When we set up a Cascadia table at an event or a festival, it’s fun to see how many people, when asked how they first heard about Cascadia, say they read about it in Ecotopia. “Even today, despite being out of print for many years, Ecotopia is a novel that continues to inspire generations.

He currently runs The Department of Bioregion, Cascadia Underground and Horizon Books, Seattle’s longest-running used bookstore. The official flag of Cascadia, named the “Doug flag” after the Douglas fir it features Brandon Letsinger is an open source advocate and bioregional organiser and has joined or started many of the largest organisations promoting the idea, including CascadiaNow! and the Cascadian Independence Project in 2004. The quasi-utopian nation of Ecotopia grew while Callenbach was working as the editor of the famously progressive University of California Berkeley campus press, which is described by Callenbach’s close friend, colleague and former executive director of Heyday Books, Malcolm Margolin, as “a seedbed of innovation and radical thinking.”Īlthough the nation of Ecotopia does not exist in reality, the book was highly influential within the climate movement of the seventies and eighties, inspiring the creation of real activism in the north-west coast of the Americas, in the form of the Cascadian independence movement, which expanded beyond the political borders north to include the Canadian province of British Columbia. In it, Washington State, Oregon and Northern California secede from the United States to become their own single nation. Such a situation is not too hard to imagine these days, one which Earnest Callenbach predicted in his novel, Ecotopia. Once a shining example of pluralism, it is now a mere shadow if its former self.

Imagine a world where a once great nation teeters on the brink of collapse, straining to hold together the patchwork quilt of ideologies that characterises its federal democracy.

Ecotopia novel