The EE story seems to take place in the 1990s; Callenbach assumes that the pro-business, anti-environmental Reagan-era policies—already evident at the time of publication—will have persisted in the United States after Reagan's presidency.

Other characters are shown briefly as each one decides independently to break with the American status quo and begin living in an Ecotopian (low-tech, sustainable) fashion.

Bolinas, California, high school student Lou Swift finds a way to generate electricity cheaply from seawater in a solar cell.

Angered by an Eastern food corporation's announcement it would stop selling fresh produce, she and other politicians, artists, and professionals form a new political party.

An ardent secessionist claims to have planted dirty bombs in New York City and Washington, DC, and threatens they will explode if the U.S. attacks the region.

In a lucky coincidence, the U.S. helicopters massing on the Nevada border and preparing to attack the region are suddenly recalled to deal with a crisis in Saudi Arabia, and secession seems likely to proceed.

Refusing to develop alternative energy sources, “oil-hungry America lurched toward some unseen economic catastrophe.” At the end, the Saudi oil refineries have been bombed, and the U.S. military is caught up in a war in the Middle East.

The Ecotopian storyline ends with the Party making Lou's solar cell technology available to the public, and a constitutional convention where the region decides to secede from the U.S. following the Quebec-Canada model.

Neither book describes events in between, such as the political difficulties of secession, the economic dislocations and outmigration from the region, and the Helicopter War with the U.S. (referred to in Ecotopia).

However, little account is offered of how such dynamics would surely also ensure stubborn resistance to such change (nuclear blackmail notwithstanding) – in this emerging ecotopia, big business’s capitulation to idealists seems abject and fairly complete.”[4] Also