Letters to the Young

"Letters to the Young" is a review of the novels Ecotopia and Ecotopia Emerging by Ernest Callenbach, published in The Nation on May 22, 1982 and reprinted in the collection Vonnegut By The Dozen in 2013.

Summary

Despite serving as editor of Film Quarterly and for the University of California Press, as well as possessing an M.A. in English from the University of Chicago, Callenbach was forced to self-publish his first novel, Ecotopia, in 1975 when he was 45. In it, an American male journalist visits a new nation without waste or poison where people work only twenty hours a week, repair clothes, farm organically, use mass transit, smoke marijuana, and run everything with natural, renewable energy sources. Prepared to find nothing but failings in the new nation, the journalist instead falls in love with a local woman and stays. While this could have been funny, the novel is serious and readers are meant to be inspired. Speaking with Callenbach on the phone, Vonnegut found him aware that the work is "a lot more successful as a conservationist tract than as a novel". It allows the reader to daydream about a way of life that loves instead of destroys the Earth. Even lacking advertising and reviews, the novel sold 40,000 copies before Bantam reprinted it, selling 145,000 more copies.

Unsatisfied with the book as a work for fiction, Callenbach wrote the prequel Ecotopia Emerging about the difficulties of the new nation, published in 1981 and selling 3,000 copies so far. A nation of Washington, Oregon, and northern California down to San Francisco seeks to secede from the United States. They win by claiming to have hidden atomic bombs throughout "the old country" which they will detonate if attacked, while the United States is already militarily distracted defending overseas oil fields. In their phone conversation, Callenbach admitted the new nation got much desirable land, leaving the United States with most of the debt, aged, poor, and environmental destruction. However, he said such a novel based around Lake Erie would have taken hundreds of pages just to cover the clean up. There would also have to have been more old people in the story, instead of everyone of importance being under 30. Their code of living, called the "The Nine No-nos", were shared by Vonnegut's own children before they reached middle age: no extinction, nuclear capabilities, manufacture of deadly substances, adulterants in food, discrimination, private cars, limited liability corporations, or population growth. Meanwhile, the winds will bring the fresh Pacific air to carry away the smoke of wood stoves and marijuana.