'Ecotopia' revisited

I observed more WTF? head scratching over the L.A. Times' layoff of Calendar writer Scott Timberg this fall than over just about anybody. So no surprise he shows up today freelancing for the New York Times, with a piece from Berkeley on a resurgence in interest in Ernest Callenbach's quintessential Northern California-in-the-'70s fantasy novel "Ecotopia." Good headline: "The Novel that Predicted Portland."

in the flush of a financial crisis, the Pacific Northwest secedes from the United States, and its citizens establish a sustainable economy, a cross between Scandinavian socialism and Northern California back-to-the-landism, with the custom � years before the environmental writer Michael Pollan began his campaign � to eat local.

White bicycles sit in public places, to be borrowed at will. A creek runs down Market Street in San Francisco. Strange receptacles called �recycle bins� sit on trains, along with �hanging ferns and small plants.� A female president, more Hillary Clinton than Sarah Palin, rules this nation, from Northern California up through Oregon and Washington.

� �Ecotopia� became almost immediately absorbed into the popular culture,� said Scott Slovic, a professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, and a pioneer of the growing literature-and-the-environment movement. �You hear people talking about the idea of Ecotopia, or about the Northwest as Ecotopia. But a lot of them don�t know where the term came from.�

In the �70s, the book, with a blurb from Ralph Nader, was a hit, selling 400,000 or so copies in the United States, and more worldwide. But by the raging �80s, the novel, along with the Whole Earth Catalog, seemed like a good candidate for a �70s time capsule � a dusty curio without much lasting impact.

Bantam is reissuing the book this month.