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Ecotopia #2

Ecotopia Emerging by Ernest Callenbach

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This "prequel" to Callenbach's classic Ecotopia dramatizes the rise and triumph of a powerful American movement to preserve the earth as a safe, sustainable environment. The story springs from harsh realities. Toxic contamination of air, water, and food has become intolerable. Nuclear meltdowns threaten. Military spending burdens the economy. Politicians squabble over outdated agendas while the country declines. But then dedicated people begin to respond in their own ways to the crisis, and fresh hope arises. A brash physics student, Lou Swift, invents a unique solar cell that will end dependence on polluting fossil energy. Marissa D'Amico decides to devote her life to the restoration of clear-cut and eroded forests. Her mother Laura organizes a commando group of cancer victims to disable plants making carcinogenic chemicals. A distinguished but disillusioned legislator, Vera Allwen, organizes a new grassroots party working toward a survival-oriented future. Joining with thousands of others, they take their lives into their own hands—fighting the corporate control that endangers their personal survival along with that of the earth. A panorama of history about to happen, Ecotopia Emerging weaves many individual destinies into an absorbing the birth of a new nation.

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1981

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About the author

Ernest Callenbach

117 books54 followers
Ernest Callenbach was an American author, film critic, editor, and simple living adherent. He became famous due to his internationally successful semi-utopian novel Ecotopia.

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Displaying 1 - 30 of 43 reviews
Profile Image for Kate.
308 reviews63 followers
December 15, 2019
Ok whaaaaaaaaaaat.

This book did not need to exist.

Seriously. Ecotopia was great and beautiful and lovely and I'm still sad I can't live there. But this book - which is supposed to discuss how Ecotopia is founded - was completely unnecessary.

We already had a pretty good idea from Ecotopia how the world got founded. This tries to be a more detailed blueprint of that telling, but what it really lands as is a, "uhhh.....people don't work that way" eye-roller. (Or talk that way. Dialogue has never been Callenbach's strong point.)

I can't get over how cheesy (not in a good way) and cringe-y this book is. Or the ridiculous and unrealistic plot devices.

And the amount of time dedicated to the sexual life of an 18-year-old girl? (Well, 15 or 16 when it started.) Creepy, creepy, CREEPY.

Some of the expositions on why the world was falling apart were interesting. But that's about it.

Callenbach did no service to his vision with this novel. Go read Ecotopia and stay far away from this one. Two stars only because I still wish this was a place for real.
Profile Image for Paco Nathan.
Author 10 books57 followers
December 12, 2009
This is actually more of a favorite read, and more of a political template, than the original "sequel" Ecotopia.

The events leading up to secession of CA/OR/WA, with foundations for the political party which ring *oddly* similar to events in California more recently (federal vs. regional).

Great unschooling themes... with a narrative mostly told as a coming of age story for a teenage girl / scientific prodigy growing up in Bolinas and discovering a way to take down Big Oil.
Profile Image for Rita.
111 reviews3 followers
February 6, 2019
Despite being as cringeworthy and vague as it is profound, prescient and timely, this book is a gem. I don't know if there is a word for mourning something that you never had, but as our planet continues to plumit towards destruction, that's what I felt reading this book.

As someone who spent their entire life living in Santa Cruz, Eugene, and Portland, and recently moved away from it all, perhaps I am just a little homesick for the hippie idealism I grew up with. It's the belief that love and community will heal all the world's problems, and all you need to do is make sure that everyone is just like you and shares 100% of your beliefs.

Therefore the proto-Ecotopia is a Utopia in the strictest sense, in that it is no real place, but a heterogenous facsimile of every pre-Silicon Valley Berkeleyan and PNW Cascadian's revolutionary wet dream. There are clandestine community yoga meetings with the president, building walls in the middle of the road so people can't drive their cars, floating the Willamette from Eugene to Portland in protest, and extremely thoughtful acts of ecoterrorism. All the leaders are strong women, solar power is cheap, love is free, and everyone just sort of goes along with it all. But it's easy to see that it's all a fantasy, if not the outright birthplace of many a hippie stereotypes (although I think that might be the Oregon Country Fair).

