Ecotopia Horror Book Review

“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,  the isolated, mysterious Ecotopia welcomes its first officially sanctioned American visitor: New York Times-Post reporter Will Weston.

Like a modern Gulliver, the skeptical Weston is by turns impressed,  horrified, and overwhelmed by Ecotopia’s strange practices: employee ownership of farms and businesses, the twenty-hour work week, the fanatical elimination of pollution, “mini-cities” that defeat overcrowding, devotion to trees bordering on worship, a woman-dominated government, and bloody, ritual war games. Bombarded by innovative,  unsettling ideas, set afire by a relationship with a sexually forthright Ecotopian woman, Weston’s conflict of values intensifies-and leads to a startling climax.