The Ecotopians are not like you and me. They favor fanciful hats and eccentric leggings, all made from natural materials. They work only 20 hours a week, smoke marijuana legally, like to give one another back rubs and reject conspicuous consumption. What they really care about is their land, their air, their water and one another, all of which they regard with an almost obsessive passion.
For many American high school and college students, the appeal of this land of vaulting ideals and valued indolence is seductive. Surveying their own daily diet of angst, fetid air and befouled shores, students' common response is "When can I move there?"
But a 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 the book in a high school political science honors course.
All of this is faintly bemusing to Callenbach, a tall, donnish man who edits nature books and the scholarly movie magazine Film Quarterly at the University of California Press. Part prophet and part cranky critic, he is in demand these days as a speaker at gatherings of ecologists and government planners. "People ask me, 'How could such a world come about?' I use the example of the vast change in smoking behavior in this country, which is a paradigm of the way in which social change toward Ecotopian patterns is happening and is going to happen. When you give people a choice between living and dying, on the whole more choose living."
When Callenbach created his fable about a country that sacrifices consumption in order to ensure survival, he was unable to find a publisher for the slim, 167-page novel. So he published it himself, raising the $3,500 cost from friends. "I thought it had some modest virtues and might even sell 2,500 copies." To date, worldwide sales are about half a million. The book has been translated into eight languages and has gone through eleven printings in the U.S. since Bantam Books bought the rights twelve years ago.
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, to explore Ecotopian technology, the almost religious reverence for nature, and social habits, both appealing and appalling.