Ecotopia Emerging

John Lawrence says...

Here is the quote, “I thought that the bleak picture painted of America in that section on p.42-44 is spot on. I enjoyed the part about we ignorantlly attribute our decline in quality of life to inflation when in reality it's due more to corporate and political greed. Our standards are decling. Our jobs are being lost. Regulations are being dropped. I definitely feel that if some positive changes don't come out of the next few years we may be on the verge of mass rioting or social collapse. If someone was articulate and charismatic enough to organize a revolt in this country I think there would be a surprising number of followers- I would be one of them.

Out of the movements of the 1960s also came two new kinds of utopias—the ecological utopia or “ecotopia” and the feminist utopia (Williams, 86). Neither was entirely new—Morris's News from Nowhere was an ecotopia in all but name, and the feminist utopia had precedents in works such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915). But both showed that the utopian imagination was far from exhausted and was capable of being put to effective use in the new concerns of the age. Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia (1975) named the form, although some of its best expressions were to be found in genre science fiction, such as Frank Herbert's portrait of the Fremen in Dune (1965).

The term Ecotopia is derived from Callenbach's combination of the two words ecological and utopia (Jackson, 69). The term characterizes well the attitudes of the people in the region and identifies their love of nature and overwhelming support of environmental awareness and protection. The coastal area has also been called “Cascadia” after the Cascade Mountains and because of the multitude of rivers flowing out of the highlands ...