Nachhaltige Vision: Die erste klassisch-ökologische Utopie Ecotopia (1975) von Ernest Callenbach

The global environmental problems had been unmistakable since the end of the 1960s. In 1975, Ernest Callenbach published Ecotopia, the first major ecological utopia, which confronted the cri⁠sis scenarios with a decidedly positive alternative. Callenbach’s Ecotopia quickly became a cult book of the ecology movement. At the centre of his literary fiction is the concept of a sustainable circular economy with a completely regenerative energy supply, which from today’s perspective can certainly be considered visionary. Although the influence and strength of the design do not lie in its literary quality, Callenbach’s utopia also holds remarkable genre-historical innovations that concern both the transformational relationship between utopia and social reality and the transformation of the utopian genre itself.