If you want to know what life *could* be like in this country, if we could get rid of the corporate libertarians who want to rape the land (and the people) for short-term profits, READ THIS BOOK.


Good but not wonderful   October 20, 1997
 3 out of 3 found this review helpful

Ecotopia is a book that is definitely worth reading, in that it describes a nation that is desperately striving to save its own environment and the health of the Earth as a whole. As an environmental novel this is undoubtedly a ground-breaking work. However, there were several areas where I thought that it could use considerable improvement. Firstly, the nation of Ecotopia is ridiculously fertile and well-off - many of the problems that would occur in any real implementation of an environmental state are simply brushed off. Population control is easy because these states are already close to zero-growth; finding money for maglev trains is even easier because Boeing just happens to be in the country; workers' control of factories and land reform is easy because people are all nice; there is no large-scale opposition; and so on. When considering past revolutions which also attempted to create Utopian states, this sort of doo dee doo optimism is somewhat disconcerting. Here, it seems that the book comes dangerously close to the line between vision and fantasy. Secondly, the book's storyline is somewhat trite, and character development is not really present. Thus, it would be stretching it a bit to call Ecotopia a work of literature. Nevertheless, though, Ecotopia is an imaginative work, and should be read if only for the sake of seeing what one possible environmental state might be like.