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"Ecotopia was founded when northern California, Oregon, and Washington seceded from the Union to create a "stable-state" ecosystem: the perfect balance between human beings and the environment. Now, twenty years later, the isolated, mysterious Ecotopia welcomes its first officially sanctioned
...(more) American visitor: New York Times-Post reporter Will Weston. Like a modern Gulliver, the skeptical Weston is by turns impressed, horrified, and overwhelmed by Ecotopia's strange practices: employee ownership of farms and businesses, the twenty-hour work week, the fanatical elimination of pollution, "mini-cities" that defeat overcrowding, devotion to trees bordering on worship, a woman-dominated government, and bloody, ritual war games. Bombarded by innovative, unsettling ideas, set afire by a relationship with a sexually forthright Ecotopian woman, Weston's conflict of values intensifies-and leads to a startling climax.(less)
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This book should be on everyone’s bookshelf as a much read, much worn, favorite if you breath air. Obviously I love this book!
I think Callenbach captured an ideal and a movement before it was fully formed … this is the rallying cry of the entire Green Social Movement (read: Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawken). This was no mean feat given that he originally wrote the book over thirty years ago (circa 1975).
What he lays out in this book will call out to the soul of anyone who has ever dreamed of a world that works on more than just an industrial/commercial political level and takes into account our nature as biologically-derived social beings. He creates a ecological utopia of magnificent dimension for us to gaze longingly at … just as the title and cover image suggest.
The story is told as a series of news reports by a journalists traveling into and through the newly formed (20 year old) country of Ecotopia. The journalist is at first overwhelmed and offended by what he views as a primitive reversal from the progressive industrialized ways of the United States from where he comes. Then slowly and over time he becomes entranced and enchanted by the beauty and wonder of the place.
Callenbach protrays what a society built on sound biologically derived principals might be like … the science, the society, the politics … and weaves it into a story worth reading for the concept and the content.
Simply put, … and when you have, finding yourself hooked by what Callenbach lays out, go ahead and read the prequel Ecotopia Emerging to find out how he got to Ecotopia … just as good in a different way …