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This new edition of the classic environmental novel Ecotopia offers a visionary blueprint for the survival and “thrival” of our planet. Originally published in 1975, it provides a fascinating view of an imagined future that we are now living. The cell phone, called a picturephone, is there, as are electric taxis.
The buses creep along at about ten miles an hour, but they come every five minutes or so. They charge no fare. When I took an experimental ride on one, I asked a fellow passenger about this, and he said the minibuses are paid for in the same way as streets—out of general tax funds. Smiling, he added that to have a driver on board to collect fares would cost more than the fares could produce.
The novel is set in an ecologically wise future society, Ecotopia, founded when northern California, Oregon, and Washington secede from the Union to create a “stable-state” ecosystem: the perfect balance between human beings and the environment. Now, twenty years later, this isolated, mysterious nation is welcoming its first officially sanctioned American visitor: New York Times-Post reporter Will Weston.
Skeptical yet curious about this green new world, Weston is determined to report his findings objectively. But from the start, he’s alternately impressed and unsettled by the laws governing Ecotopia’s earth-friendly agenda: energy-efficient “mini-cities” to eliminate urban sprawl, zero-tolerance pollution control, devotion to trees bordering on worship, ritual war games, and a woman-dominated government that has instituted the twenty-hour workweek and employee ownership of farms and businesses. Bombarded by innovative, unsettling ideas, swept off his feet by a relationship with a sexually forthright Ecotopian woman, Weston’s conflict of values intensifies—and leads to a startling climax.
“A classic of earth consciousness.”
—Denis Hayes, original coordinator of Earth Day