The only sources of conflict in the book seems to be between the righteous Ecotopians and the awful evil Americans, otherwise internal disagreements are few and far between. As a young person working in sustainable technology, my heart ached with how much I wanted this largely unencumbered path to ecological salvation and unity to be made real. So for fulfilling that fantasy this book is unparalleled, but in providing a realistic framework it falls short, and that's ok.

Despite Callenbach not being able to foresee our Hi-Tech future and the role of the internet in disseminating misinformation, he does get some things right. Ecotopia has a UBI and randomly selected representatives - two concepts gaining steam in modern progressive politics. We went to war for oil in the Middle East, and wealth inequality has only gone up in the current US as it did in the fictional dystopian US. He didn't get it all right, as we have largely phased out toxic pesticides and nuclear, but we do remain hopelessly addicted to oil and cars.

For it's socially shortsighted flaws (I'll let you decide if Lou's story is mild pedophilia or innocent hippie bullshit), it's a well thought out, if not overly earnest vision for an alternate future we would be lucky to have lived. Hell, I'll take any optimism for our planet's future I can get right now, even if it comes from a past that never was.
Profile Image for amy.
280 reviews
July 7, 2018
whew! This one was jam-packed with minutiae of the main characters' lives (of which there were about a dozen or so...?) which was a very time-consuming process of getting the overall message of ecologically-minded living. It was like reading a day in the life of your average Santa Cruzan. As a proponent of even the more revolutionary conservation ideas described as taking root in Bolinas would sound more exciting to me, but there wasn't much no more fictional intrigue/conflict than the process of getting a patent for the mysterious photo cell--and it took FOREVER (nearly 250 pages out of 326) for the big reveal of the forces increasing its performance. After that, the plot started to veer towards some heavier conflicts... I guess can try 'Ecotopia' (the story for which this was a prequel, because the conflicts (which are very real and present in our current lives under this administration) weren't even close to being resolved in the end. I'm very sad to know this was written in 1981 and we're still dealing with the same subsidies and lobby groups for industries actively destroying the planet.
Profile Image for Brett.
747 reviews31 followers
August 15, 2022
I was no great fan of Callenbach's Ecotopia, but in my review of it I did at least acknowledge that the book's heart is in the right place, even if the execution made it unreadable. At least in principle, you can understand what Callenbach was going for; it was not a realist piece of writing, but a sort of fable about an alternate way society could be organized. The ideas were central, not the characters or writing.

Even that very thin reed has been snapped in the prequel, Ecotopia Emerging. Callenbach has already presented his alternative vision for society, so what is left for this book? It does a fair amount of rehashing the themes of Ecotopia but also purports to tell the tale of how northern California, Oregon, and Washington state pulled off a peaceful secession from America and formed their own separate, ecologically sustainable country. This story is told from the viewpoint of several residents of the Ecotopian states. It is a manifest failure in every conceivable way.

I'm not sure if Callenbach has ever spoken to another human based on the dialogue he gives to his characters. He has certainly never participated in the political process based on his conception of political change.

The book does offer extensive, pervy passages devoted to the sex life of a 16 year old character and at one point casually discusses the way the residents of Ecotopia of have traded in Christmas for a holiday that celebrates the solstice by throwing off the chains of monogamy for a few days. I have nothing against less traditional forms of relationships but these weird inclusions in the book are obviously just Callenbach's hobbyhorses and not connected in any meaningful way with the rest of the narrative.

There are big build ups for some plotlines, such as the idea that utility companies are going to steal or bring bodily harm to our protagonist who has developed more efficient solar cells, only to completely disappear later in the story. Or there is the section where a character unilaterally decides to reintroduce grizzly bears to California by I guess trapping them and driving them them there in his personal trailer and just setting them free. This takes up a few pages and is never heard of again.

The material is handled with maximum self-importance and no hint of self-awareness or humor. Callenbach's relationship to the written word is like a man with no hands playing basketball. You have to kind of admire someone for giving it a try, but let's not kid ourselves. You're not going to the NBA.

