"Eco-polis": Environmental Sustainability in Ecotopian Cities.

Sustainability; Natural resources; Diesel automobile emissions; Business & politics; Solar heating; Canals; City traffic; Botany

William Weston, one of Callenbach's protagonists in the novel "Ecotopia", experiences Ecotopian cities devoid of internal combustion engine powered cars (Callenbach 16), instead of which there are "electric taxies, minibuses, and delivery-carts" (Callenbach 27). Ecotopians rigorously recycle everything (Callenbach 260) and synchronize technology with nature's cycles, e.g. electricity generation with "solar energy, earth heat, tides, and wind" (Callenbach 219). Car-free zones cover all densely populated city areas (Callenbach 24), as for example in the Ecotopian capital San Francisco (Callenbach 10), where slowly moving, frequent, and free-of-charge driverless minibuses are readily available in the streets. This article analyzes Ernest Callenbach's 1975 novel "Ecotopia" by focusing on the description of ecologically sustainable features of cities in this fictitious ideal state, although the term "sustainability" is not mentioned once in the original text (except in an afterword in the 2004 anniversary edition) because "sustainability" as an environmentally relevant notion only became widely used after the publication of the so-called Brundtland Report (Commission). [Extracted from the article]