“Eco-polis”: Environmental Sustainability in Ecotopian Cities

Extract

1. Introduction: Ecotopia as Inspiration for Sustainable Cities

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). Scholarly environmental ethical terminology was neither employed nor intended in the book since the aim of the book was to reach a wider audience and not just academics. The article’s second section analyzes Ecotopian cities’ environmental sustainability with the help of the ecology domain of the “Circles of Sustainability” (circlesofsustainability.org). In doing so, the objective is to screen ecologically sustainable characteristics in Ecotopian cities that may still serve as potential blueprints for environmentally sustainable cities. We focus on the ecology domain only, screening Ecotopian city characteristics within the seven ecology subdomains. This will lead us to explain in which regard the Ecotopian city features characteristics that lie within several aspects of the ecology subdomains. From this analysis, we extrapolate environmental ethical presuppositions that are implied, but not overtly explained, in the novel, namely the fact of the existential or ontological situatedness of all human activities, including the economy, within the ecosystem and biomimesis or homoeotechnology as directive for technology development and utilization. Ethical presuppositions and ethically relevant values implied in the novel have so far not been the subject of extensive research.