It can be tempting to give stuff like this a pass just because its politics is generally oriented in the same direction has mine. But come on. There are limits to what the human mind can endure, even on behalf of a good cause.
Profile Image for Dylan.
Author 7 books16 followers
July 21, 2014
I wish we lived in Ecotopia.

It's important that books like this exist. You won't find many books that attempt to write a utopia that not only could exist, but that doesn't end in ruin. Yes, it's idealistic, yes it's got a late 70's hippie tinge at times, but having an ecologically, biologically based society over a profit-driven and hierarchical one just makes sense. It's not that radical of an idea really. Society at large just has too many myths of power and profit and progress to overcome. I'm from the Pacific Northwest, it's not Ecotopia, not yet, it'd take a lot of work to get there.
Like making a nature's bill of rights, raising the minimum wage to 15$, promoting local sustainable agriculture that everyone can afford, demilitarizing, gas tax, advanced solar power technology, getting rid of corporation's rights as persons under the law, passing laws for employee owned business, getting universal education, healthcare, and welfare, providing jobs that don't just benefit profit but provide a meaningful way to engage in making a better society (or at the very least don't add to its degradation), addressing racism, sexism, classism, taxing the rich fairly until they join the rest of everyone in the middle and the poor rises to the middle, providing low income housing, banning chemical pollutants, decommissioning all nuclear power, stopping logging and relying on other industrial materials than lumber, getting rid of factory farming, promoting community building and interaction between neighbourhoods, making cities smaller, redesigning the suburbs, having a free non-advertising/corporate biased press, and likely having the PNW succeed nonviolently from the US to do all of this, or at the very least having full states' rights in Oregon, Washington, and Northern California (at a county and municipality level there) to enact laws that are contrary to the Federal government as well as making opt-outs on having tax money finance the military budget, or any other corporate scheme.

We must demand the impossible if we are to be realistic enough as the Ecotopians insist to have a chance of surviving. And to have our dignity as intelligent, social beings who working together could come to such a world, even if it occurs slowly, laboriously, and with great concentrated effort on the behalf of many. many groups and individuals seeking groups. For we wish to belong more than anything, and this American alienation and ennui, this age of uncertainty and anxiety, I think comes for the most part from not belonging to these visionary common-sense ideas which seem so impossible to surmount.



Profile Image for Jill.
1,007 reviews18 followers
March 4, 2010
This book is an interesting mix of foresight and hindsight, reading this almost 30 years after it was written. Having been born after it was written, I don't have a good sense of how much of this is true, and how much was speculation. Things certainly aren't as grim as they predicted - yet. But it could get that way, just as it could get better in ways they predicted as well. I doubt that the northwest will secede from the rest of the nation, but if it does, I'm glad I live here. :) The nicest part was that the book really didn't seem all that dated, besides the fact that the internet is a HUGE technology jump that would have totally changed this novel, judging by how it was used in the last election.

I thought it was amusing that they reference the other Ecotopia book in this one as part of the plot. I haven't read it yet, but it's next on the list. Should be interesting.

The only thing that annoyed me was that there's a part where the Ecotopians float down the Willamette river from Eugene to Portland, and they supposedly go "mere feet from the golden dome of the state capitol" in Salem. First, there's a gold MAN, not a dome, and second, the closest stream is on Willamette U's campus, which is at least a city block away, not a few feet. I suppose other people from the towns around here will have their own corrections to make, and perhaps things were different in ye olde Salem towne way back in the 80's.
Profile Image for Dan.
385 reviews27 followers
September 10, 2023
A lot of worthwhile ideas are discussed in this book. But, why does it have to be so dull? The characters are flat and lifeless, and their stories are so obviously contrived that I found myself thinking "just get on with it" constantly.
While a lot of the ecological, political, and social principles discussed throughout the novel feel prophetic at times, they are presented as unambiguously positive. If there is a debate presented at all, opposing views are typically comical straw-man arguments frequently featuring characters that, if I'm completely honest, resemble a "Snidely Whiplash" sort of cartoon villain. It feels as though the book is "preaching to the choir", despite an actual chapter of the book outlining how fruitless that sort of endeavour typically turns out to be in catalysing real social change.
Ultimately, this book just doesn't have the charm that the original Ecotopia had. I wouldn't recommend reading it, even to readers interested in the politics and ecology of the Pacific Northwest.
7 reviews
December 18, 2012
Ecotopia is the name of that country. The US didn't want to dependant of ecotopia so they did everything such as millitary way to Ecotopia but they faild. After 20 years, William Western visited to Ecotopia by frist american. This is book's story is like his experience while he is staying in Ecotopia. After his work in Ecotopia, he decided to not go back to America but stay and keep his friendship and love. Also, he said that we should try to immitate that mind of Ecotopia for our future.

