The Man Who Invented Ecotopia

The following is an extended, edited version of Geov Parrish's interview with Ecotopia author Ernest Callenbach on the 30th anniversary of his futuristic novel about Pacific Northwest secession. The story is told from the perspective of an American reporter, William Weston, who is one of the first outsiders allowed into Ecotopia some 20 years after Washington, Oregon, and Northern California have successfully separated themselves from the rest of America to form a new country. What he finds is an alternative universe, a place that is socially progressive, hardworking, and connected to nature. It is a society without the internal combustion engine but with maglev trains. It is, in many respects, the first picture of how a modern society could be restructured around environmental principles, and in that, was both reflective of its era and a road map for future ecologically aware development. Ecotopia proved to be a seminal book. Not only did it sell nearly 1 million copies in nine languages and generate a sequel, it became something of a utopian manifesto for the green movement, including the German Green Party.

Today, at age 75, Callenbach is retired from his day job at University of California Press, where he was founder and editor of Film Quarterly. He lives and writes in Berkeley, Calif., where Geov Parrish talked with him by phone. He, like his fictional character William Weston, offers his observations on the Ecotopian phenomenon, how far it's come, and where it is likely to go in the years ahead.–The Editors

Geov Parrish: What's changed in the 30 years since you wrote Ecotopia? Are we any closer to Ecotopia now than we were in 1975?

Ernest Callenbach: History is a spotty thing; it moves back and forth, and so there's been some backsliding from where we were in 1975, especially on the internal combustion engine.

I think the reason that George Bush is so enthusiastic about hydrogen—to the extent that he is genuinely enthusiastic, and we can't really tell—it's because he imagines that hydrogen will be made out of petroleum source fuels. But those of us who think in the longer term know that that's not good for the long run, so we're going to have to think about renewable sources for hydrogen, and the only place in the world that's doing that is Iceland. The Icelanders have a tremendous wealth of both hydroelectric and geothermal energy. So it makes sense for them to produce hydrogen using that kind of energy, and they can probably be totally self-sufficient. Luckily, there aren't too many Icelanders, so even if everybody has at least one car, they can probably get away with it.

In more populous larger countries without their resources, it's not going to be so easy. So in the long term what's going to happen probably is that cars are going to scale back, somehow or another, we don't know. Probably it won't happen voluntarily, because at least in countries like the United States, we are so totally dependent on and wedded to the automobile, both in practical terms and emotional terms, that we're going to have to be driven out of the driver's seat by main force rather than getting out on our own.

Parrish: What makes this region different? Why did you pick this region to secede from the United States and chart a different course?

Callenbach: Well, it's partly just because I live here [in Berkeley, Calif.] If you're going to write a novel about a place, you'd better have a fair amount of knowledge about what the place is like and what the people who inhabit it are like. But I think the larger reason is that Ecotopia is a kind of bioregion. At the time I was writing Ecotopia the term "bioregion" had not yet been invented, although it followed very soon after. But we now see that the Cascadia bioregion, as the zoologists and botanists now call it, stretches north from the Tehachapi mountains in Southern California all the way up through British Columbia and into the Alaskan panhandle. And this is an area that's defined by a fairly uniform climate; and the animals are pretty much consistent throughout—meaning animals of all kinds including insects and so on—as well as the plants. So there's a certain geographical unity to the area. And my contention, as well as that of a lot of professional geographers, is that in the long run the characteristics of your bioregion help to determine what you might call your regional character. And if you contrast Ecotopians—let's call them that for short—with people who live in hot, dry, arid climates of the Southwest, or climates of, say, Quebec . . . we see that people are somewhat different in these regions. They like different things and they have different possibilities open to them about building and getting around and raising food and a whole panoply of other things that in the long run. (Globalization is making us homogenous all over the world, but there's a limit to that.) And I think in the long term, especially when globalization collapses under its own weight, as I think it's going to do because it's really a sort of tissue of monstrous subsidies that nation-states are still able to give to corporations, but when that can't be done any more, then I think regionalism will reassert itself. And Ecotopia will be one of those regions.