the book seem unsettlingly artificial, as if the body-snatchers had already come and gone, leaving behind only pod people. Hayduke may live, but he doesn't live in Ecotopia.