Just over a month ago, a sad event was overlooked amid the general nonsense distracting the country. Part of the tragedy is how petty most of today’s squabbles may seem compared to the vision of Ernest Callenbach, who passed away on April 16:
Ernest Callenbach, the author of the 1975 novel “Ecotopia,” the tale of an awakening paradise in the Pacific Northwest that developed a cult following as a harbinger of the environmental movement, died on April 16 at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 83.
I read Ecotopia in 1997, when I was around 23 years old and ridiculously idealistic. The book’s concept of a utopian society built around sustainability was irresistible to me.
Written in the throes of the Vietnam War, “Ecotopia” tells of a secessionist nation — carved from what was once Oregon, Washington and Northern California — that by 1999 has evolved toward a “stable state” of bioregionalism, in which each territory cultivates its distinct ecological character.
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The novel is told through the accounts of a newspaper reporter who is sent to Ecotopia two decades after it seceded from an economically collapsing United States. Ecotopians realized just in time, the reporter writes, that “financial panic could be turned to advantage if the new nation could be organized to devote its real resources of energy, knowledge, skills and materials to the basic necessities of survival.”
The book describes a society in which recycling is a way of life, gas-powered cars are replaced by electric cars (although most people walk or commute on high-speed magnetic-levitation trains) and bicycles are placed in public spaces to be borrowed at will. In Ecotopia, solar energy is commonplace, organic food is locally grown and, instead of petrochemical fertilizers, processed sewage is used to cultivate crops.
