By Eve Ekman

IN 1975 A Berkeley writer imagined a utopian country formed by the secession from the United States of northern California, Oregon, and Washington. The book, Ecotopia, by Ernest Callenbach, quickly attained cult status nationwide; its articulation of hope for a better future tapped a vein and continues to remain on college syllabi and bookstore shelves. It was reissued in January by Heyday Books to celebrate its 30-year anniversary and recognize its continuing legacy.

In person Callenbach is an unlikely revolutionary, slight and soft-spoken and now graying. In conversation his fixed gaze and extensive stores of information quickly reveal a strong vision. Callenbach's San Francisco is the capital of Ecotopia. Market Street is a creek, there are free bicycles and eco-efficient Muni-style trains, skyscrapers have been put to use as housing and marketplaces, people collect on corners to picnic, play, barter, and banter, as at an urban Renaissance fair. But borderline hedonism and love of nature are not the vital aspects of this vision. Ecotopia challenges the viability of corporate-driven social and political structures, with exhaustive plans in forestry, energy efficiency, and worker-owned everything; radically transformed education techniques; and a progressive political system led by women. The social effect this has on the individuals is enviable; they have an unmatched confidence, commitment, and sense of place.

Bay Guardian: In order to get a perspective on the time when you wrote this book, what forces lead you to devise this project and put it to paper?

Ernest Callenbach: I am a country boy at heart. I grew up in a town of 300 in Pennsylvania. I knew the way we were – are – living was not sustainable; sooner or later you have to make things run on a stable state system. I was trying to write a magazine article about improving our handling of sewage. It is fundamentally insane, on a biological level, to take all this nutritious human excrement and wash it down the rivers to the sea, burn, or bury it. Sewage ought to be recycled into the food cycle. The first thing I wrote about Ecotopia was a news story about an imaginary country that recycled human waste. I began thinking about transportation issues, fisheries, and forestry, and little by little I was sketching out an entire imaginary country.

BG: How come you carved up the West Coast the way you did, stopping at Big Sur?

EC: At the time I was writing, L.A. seemed more like an alien culture from the point of view of "Ecotopian values." I was also trying to be bioregional. The plants and animals divide at the Tehachapi Mountains. The Cascade bioregion runs all the way from the Tehachapis to Alaska. Los Angeles belongs to the Sonora Desert region, which is altogether different in terms of biology. I think biology really tells on culture; it really influences what can be done and what kind of lifestyles will survive happily and which have to be supported by man-made constructions. I would consider including L.A. now in Ecotopia. California, Washington, and Oregon are all blue states, all with urban conglomerations, all similar in their strong export economies, all quite liberal on social issues, conscious of environmental issues. There is a certain coherence in West Coast culture. Now we are seeing a gulf between the coastal areas and the interior valleys, which have always had a sort of Southern hillbilly culture. That may be more accentuated now.

BG: Ecotopia is of course a novel, but with all the attention and praise, why didn't Ecotopia happen? Could – should – this book have incited its own revolution?

EC: Ecotopia is a kind of thought experiment; scientists and philosophers often do thought experiments to test new theories. There was an immense amount of sophisticated scientific literature on sustainable practices floating around, but no one had ever put it together and asked, "Well, if we took all this data and information seriously and put it together, how would we do things differently?"

If you a imagine a country on the scale of Ecotopia, you are forced to really take seriously a lot of survival issues that the country as a whole can really skate over or busy themselves bombing someone somewhere. In a country like Ecotopia, you must really think out what you are going to do to make sure your forests are productive in the long run, and how you are going to run agriculture, how you are going to deal with your fisheries, and what kind of design is necessary to really be energy efficient.

If you look at what has happened since Ecotopia came out, then you see negative trends – especially connected to the automobile, but we have gotten a lot more ingenious about energy conservation and regeneration, for that matter. We now know how to design suburbs to not be so wasteful, and how they are better for humans and animals to live; we know more about organic agriculture; we have gotten better equipped to do what is necessary under the pressures of economic globalization. We are not doing as much as we should, however.

BG: Why is that? Why haven't we actualized our potential for a more sustainable existence?

EC: Well, it is the nature of our institutions. We happen to be saddled by corporate-dominated institutions currently. All significant power in the U.S. now is corporate. Until we get some kind of a handle on controlling corporations – which are, after all, licensed and chartered by states – we will not be able to change these fundamental institutions. The purpose of corporations is to make money for the shareholders; nothing else at all can be a legitimate goal of a corporation. We see all around us the consequence of this – a looter economy that is sucking the well dry and filling the pockets of a few. Sooner or later it will be the ruin of society, for every society must have some degree of loyalty from its citizens. When a society loses that, the jig is up. The ruling class, though adept at controlling what it aims to control, can't create loyalty among people or give people a sense that they are living well. If you ask people – left, right, religious, nonreligious – what is a good society, they will tell you it is not what is being provided by corporations, and pretty soon people will connect the dots and demand better. We have to keep alive, however, the idea that power structures are not immutable. They can be changed.

I was a student radical, and I studied a bunch of Marx and the history of revolutions, and I found that they were not really revolutions at all because they did not change the relationship with the means of production. Marx says changing that relationship is the name of the game because everything in a culture then follows from that. The Russian Revolution lasted maybe three weeks, and then the Bolsheviks realized that giving power to workers in the factories meant the workers were going to do things the way they wanted to, which was not necessarily the way the Bolsheviks wanted them to, and so they reinstalled authoritarian rule. China did much the same thing. Cuba, which was in some ways the most humane of the revolutions, degenerated into a centralized authoritarian party. Having employee ownership as your basic method of organizing economically seems to be very promising, and I am very heartened by all the mostly medium-sized and small companies that are going to employee ownership today.

BG: Cities will continue growing and become the predominant human habitat by virtue of their space efficiency and rising populations. How can we use this habitat best for humans?

EC: People think of Ecotopia as a back-to-the-land book, although the goal was to show that cities can be ecologically viable. I still think that the basic challenge we have has a long tradition in radical thought. It was once called the "town and country" problem. Marx observed that country people are "idiotic, badly educated, backwards," et cetera. I gave Ecotopia a balance between city and country things in order to have the joys of rural life and city life. There is a power in the agglomeration of people, where minds rub on minds in novel ways. In the history of ideas, there were very few that occurred in isolation. Cities, because of that potential, are tremendous engines of creativity. When we began to live in cities, it was like a quantum leap. We owe the city almost everything we consider a culture.

Eve Ekman is a writer who lives in San Francisco.