Free Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach

weep, whether from shame or relief. A couple of customers came into the kitchen, hugged her, lent a hand; she probably dropped salty tears into the next couple of orders, but everybody else went back to their tables, seeming very satisfied with the whole episode, and the complainer ate his new eggs with gusto, after thanking Ruth loudly and elaborately when she personally brought them out to him—with many smiles all around them.
    Little emotional dramas like this seem to be common in Ecotopian life. There’s something embarrassing and low-class about them, but they’re delightful in a way, and both participants and observers seem to be energized by them.
    Usually on my trips I feel pretty frustrated sexually after a couple of days and try to get taken care of, somehow or other. Am still totally puzzled why these independent Ecotopian women don’t react to my signals. It certainly isn’t because they are out of touch with their own sexuality! Was kidding around with one I picked up on the street. “Look,” she said after a bit, “if you just want to fuck why don’t you say so?” and marched off in disgust. That got to me, somehow. Realized I don’t
just
want to fuck, as I usually think when I’m away. I really want to figure out what goes on between men and women out here, and try getting with it: they obviously deal with each other in ways I don’t know about. I feel envious and left out, but also challenged and curious. Sometimesmy confusion settles into a feeling of readiness, patience, calmness: as if I must soon run into somebody who will make it all clear. But it doesn’t make it any easier that Ecotopians are very noisy at their lovemaking. Groans and gasps and shudders and moans percolate through my hotel walls, even though they aren’t particularly thin. Evidently they don’t have any inhibitions about others hearing what’s going on.

 

    THE ECOTOPIAN ECONOMY:
FRUIT OF CRISIS
    San Francisco, May 12. It is widely believed among Americans that the Ecotopians have become a shiftless and lazy people. This was the natural conclusion drawn after Independence, when the Ecotopians adopted a 20-hour work week. Yet even so no one in America, I think, has yet fully grasped the immense break this represented with our way of life—and even now it is astonishing that the Ecotopian legislature, in the first flush of power, was able to carry through such a revolutionary measure.
    What was at stake, informed Ecotopians insist, was nothing less than the revision of the Protestant work ethic upon which America had been built. The consequences were plainly severe. In economic terms, Ecotopia was forced to isolate its economy from the competition of harder-working peoples. Serious dislocations plagued their industries for years. There was a drop in Gross National Product by more than a third. But the profoundest implications of the decreased work week were philosophical and ecological: mankind, the Ecotopians assumed, was not meant for production, as the 19th and early 20th centuries had believed. Instead, humans were meant to take their modest place in a seamless, stable-state web of living organisms, disturbing that web as little as possible. This would mean sacrifice of present consumption, but it would ensure future survival—which became an almost religious objective, perhaps akin to earlier doctrines of “salvation.” People were to be happynot to the extent they dominated their fellow creatures on the earth, but to the extent they lived in balance with them.
    This philosophical change may have seemed innocent on the surface. Its grave implications were soon spelled out, however. Ecotopian economists, who included some of the most highly regarded in the American nation, were well aware that the standard of living could only be sustained and increased by relentless pressure on work hours and worker productivity. Workers might call this “speed-up,” yet without a slow but steady rise in labor output, capital