The novel Ecotopia appeared in 1975, its "prequel" Ecotopia Emerging in 1981. The considerable success of Ecotopia (it has now sold about 700,000 copies in nine languages) seemed to me then, and still seems to me now, an optimistic sign. But I must confess that the book was written partly out of despair. Even in the early seventies, when it was clear that the new ecological thinking being deployed in Co-Evolution Quarterly, Science, and a host of other serious publications was becoming enormously sophisticated and intellectually impressive, there were plenty of reasons to believe that the jig was up: the unchecked power of industrial society to destroy the natural order had been so magnified by surging population and consumption growth and more powerful technology that the prospects for saving more than tiny remnants of undisturbed areas were dim. Air and water pollution were staggering. Forestry, agriculture, and fisheries--the basic life-support systems that make human life possible despite our ever-growing population burden--were being operated on nonsustainable bases. Fundamentally, we were eating oil, since the food system required far more petroleum calories of input (fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, equipment fuel, processing, transportation) than we got out of it in food calories.
Ernest Callenbach
