2025/07/03 by Spencer Adams · 1 voice
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Water Governance and Infrastructure #Posthumanist Ethics and Activism #Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/27708888.2025.2596543
openalex publication_date 2025/07/03 · openalex created_date 2025/11/29 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
Ernest Callenbach’s 1975 novel, Ecotopia, was among the first and most influential self-consciously environmentalist utopian novels. Drawing on Callenbach’s writing as a film critic in the 1960s and 1970s, this article situates the novel in relation to two particular political backdrops explicitly invoked within it, backdrops that served as acute influences on the novel’s Ecotopian imaginary. First, situated as he was in Berkeley, California, Callenbach presents a reading of the New Left milieus emerging and folding around him. This reading reflects and interprets both the promise of the era’s radical movements and these movements’ limits, problems, and internal struggles. Second, central to Callenbach’s Ecotopian imaginary was a coordination of resource extraction, production, and distribution through a regulated market mediating exchange between worker-led cooperatives, a basic model of political economy informed in particular by Yugoslav socialist ideals. The novel thus mirrors the oft-obscured influences on Western Marxists of the internal critiques within socialist Yugoslavia in the 1960s and 1970s. Having laid out these political backdrops, the article delves in its final section into a reading of Ecotopia’s racial pessimism and its surprising resonance with the eventual collapse of socialist Yugoslavia. Performing a critical reading that triangulates the novel in relation to the Northern California New Left and socialist Yugoslavia allows for a new way of situating Callenbach and early imaginaries of Ecotopia in periodizations of environmentalism, seeing the novel as a vexed and idiosyncratic swan song of 1960s radicalism.