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When Callenbach began researching the book, he recalled a work he had read while a student at the University of Chicago, Science and Sanity, in which author Alfred Korzybski talked about man's capacity for "non survival" behavior. "He used the term largely in a social sense, but it seemed applicable to a wide range of things that we started doing in this century and that seemed like a good idea at the time, but now persist even when circumstances have changed and the habits have become self-defeating." Callenbach mentions things like nuclear plants and chemical fertilizers that end up polluting lakes and streams. "I'm not antitechnology, but there are a lot of things that a rational society probably would not have much use for."
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 through transportation, land-use patterns and a whole panoply of related things." Plastics? Made from plants and thus biodegradable. Aluminum and nonferrous metals? Ban them. Garbage? Recycle everything. Electric power? Build solar and thermal-sea power plants.
To get 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 we are trying to live according to bizarre economic and institutional social rules that seem to contradict our species nature."
Admittedly, Ecotopian man still has remnants of competitiveness left -- controlled by war games in which teams go at each other with spears. As other examples of liberated thinking, drug use and prostitution are decriminalized. By contrast, polluters are given long jail terms. "Environmental crimes are just as life destructive as hitting people over the head, and ought to be punished similarly."
Scientists have given Callenbach credit for technical accuracy, and he does seem to have been remarkably prescient in writing about the spread of the garbage- and sewage-recyling ethic, and the growing public demand for "natural" foods. But he doesn't believe America will be ready for some of the more startling sociological changes he predicted until at least 2025. "I am a constitutionally optimistic chap, and I thought at the time I wrote the book that change at those levels would take only a generation -- perhaps it was because of the heady influence of the '60s and '70s."