I would recommend this book. If anyone who had worried about century before, they would really like this book. While i read this book, i felt like run away from alot of mechanical things.
I really like this book and i would recommend this book.
Profile Image for Jennifer Wyld.
145 reviews2 followers
August 7, 2008
This book is hopeful, to me, about future solutions. Read it and be inspired! And it is a great story! Cool girl, scientist character.
Profile Image for Dylan Vargas.
113 reviews
November 18, 2024
 I am not a huge fan of the lecture style italicized sections. These are just narrative information dumbs about some ecological or political fact of the time and it just takes me out of the story. They are interesting and all but are just dense and feel like the could be better included more seamlessly into the narrative then they are now. I think he author is trying to mimic the style he established in the first book with toe distinct narrative sections, but it's unnecessary here and doesn't fit the structure of the story in the way it did previously. While these became more scarce as the short went they will were sporadic and tedious.
Adding to this point the entire book appears to be half random interludes or exposition about a character or situation that feels connected to the overal themea of the book but detached from the narrative. And they introduced so many characters who you never know if the story will go back to do they become easily forgotable until it's important you remember them suddenly.. Also sometimes the transitions between these sections is confusing and jarring. A story feels incomplete but then left abandoned for another or it ends on a page you flip to the next expecting more but another is there instead
Again back to the central complain around the jumping narratives it's just so annoying it goes from what appears to be central stories and characters to just side interludes and it just disrupts the flow.
One Line and then on paragraph just discredited the whole first book in this sequel. What had been a fascinating and real feeling report on a new society that was the structure of the first book, in its prequel was explained as actual a fantasy amusing, that it had all been made up and in fact had been a dreamed up scenario that had never come to pass. Fuck that, sorry for the language but it kinda pissed me off to completly discredited the narrative the first book painted as mere musing out of the real world developments
I was further confused as many of the names from the allegory stories in the second book match those from the first. They are so similar infact in character I first assumed this was their introduction in the prequel, but knowing the prequels is false because the story in the first book was a made up tale during the time of the prequel I feel detrayed and just straight up annoyed 
Additionally I ended the book even more confused about its relation to the first then before. That one line mentioned above seemed to discredit it as a true prequel, but then the developments within the book were so close to those explained in the first I has to be a sequels. I am just angered and confused thag it's a prequel that feels like a prequel but saying it's not a prequel. Is a true prequel, who knows, not even even though i red all 400+ pages of it. It appears the main thing that differentiates the first story form this fake prequel was the peacefulness which the new nation of ecotipia emerges, and that it appears not to completly close itself off; but this is such a small differentiation it's still annoying. This was almost quite anticlimactic 
I don't know if this a good or bad thing but I never felt like one coherent story was developing. It did honestly feel like a building political movement. It's growth felt organic and real. It never felt idealistic or impossible. It was just sporadically portrayed with successes and events playing out so dispersed. Again this could be a major strength of the narrative structure that it felt like a movement building and not a story unfolding. But also as a reader it was hard to stay engaged in a novel that jumped around a lot. You had to make connections throughout and remember many things at once. And unfortunately as stated earlier so many things were mentioned with just Breif introductions nothing felt fleshed out and I struggled with investment. I found the movement very sympathetic and inspiration but the over all reading experience just exhausting.

