Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #164687 in Books
• Published on: 1990-11-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 181 pages

Synopsis
Investigative reporter William Weston crosses the Sierra Nevada mountains and enters Ecotopia, the first American to do so since the Ecotopian secession from the U.S. in 1980.

Customer Reviews

You must read this book... it will haunt you forever.
I read this book ten years ago, and at least once or twice a year since then. I take it with me when I travel, and I have given it to everyone I know. Ernest Callenbachs vison of what life could be, and should be like is inspiring and has made me think twice about everything I do. I find myself thinking about the message of this book at least once a week. Although it is a novel with some unimportant sub-plots, I enjoyed and savored every word of it. A must for everyone who cares about the country and the planet.

Good but not wonderful
Ecotopia is a book that is definitely worth reading, in that it describes a nation that is desperately striving to save its own environment and the health of the Earth as a whole. As an environmental novel this is undoubtedly a ground-breaking work. However, there were several areas where I thought that it could use considerable improvement. Firstly, the nation of Ecotopia is ridiculously fertile and well-off - many of the problems that would occur in any real implementation of an environmental state are simply brushed off. Population control is easy because these states are already close to zero-growth; finding money for maglev trains is even easier because Boeing just happens to be in the country; workers' control of factories and land reform is easy because people are all nice; there is no large-scale opposition; and so on. When considering past revolutions which also attempted to create Utopian states, this sort of doo dee doo optimism is somewhat disconcerting. Here, it seems that the book comes dangerously close to the line between vision and fantasy. Secondly, the book's storyline is somewhat trite, and character development is not really present. Thus, it would be stretching it a bit to call Ecotopia a work of literature. Nevertheless, though, Ecotopia is an imaginative work, and should be read if only for the sake of seeing what one possible environmental state might be like.

ECOTOPIA is a realistic goal & an inspiration
My first experience with ECOTOPIA was with my 11th grade English class in Anchorage, Alaska. We were each given a copy of it to read, discuss, and write about. That was back in April of 1990, when Earth Day was 'big'. Now Earth Day doesn't get much mention at all, just a few seconds in the news on April 22. It is sad to see that the environmental enthusiasm has lost its momentum with my lost and now markedly apathetic generation: Generation X (as the media marketers labeled it to sell things). ECOTOPIA is an inspiration, a must read for everyone... It is possible to achieve a world of balance and health like ECOTOPIA if we break our addiction to non-renewable resources and cynicism: There WAS life before corporations and more connectedness, too. This book shows what we can achieve when we DOUBT the lies of the consumerism culture that have us believing that using most of the world's resources is good & the 'American way.' The Native Americans were very wise and had it right when they said to Respect the Earth. It is the Earth who has sustained us for countless millennia, What have we given back to the Earth besides pollution and greed? :)