Ecotopia A Land Where Ideals And Sensuality Reign

By David Brand

The Ecotopians are not like you and me. They favor fanciful hats and eccentric leggings, all made from natural materials. They work only 20 hours a week, smoke marijuana legally, like to give one another back rubs and reject conspicuous consumption. What they really care about is their land, their air, their water and one another, all of which they regard with an almost obsessive passion.

For many American high school and college students, the appeal of this land of vaulting ideals and valued indolence is seductive. Surveying their own daily diet of angst, fetid air and befouled shores, students' common response is "When can I move there?"

But a passage to Ecotopia is impossible to buy, because this country of fiercely energized environmentalists exists only in the mind of Berkeley writer Ernest ("Chick") Callenbach, 59. Since his novel Ecotopia was first published in 1975, it has become an environmental classic. Now, after a summer of discontent -- ozone smog, sewage and medical wastes on beaches and fears of a global warming caused by the greenhouse effect -- the novel is winning new popularity. "It's a super book. It really gets students discussing solutions to our environmental problems," says William Hastings, a professor at San Diego Mesa College, who is using the book in a high school political science honors course.

All of this is faintly bemusing to Callenbach, a tall, donnish man who edits nature books and the scholarly movie magazine Film Quarterly at the University of California Press. Part prophet and part cranky critic, he is in demand these days as a speaker at gatherings of ecologists and government planners. "People ask me, 'How could such a world come about?' I use the example of the vast change in smoking behavior in this country, which is a paradigm of the way in which social change toward Ecotopian patterns is happening and is going to happen. When you give people a choice between living and dying, on the whole more choose living."

When Callenbach created his fable about a country that sacrifices consumption in order to ensure survival, he was unable to find a publisher for the slim, 167-page novel. So he published it himself, raising the $3,500 cost from friends. "I thought it had some modest virtues and might even sell 2,500 copies." To date, worldwide sales are about half a million. The book has been translated into eight languages and has gone through eleven printings in the U.S. since Bantam Books bought the rights twelve years ago.

Ecotopia is set in 1999, nearly 20 years after Washington, Oregon and much of California, sickened by environmental degradation, swollen military budgets and inflation in the U.S., have announced their secession from the Union. They have outlawed the internal-combustion engine, banned a host of consumer products, from microwave ovens to electric can openers, and expropriated all waterfront property. They have also encouraged such an independent spirit in women that they have become sexual predators and even control the ruling party. Into this world of spartan but sensual living comes a reporter, the first American to visit Ecotopia since independence, to explore Ecotopian technology, the almost religious reverence for nature, and social habits, both appealing and appalling.

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."

This summer's environmental assaults, the author believes, have made an Ecotopian world a little more likely. "We have been messing about with the atmosphere in a truly Faustian way. That and the garbage on the shores have put people in a rotten humor." But what will really "be the key to the evolution of Ecotopia" will be a catastrophe at a nuclear plant. "One of these days a nuke is going to blow in the country, as surely as the sun goes up and comes down. It's practically bound to happen, and it will put a whole new complexion on environmental politics."

Callenbach likes to shock students by telling them, "The challenge of modern life is to make it as emotionally healthy as life in a Stone Age village." Keep that in mind next time you fume over foul air and blaring traffic. Think of your Ecotopian future, smoking a joint on some peaceful municipal waterfront, watching the biodegradable plastic boats go by.