Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston is the title of a seminal book by Ernest Callenbach, published in 1975. The society described in the book is one of the first ecological utopias and was influential on the counterculture, and the green movement in the 1970s.

The impressive, environmentally benign technology Callenbach described in Ecotopia was based on research findings published in such journals as Scientific American. The author's story was woven using the fiber of technologies, lifestyles, folkways, and attitudes that were being reflected (from real-life experience) in the pages of, say, the Whole Earth Catalog and its successor CoEvolution Quarterly, as well as being depicted in newspaper stories, novels and films. Callenbach's main ideas for Ecotopian values and practices were based on actual experimentation taking place in the American West.

The term ecotopia as a sub-genre of science fiction and utopian literature refers to this book.

The book is set in a 1999 future (25 years in the future, seen from 1974) and consists of the diary entries and reports of William Weston, a reporter who is the first American proper to investigate Ecotopia, a new formed country that broke from the USA in 1980. This country consists more or less of the territory of the former states of Oregon and Washington, plus northern California.

Together with Weston, who at the beginning is curious, but not really empathic about Ecotopia, we learn about the ecotopian train system, life style, war sports, politics (the president is a woman, Vera Allwen), gender relations, sexual freedom, energy production, agriculture, education, and so on. Ecotopian citizens are characterized as free-thinking, creative and energetic, but also socially responsible and often inclined to work in team configurations. In the end, Weston becomes an Ecotopian himself.

The importance of this book is not so much to be found in its literary form, as in the lively imagination of an alternative and ecologically sound lifestyle on a greater scale, presented more or less realistically. It expressed on paper the dream of an alternative future held by many in the movements of the 1970s and later.

Worth mentioning is Callenbach's speculation on the roles of TV in his envisioned society. In some ways anticipating the "reality TV" genre that emerged 20 or more years later, the story mentions that the daily life of the legislature and some of that of the judicial courts is televised in Ecotopia, and debates (including technical debates concerning ecological problems) met a need and desire among viewers.

In 1981 Callenbach published Ecotopia Emerging , a multi-strand "prequel" suggesting how the sustainable nation of Ecotopia could have come into existence.

Quote from the Author: "...if you reflect on our change from thoughtless trash-tossing to virtually universal recycling, or from the past in which smokers didn't hesitate to blow smoke in anybody's face to our present restrictions on smoking in public places, it's clear that shared ideas about acceptable or desirable behavior can change markedly. Such changes occurred without anybody getting arrested in the dark of night. Further changes will come..."

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In the book Nine Nations of North America (1981) by Joel Garreau, Ecotopia is meant as label for Northern California, Western Oregon, Western Washington and coastal British Columbia and Alaska.

See also: Cascadia