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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Love, love, love this book! Read years ago in a high school environmental science course, and I look forward to reading it again. ( )The book is set in a 1999 future (25 years in the future, seen from 1974) and consists of the diary entries and reports of William Weston, a reporter who is the first American proper to investigate Ecotopia, a newly formed country that broke from the USA in 1980. This country consists more or less of the territory of the former states of Oregon and Washington, plus northern California. Together with Weston, who at the beginning is curious about, but not particularly sympathetic to, Ecotopia, we learn about the ecotopian train system, life style, war sports, politics (the president is a woman, Vera Allwen), gender relations, sexual freedom, energy production, agriculture, education, and so on. Ecotopian citizens are characterized as free-thinking, creative and energetic, but also socially responsible and often inclined to work in team configurations. In the end, Weston becomes an Ecotopian himself. dated now, and reads clumsily, but an inspirational book in its time A novel to savor for the ideas and the comprehensiveness of vision rather than the writing. Having been penned decades ago, Ecotopia offers as much insight into the 1970's as it does into a utopian future. What would happen if Northern California and the Pacific Northwest were to secede from the United States? An environtalist's view of a perfect world. Stupid and horrifying in its broad acceptance. no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0553348477, Paperback)"Ecotopia was founded when northern California, Oregon, and Washington seceded from the Union to create a "stable-state" ecosystem: the perfect balance between human beings and the environment. Now, twenty years later, the isolated, mysterious Ecotopia welcomes its first officially sanctioned American visitor: New York Times-Post reporter Will Weston.Like a modern Gulliver, the skeptical Weston is by turns impressed, horrified, and overwhelmed by Ecotopia's strange practices: employee ownership of farms and businesses, the twenty-hour work week, the fanatical elimination of pollution, "mini-cities" that defeat overcrowding, devotion to trees bordering on worship, a woman-dominated government, and bloody, ritual war games. Bombarded by innovative, unsettling ideas, set afire by a relationship with a sexually forthright Ecotopian woman, Weston's conflict of values intensifies-and leads to a startling climax. (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:05 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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