I recognize that the above is a ton of criticism, however I did enjoy much of the book. After greater reflection I think that ultimately the book did feel like it was more describing the progression of political movement that felt quite real and organic. Each unique main or side character I saw there part in the over all story. And all the information presented was interesting. Again I know this seems contrary because I ranted about how much I hated the structures but I can also recognize it was clearly an intentional approach by the author and I can equally recognize that it succeeded.

In the end while I have to rate the book low, because this is about persona preferences and I cant get past every annoyance that I endured, it still was a great political narrative.
Profile Image for Bas Vossen.
30 reviews11 followers
April 18, 2021
If there is any book that we can say is prophetic and visionary, it is this. A follow-up on his revolutionary 70's 'Ecotopia' novel, Kallenbach now takes the time to explain how mankind in (North) California, Oregon and Washington came to break away from the east-coast centralized nation of America, which did nothing to prevent the upcoming ecological disaster the world is in, anno 2021.
After a nuclear disaster in Washington state, the first green, ecological government is voted in, followed by Oregon and the northern part of California. A young woman made progress with her solar cell research and gets targeted by big industrial and government interests. To protect Ecotopia from being overrun by the central government, some members of the Ecological Party claim to have planted nuclear bombs in city centers in the East. Meanwhile, the down to earth, female led goverment of Ecotopia, using two way communication with anyone watching via the cable (at the time of writing, Internet was hardly known outside of universities and the military) is making peoples hearts and minds ready for the changing attitude of the ecological future.
I would say, this is one of the best books to read if you are curious to where we're heading with this New Green Deal!
Profile Image for Dominique Rowell.
15 reviews1 follower
February 10, 2024
Beware of early white environmentalism!

To start, I’m not happy about the Zionist propaganda that revealed itself at the end of the book. I also think this was an incredibly simplified version of secession and super unrealistic.

Although this book did detail some necessary changes that humanity needs in order to save itself, I have fundamental concerns about some of the pillars of Ecotopia. The anti-nuclear power sentiments and anti-immigrant/refugee principles are antiquated stances and actually harmful to the general environmental movement. Overall, it was an egregious environmental purist novel that failed to include diverse perspectives and had racist, xenophobic, and sexist undertones. Ecotopia does sound nice…too bad it’s only for white northwestern colonizers!

Also, basically every chapter relating to Lou, the teenage protagonist, detailed her sexuality in an extremely creepy and, at times, literally illegal manner. Ernest Callenbach is a creep. Romanticized statutory rape is fucking gross and I honestly wish I had stopped reading after that point.
Profile Image for Prof Primate.
75 reviews
June 19, 2024
“Without vision, the people perish”

Together with Ecotopia, this book got me a new vision, a new doable path for the future. Nothing in it is utopian, but biologically sane and striving towards the optimization of human flourishing.

I’ll recommend this book to my students, who are either doomers (like I was) or deluded by drugs, videogames and social media (the financial capitalism triad for stability).

Ecotopia emerging is the prequel of Ecotopia. Most people think Ecotopia is far better, but I see them as very complementary. I wish Callenbach had continued the series exploring more and jotting new, beautiful and feasible ideas for a better society.

Ecotopian prisons and courts are absent in both books. I wish he had gone more into this, but well, what else could I reasonably ask of the author when he wrote such masterpieces?

Hear this internet stranger’s advice and go read it. It’s entertaining and good brain food.

Peace!
Profile Image for Frederick Gault.
938 reviews17 followers
September 23, 2021
This book didn't age well (released in the early 1980s). Although the challenges to the biosphere and humanity are the same, if not worse, than depicted in the book, the technology described is quite dated. In fact, the breakthroughs posited in the book have more or less happened - as have the disasters. The general idea is that a new political party arises on the West Coast that is determined to put sustainability first. It's a pretty dream, but one that pretty much fizzled out in the real world instead of growing as the author clearly had hoped. A more hard-boiled and contemporary story along this line is Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry For The Future, which takes are more jaundiced view of how things might play out.
Profile Image for RMD.
102 reviews15 followers
November 30, 2023
Clearly incredibly relevant for its time - ministry for the future looks like child's play in comparison.

