Ecotopia

In order for William Weston, the protagonist of Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia, to fall in love with the place he needs to fall in love with a woman. It is all well and good for the Ecotopian principles of community, modularity, and frugality to make sense from social, economic and ecological perspective, but if they don’t enamour him, by speaking to his sense of aesthetics, the cause is lost. This seems to be the implication of Ecotopia’s romantic subplot. The book is set in 1999; 25 years after California, Oregon and Washington secede from the Union to form the state of Ecotopia. It is made up of Weston’s notebooks and reports, where the former are in cursive, and represent his private thoughts and experiences, while the latter are in regular font, meant for broader dissemination in the United States, on whose behalf Weston is reporting.

The reports are in a somewhat neutral register, although occasionally Weston’s condescending surprise at the ingenuity and agreeableness of the Ecotopian lifestyle shines through. In fact, these sections of the book read very much like the diary of an American in Europe: ‘pedestrian streets, public transport … How exotic!’ Perhaps because they are inspired by a kind of rose-tinted image of Europe, many of Ecotopia’s quirks are not implausible, and have even become commonplace in parts of the world. However, other elements seem to me much more radical. For example, when Weston takes the interurban train he gets off not at city hall or a courthouse, but at a factory. Whereas in Europe railway stations are essentially colonial infrastructures, shrines to capital and to empire, in Ecotopia they are built in service, and in reverence to the workers on whose labour Ecotopia is fully dependent, cut off as it is from the rest of the world.

Despite its evocations of Europe, Ecotopia is decidedly lacking in internationalism. Most surprisingly, there is no mention of the Soviet Union despite the book’s socialist politics. This may be a flaw of the genre. Utopias tend to be islands. But Ecotopia’s nationalism is also exclusionary of people of colour. Weston remarks that there are very few non-white people in San Francisco because they have all established their own smaller city-states within the territory, like Chinatown and Soul City. He describes Soul City as “having more hold-overs from pre-Independence days than Ecotopia as a whole,” still importing luxury items and cars. Whether it is true that they are “making up for lost time” or not, the description of Soul City perpetuates stereotypes of black people as materialistic and less concerned with the environment than white people are. This is the kind bias that the black birder Christian Cooper experienced in Central Park when a white woman called the cops on him because he looked out of place.

Unlike the reports, Weston’s notebooks offer a more psychologically nuanced image of his experience. They depict him increasingly questioning his individualistic lifestyle in the U.S., with an ex-wife he no longer speaks to, his kids he never sees, and his girlfriend to whom he cannot emotionally commit, and who serves more as a socialite ambassador to him than a lover. Enter Marissa ‘Brightcloud,’ a white woman who, like many Ecotopians, is problematically indigenized in an effort to emphasize her closeness to nature. Only through his relationship with Marissa, does Weston come to prefer Ecotopia. This illustrates that we do not relate to cultures and societies, and even technologies on purely rational grounds. Case in point, the way Weston talks about driving in the U.S. as opposed to using the much slower, non-privately owned, electric vehicles used in Ecotopia. “No one can be utterly insensitive to the pleasures of the open road, I told them, and I related how it feels to roll along in one of our powerful, comfortable cars, a girl’s hair blowing in the wind…” Weston’s allegiance to American car culture (and theU.S. more generally) here is both a matter affect, and desire. It is Ecotopia's task to envision an alternative aesthetics that is just as persuasive. Given the book's cult status and rave reception in the seventies, one could argue it was to some extent successful. 

Laura op de Beke