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The Novel That Predicted Portland
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of New York Times
Posted: January 2nd, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/fashion/14ecotopia.html?pa...
Sometimes a book, or an idea, can be obscure and widely influential at the same time. Thats the case with Ecotopia, a 1970s cult novel, originally self-published by its author, Ernest Callenbach, that has seeped into the American groundwater without becoming well known. The novel, now being rediscovered, speaks to our ecological present: in the flush of a financial crisis, the Pacific Northwest secedes from the United States, and its citizens establish a sustainable economy, a cross between Scandinavian socialism and Northern California back-to-the-landism, with the custom ... to eat local. In the 70s, the book, with a blurb from Ralph Nader, was a hit, selling 400,000 or so copies in the United States, and more worldwide. Today, Ecotopia is increasingly assigned in college courses on the environment, sociology and urban planning, and its cult following has begun to reach an unlikely readership: Mr. Callenbach, who lives in Berkeley, Calif., and calls himself a fringe, 60s person, has been finding himself invited to speak at many small religious colleges. This month, the books publisher, Bantam, is reissuing it. For a while it seemed sort of antique to people, said Mr. Callenbach, a balding and eerily fit man of 79. But now that you go out into America and young society, it apparently doesnt seem that weird to them at all. "It is so hard to imagine anything fundamentally different from what we have now, he said. But without these alternate visions, we get stuck on dead center. And wed better get ready, he added. We need to know where wed like to go.
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