Search Worlds Without End

A novel both timely and prophetic, Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia is a hopeful antidote to the environmental concerns of today, set in an ecologically sound future society. Hailed by the Los Angeles Times as the "newest name after Wells, Verne, Huxley, and Orwell," Callenbach offers a visionary blueprint for the survival of our planet . . . and our future.

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, this isolated, mysterious nation is welcoming its first officially sanctioned American visitor: New York Times-Post reporter Will Weston.

Skeptical yet curious about this green new world, Weston is determined to report his findings objectively. But from the start, he's alternately impressed and unsettled by the laws governing Ecotopia's earth-friendly agenda: energy-efficient "mini-cities" to eliminate urban sprawl, zero-tolerance pollution control, tree worship, ritual war games, and a woman-dominated government that has instituted such peaceful revolutions as the twenty-hour workweek and employee ownership of farms and businesses. His old beliefs challenged, his cynicism replaced by hope, Weston meets a sexually forthright Ecotopian woman and undertakes a relationship whose intensity will lead him to a critical choice between two worlds.

This prequel to Callenbach's classic Ecotopia is a multi-stranded novel that dramatizes the rise and triumph of a powerful American movement to preserve the earth as a safe, sustainable environment.

The story springs from harsh realities: Toxic contamination of air, water, and food has become intolerable. Nuclear meltdowns threaten. Military spending burdens the economy. Politicians squabble over outdated agendas while the country declines. But then dedicated people begin to respond in their own ways to the crisis, and a fresh hope arises.

A panorama of history about to happen, Ecotopia Emerging weaves many individual destinies into an absorbing epic: the birthing pains of a new nation.