It is quite dated (and one hopes the author would be a little more... Progressive if he wrote these days) and certainly the writing is not as good as many other books.
Part of that is the focus on the US.

But it remains extremely interesting to understand that concepts of secession, ecological socialism and so on were quite so present at the time already.
(Even if not really giving credit to where these cultures come from!)

So, very interesting if you're into understanding modern thought towards socioecological transition - but not that great otherwise.

Read in tandem with the original ecotopia.
81 reviews1 follower
September 25, 2025
Not as engaging as Ecotopia, but a really cool origing story for the Ecoopian society as described. It also includes some more stepwise environmental improvements and community building ideas that are really cool and inspirational. Wasn't a huge fan of the constant musings on the sex life of an underage girl, but overall I thought this was a good stepping stone connecting our technological and evironmentally wasteful society to the ecotopian society in a relatively realistic way (despite the excitement of the general populace for environmental conservation being enough to risk a revolutionary war). Also sparked a lot of interesting discussions in book club; I would highly recommend both this book and Ecotopia!
1 review
September 21, 2018
Inspiring. Better than the previously-written sequel, because it feels much more 'real' and possible.

The most surprising part is how relevant most of the concerns written about here still are to the modern environmental movement, despite its datedness. The only major part missing is global warming, the science of which was only barely starting to become public around the publish date.

An important book to read for those concerned about where our planet is heading.
Profile Image for Shane Kennedy.
99 reviews1 follower
October 15, 2024
Credit where credit is due, the writing is an improvement over the original. There’s also a twist on the original that I actually liked. While the ideas aren’t as fresh, there’s enough new things to keep the science fiction side of it interesting. It learned from the first’s mistakes.
Profile Image for Richard West.
32 reviews1 follower
March 26, 2021
I read this because I remember liking Ecotopia but I might have changed my opinions over the years regarding extreme environmentalism.
Profile Image for Fox.
67 reviews
January 7, 2016
This book has flaws and faults, sure, and it's definitely a produce of the era it was written, but the message at the heart of it is still incredibly relevant.

Let's talk about the two most obvious issues first:
1) The prose is certainly not narrative-friendly. I could probably only name a few of the many people mentioned and give defining details about even less. The writing is dense and information-packed; it talks about science and politics and situations, and the people are simply another tool with which to convey those subjects.
2) The entire premise and resolve are idealistic and unrealistic in present times. It's obvious to a modern reader why things would never happen the way they do in the book, but when the book was written we hadn't yet had quite so many real-life examples of just how far the government and armed forces, much less the large corporations, are willing to go to maintain control of a domestic situation.

The first issue is one that I run into to varying degrees with certain types of books from that era. It's a problem for some readers, but for others it's not as much of an issue. It's a matter of personal taste, really. I don't mind so much; sometimes I'm in the mood for it, and sometimes I'm not and take a break from it. It's easy to do with a book like this, especially with Ecotopia Emerging, where the author is exploring how something like Ecotopia might happen rather than a story about individual people. There are individual peoples' stories contained within, but the book itself is a story about Ecotopia's birth as a whole, and the people are simply a narrative device to that end.

The second issue isn't really an issue if one simply remembers when the book was written and thinks of it in terms of historical perspective and an exploration of optimism and ideology.

Now on to the heart of the book:
The country hasn't exactly gone the route predicted as our future in Ecotopia Emerging, but in some ways it feels like we've just managed to get there by a more insidious and less visible route. The problems the book talks about are still problems; we're still not a sustainable, healthy, environmentally responsible, harmful-chemical-free nation. Even when I was a little kid, I felt pretty bleak thinking about the long-term future, because it seemed like everything was heading in a pretty bad direction. I still wish we could take ideas presented in books like this and turn some of them into reality (and some of the other ideas we've already discovered/invented new and better options that sadly aren't always being used yet, either).
I enjoy reading books like this because they remind me that I'm not alone in thinking there's a better way to run things, and that lots of people have had lots of good ideas and explored them in fiction. Remembering that can help me hope that someday they won't just be fiction anymore, even if it hasn't happened yet.

