Ecotopia: A Novel

by Ernest Callenbach

Ecotopians, I am discovering, spout statistics on such questions with reckless abandon. They have a way of introducing “social costs” into their calculations which inevitably involves a certain amount of optimistic guesswork.

the great downtown skyscrapers, once the headquarters of far-flung corporations, have been turned into apartments!

all food wastes, sewage and garbage were to be turned into organic fertilizer and applied to the land, where it would again enter into the food production cycle.

Scientists in Ecotopia are forbidden to accept payments or favors from either state or private enterprises for any consultation or advice they offer.

Ecotopians eat better food than any nation on earth, because we grow it to be nutritious and taste good, not look good or pack efficiently.

But what matters most is the aspiration to live in balance with nature, “walk lightly on the land,” treat the earth as a mother. No surprise that to such a morality most industrial processes, work schedules, and products are suspect! Who would use an earth-mover on his own mother?

Ecotopians, both male and female, have a secure sense of themselves as animals. At the Cove they lie about utterly relaxed, curled up on couches or floor, flopped down in sunny spots on little rugs or mats, almost like a bunch of cats. They stretch, rearrange themselves, do mysterious yoga-like exercises, and just seem to enjoy their bodies tremendously. Nor do they keep this to themselves, particularly—I’ve several times walked in on people making love, who didn’t seem much embarrassed or annoyed—it was hardly different from walking in on somebody taking a bath. I find myself envying them this comfortableness in their biological beings. They seem to breathe better, move more loosely. I’m experimenting, trying to imitate them….

“You made the dreadful mistake,” he said, “of turning your science establishment over to established scientists, who could be trusted. But it’s mainly young and untrustworthy scientists who get important new ideas. —You still have a few things happening, but it’s lost the momentum you need.”

“It may sound that way, but in practice there’s no stable point. We’re always striving to approximate it, but we never get there. And you know how much we disagree on exactly what is to be done—we only agree on the root essentials, everything else is in dispute.” I grinned. “I’ve noticed that—you’re a quarrelsome lot!” “We can afford to be, because of that root agreement. Besides, that’s half the fun of relating to each other—trying to work through different perspectives, seeing how other people feel about things.”

According to him, women in Ecotopia have totally escaped the dependent roles they still tend to play with us. Not that they domineer over men—but they exercise power in work and in relationships just as men do. Above all, they don’t have to manipulate men: the Survivalist Party, and social developments generally, have arranged the society so that women’s objective situation is equal to men’s. Thus people can be just people, without our symbolic loading on sex roles. (I notice, however, that Ecotopian women still seem to me feminine, with a relaxed air of their biological attractiveness, even fertility, though I don’t see how they combine this with their heavy responsibilities and hard work. And men, though they express feelings more openly than American men—even feelings of weakness—still seem masculine.)

Ecotopians seem to use TV, rather than letting it use them.

mankind, the Ecotopians assumed, was not meant for production, as the 19th and early 20th centuries had believed. Instead, humans were meant to take their modest place in a seamless, stable-state web of living organisms, disturbing that web as little as possible. This would mean sacrifice of present consumption, but it would ensure future survival—which became an almost religious objective, perhaps akin to earlier doctrines of “salvation.” People were to be happy not to the extent they dominated their fellow creatures on the earth, but to the extent they lived in balance with them.

unable to make difficult children adapt to the schools, they had to adapt the schools to the children!

However, the serving of such sentences is quite different from its equivalent in our prisons. No large prisons of our type are maintained, either in Soul City or elsewhere in Ecotopia. Prisoners are dispersed in many small institutions housing only a few dozen inmates each. During the day inmates participate (under light guard and sometimes none at all) in the general life of society—holding jobs with ordinary job rights and pay. However, they (together with their wives, husbands, or lovers if they so desire) are confined at other times. This curious policy is justified by arguing that people guilty of violent crimes generally commit another one when freed, and thus end up in prison again; indeed traditional prison life increases their tendency to commit violence. (Except for murderers, perhaps, who usually kill spouses or acquaintances, and seldom repeat.) In the American system, the argument goes, prisons were only training schools for the inmates’ next crimes. Soul City penologists, on the other hand, believe their relatively humane policies actually give inmates the time and opportunity to develop non-criminal modes of life in realistic life circumstances.

No Ecotopian avoids getting medical care because of the expense or the inaccessibility of health facilities.