I'm a die-hard lefty and I still think this is a terrible book. It's poorly written, biased, and short-sighted propaganda. I read as much of it as I could before I just had to throw it down in disgust, and this was at a time when I was young enough believe I had to finish every book that I read. For ...more

Ecotopia is an extraordinarily seductive piece of writing; it offers a glimpse of a world that could be ours if we aligned our values with those of the ecototopians: it is a suggestion that we could live in a better and more environmentally driven way.

At the heart of things, Ecotopia feels like a p ...more

This is one of the most important books ever written -- no joke. Callenbach, writing in the early-mid 1970s, imagines that Washington, Oregon, and Northern California have seceded from the Union to form Ecotopia, a new nation based on "stable-state" (today, we call it "sustainable") practices in man ...more

“Ecotopians have the feeling of never being alone.”

This classic read as if it had been written yesterday.
That is beautiful.
That is sad.
Because I could have been living in Ecotopia instead of reading it.

Sexual equality, sustainability, 3D printing, FaceTime, community, guilt avoidance warfare ...more

Ecotopia is set in the year 1999, some twenty years after Northern California, Oregon, and Washington break away from the rest of USA to become Ecotopia. The American journalist William Weston goes to Ecotopia to investigate this closed country that has taken a radical turn towards more ecologically ...more

Fundamentally, this book is an interesting thought experiment which, when read over thirty years later, really shows its age. The concept of a nation-state primarily focused on sustainability is intriguing, and the framework of Will Weston’s newspaper articles interspersed with his personal diary wa ...more

fun because it takes place mostly in the San Fransico bay area, this is an increadible vision of the future for people who have ever had a dream of living sustainably. California, Oregon, and Washington, seccede from the USA and become their own country. after 20 years of no contact and a small defe ...more

I went into Ecotopia not expecting much in the way of serious character studies or deeds of derring-do. What I expected was a typical utopian/dystopian novel where the author focuses on describing the virtues or faults of their imagined society at the relative expense of all else; and I wasn’t disap ...more