"[2] Callenbach wove his story using the fiber of technologies, lifestyles, folkways, and attitudes that were common in Northern California and the Pacific Northwest.
The "leading edges" (his main ideas for Ecotopian values and practices) were patterns in actual social experimentation taking place in the American West.
Much of the environmentally benign energy, home building and transportation technology described by the author was based on his reading of research findings published in such journals as Scientific American and Science.
Members of his fictional society prefer to demonstrate a conscious selectivity toward technology, so that not only human health and sanity might be preserved, but also social and ecological wellbeing.
[citation needed] During the 1970s when Ecotopia was written and published, many prominent counterculture and New Left thinkers decried the consumption and overabundance that they perceived as characteristic of post-World War II America.
"[8] In the mid-20th century as "firms grew in size and complexity citizens needed to know the market would still serve the interests of those for whom it claimed to exist".
[9] Callenbach's Ecotopia targets the fact that many people did not feel that the market or the government were serving them in the way they wanted them to.
Prior to Weston's reporting, most Americans had been barred from entering the new country, which is depicted as being on continual guard against revanchism.
Ecotopia also tolerates the voluntary separatism of many people of African descent who have, in fact, chosen to live in a mini-nation in the San Francisco East Bay area in order to protect themselves from racism.
The national defense strategy has focused on developing a highly advanced arms industry, while also allegedly maintaining hidden WMD within major US population centers to discourage conquest and annexation.
Through Weston's diary we learn of observations he does not include in his columns, such as his personally transformative love affair with an Ecotopian woman.
Despite Weston's initial reservations, throughout the novel Ecotopian citizens are characterized as clever, technologically resourceful, emotionally expressive, and even occasionally violent – but also socially responsible, patriotic.
The novel concludes with Weston's finding himself enchanted by Ecotopian life and deciding to stay in Ecotopia as its interpreter to the wider world.
The importance of this book is not so much its literary style as in the lively imagination of an alternative and ecologically sound lifestyle on a greater scale, presented more or less realistically.
[citation needed] However, in contrast to much of the Green movement in contemporary America, with its preference for regulation, Callenbach's Ecotopia has relatively laissez-faire economic tendencies, guided by intense moral pressure toward sustainable practices both in private life and in business.
"[11] In marked contrast, Ralph Nader praised the book, noting that "None of the happy conditions in Ecotopia are beyond the technical or resource reach of our society.
It is nonsense to propose a system of direct, personal and ecological exchange and to permit at the same time the vehicle of anonymous, indirect, centralized circulation (money).
), he needs a (very sympathetic, very democratic, even feminized) central State (The Big Sister) to repair the damage done by the system, through price controls, regulations, laws and prisons (of course, these latter only "training camps").