Ernest Callenbach's novel Ecotopia

Ernest Callenbach's novel Ecotopia develops a separate state consisting of the former states of Washington and Oregon along with the northern part of California. This state has separated from the United States and has developed a system based on the idea of deep ecology, based on the idea of "stable states" by which the ecology is maintained so that there is no decay and nothing taken out that is not put back into the ecology. The political system in the state of Ecotopia differs from that of the federal system with which many in that part of the U.S. were dissatisfied. The perspective of Robert A. Dahl serves to illuminate and criticize aspects of the political system in Ecotopia.

That system is described first as having been brought into existence by means of drastic tactics. The system was developed by the Survivalists who were most unhappy with the federal system in the U.S. Callenbach envisions a situation in which the one-third of the existing legislators and leaders who were women were in danger of being gerrymandered out of existence by males, supported by Washington, D.C. This led to widespread defiance of federal regulations, and the resulting chaos produced the growth of locally controlled organs of state in the form of workers' councils and citizens' councils. This led to what the Ecotopians view as their Independence. Stability brought a situation in which the Survivalists in the region swept the constitutional convention elections and reorganized the

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ership of factories and farms. The system is more in keeping with the needs of the economic system and the needs of the people as a whole than the system in the U.S. has ever been, and what has been formed is a Utopia which seems to work well because it is based on small governmental units. Callenbach sees groups in society as desirous of having and controlling their own political units, and they are willing and eager to do so at the microlevel when they have been unable to have an impact at the macrolevel. The position of blacks in this society shows this. The reporter notes that the blacks in the past had been unable to have much of an impact in cities that were actually dominated by the white suburbs. In Ecotopia, the blacks want to control their own territory, and so black areas have been designated as city-states within Ecotopia, with their own city governments, their own taxes, their own police and courts, their own industries, and their own farms: In fact they possessed all the attributes of tiny independent countries--even including the issuance of postage stamps and currency--except for the carrying on of foreign relations (Callenbach 107). Robert A. Dahl addresses issues of authority in a post-revolutionary

Category: Literature - E