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3.5/5
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English 177A: Ecology & Utopia
Rating: 3.5/5
Pages: 192
Started: 27 September 2024
Finished: 29 September 2024
Summary:
Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia is a quintessentially 1970s Berkeley approach to imagining a modern utopia. The novel follows news reporter Will Weston, who the first American emissary admitted into the country of Ecotopia--formerly the Pacific Northwest of the US which seceded two decades prior. At first skeptical of the strange ecological innovations (No cars on the streets? Free bicycles for use by anyone, at any time?) and the equally strange social patterns (20-hour work weeks? Mandatory forest service? Complete sexual openness?), as Will becomes closer to the citizens and more immersed in the Ecotopian world, he finds himself beginning to feel persuaded by what was once a truly alien society.
Thoughts:
Ecotopia is a creatively framed presentation on how to expand a hippie commune into an entirely self-contained and fully functional country. The framing was the most brilliant part--the story was told through news articles that the protagonist sent back to the US, interspersed with far less filtered journal entries about his genuine experiences--and the journal entries were so engaging that it made the politics & science of the country much easier to parse through than it was in in other works like Sir Thomas More's Utopia, for example. The utopian world was also more believable than that of More's, with at least a semblance of real gender equality and freedom, without any enslavement or terrifying punitive measures. Although this utopia still centered whiteness and white culture pretty completely, the role of 'savages' was held only by the Americans who produced waste and war. Because the journal articles in this book were so engaging, and because the utopia was modern enough to not feel heinously patriarchal & intolerably racist, I did really enjoy this book (even if I was giggling at how stereotypically hippy it was at some points), and I would recommend it to anyone looking for a pretty comprehensive introduction into one way to conceive of a utopic society.