Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston is the title of a seminal book by Ernest Callenbach, published in 1975. The book is one of the first ecological utopias and was influential on the counterculture, and the green movement in the 1970s. The term ecotopia as sub-genre of science fiction and utopian literature refers to this book.
Spoiler Warning!
The book is set in a 1999 future (25 years in the future, seen from 1974) and consists of the diary entries and reports of William Weston, a reporter who is the first American proper to investigate Ecotopia, a new formed country that broke from the USA in 1980. This country consists more or less of the territory of the former states of Oregon and Washington, plus northern California.
Together with Weston, who at the beginning is curious, but not really empathic about Ecotopia, we learn about the ecotopian train system, life style, war sports, politics (the president is a woman, Vera Allwen), gender relations, sexual freedom, energy production, agriculture, and so on. In the end, Weston becomes an Ecotopian himself.
The importance of this book is not so much to be found in its literary form, as in the lively imagination of a alternative and ecologically sound lifestyle on a greater scale, presented more or less realistically. It expressed on paper the dream of an alternative future held by many in the movements of the 1970s.
In 1981 Callenbach published Ecotopia Emerging, a multi-strand "prequel" suggesting how the sustainable nation of Ecotopia could have come into existence.
In the book Nine Nations of North America (1981) by Joel Garreau Ecotopia is meant as label for Northern California, most of Oregon and Washington states, as well as coastal British Columbia and Alaska.
See also: Cascadia