Ecotopia Emerging isn't ground-breaking or riveting. It's not an impressive or defining work of fiction. It's not even an example of particularly good writing. But none of that is terribly important compared to the ideas and hope it contains. Yes, it can come off as preachy or agenda-pushing, but it's an agenda that, with translation into current times, would actually make the world pretty damn awesome, so I don't exactly have a problem with that. If you can get past the issues of the writing and the society in which it was written, at the center of it is a dream that I hope we can all share some day, where true sustainability and a healthy environment are more important than business and wealth for the few at the expense of the many and of the future of everyone.
Profile Image for Sam Diego.
Author 1 book4 followers
August 3, 2021
Ecotopia's prequel. Not as fun for me as Ecotopia itself...
Profile Image for Michelle Lasley.
48 reviews7 followers
November 21, 2007
Thoughtful, imaginative sequel to Ecotopia, by Ernest Callenbach, this book offers a nicely woven story on how to change your world. Ecotopia, written in the 70s amidst a political storm of environmental change, is as Callenbach confesses in Emerging, a quick pop book written by an activist author. Emerging, on the other hand, pieces together events laid out in the original. It shows how the residents of the Northern West Coast got mad about current politics, and how they constructively dealt with it - beginning by confronting the master narrative we hear and abide everyday and changing it. A definite read for anyone hoping for a better future.
Profile Image for Richard.
1,187 reviews1,147 followers
November 22, 2010
Partner book to his "Ecotopica". Better in some ways, but mostly more-of-the-same in too many ways. Daydream fulfillment to such an implausible extent that it gets tiresome. The problems of the time, as bad as they were, didn't signal the end of the world, much to many liberals' surprise.

The only detail I can clearly recall is that some fellow invents a solar cell that can be made in a backyard kiln but has astonishing efficiency; enough that petroleum can be dispensed with, and it can be made by neighborhood craftspeople, not in billion-dollar corporate-own fabrication plants. How convenient!
34 reviews2 followers
June 26, 2011
A great little read. This is a fictionalized history of the events leading up to the secession of Northern California, Oregon and Washington to form a steady-state, environmentalist nation of Ecotopia along the Pacific Coast of the United States. In 1975, Callenbach had published a utopian novel called Ecotopia about the events; EE is its prequel, published in 1981.

Discussed how a teenage girl finds an easy way to generate electricity cheaply from seawater in a solar cell. and how the baddies of corporate America try to stop her publicising it.

A bit simplistic but interesting nonetheless.
Profile Image for J.
22 reviews3 followers
August 7, 2012
70s environmentalism wish-fulfillment in all of its decentralized, self-reliant, righteous and crunchy glory. It's much less entertaining than Ecotopia due to all-around boring writing and a plot that skips around far too often. But Callenbach's enthusiasm is infectious, the characters are generally likable and the book gets my west coast jingoism going. Modern environmentalism as a movement could use more of this old-school environmentalism, especially the DIY and local action mindset. Cascadia uber alles!
Profile Image for Lauren Bergh.
32 reviews
December 15, 2010
I had to keep looking back to see when this book was published! A wonderful commentary on the energy crisis of the 1980s and completely applicable to today. A story of energy moguls trying to secure their control on the American economy and a bright student who cracks the code to photovoltaic cells... and beats corporations to releasing the product into public domain. Definitely a must-read for the eco-conscious looking for something positive to think about.
Profile Image for Indira.
16 reviews
May 7, 2014
Ecotopia was a good read especially if you are someone who cares about the environment and human rights. At times it read more like a newspaper than an actual novel. Overall, it was revealing in explaining the ways in which our system of consumption is doing harm to the environment. A great deal of the story line bears truth in what is going on today.
Profile Image for Toni Olivieri-barton.
276 reviews
June 16, 2011
Environmental Society
The Northwest US cuts all ties from the US, shuts its borders, and creates its own country. 10 years later a reporter from the US is let in and discovers how Ecotopia works. I loved it.
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