Trois Etats de la côte ouest des Etats-Unis - la Californie, l'Oregon et l'Etat de Washington - décident de faire sécession et de construire, dans un isolement total, une société écologique radicale, baptisée Ecotopia. Vingt ans après, l'heure est à la reprise des liaisons diplomatiques entre les deux pays. Pour la première fois, Ecotopia ouvre ses frontières à un journaliste américain, William Weston.
Au fil des articles envoyés au Times-Post, il décrit tous les aspects de la société écotopienne : les femmes au pouvoir, l'autogestion, la décentralisation, les vingt heures de travail hebdomadaire et le recyclage systématique. D'abord sceptique, voire cynique, William Weston vit une profonde transformation intérieure. Son histoire d'amour intense avec une Ecotopienne va le placer devant un dilemme crucial : choisir entre deux mondes.
Récit utopique publié en 1975, traduit depuis dans le monde entier, Ecotopia offre une voie concrète et désirable pour demain, et ce faisant agit comme un antidote au désastre en cours.

A violent storm sweeps through California, taking on a life of her own. Making her way from the Pacific Coast, she gains momentum as she approaches the Sierra and transforms into a blizzard of great strength, covering mountain ranges and roads with twenty feet of snow. Originally published in 1941, _Storm_ is a rare combination of fiction and science by a master storyteller, drawing upon a deep knowledge of geography, meteorology, and human nature. "In _Storm_ we are…far from freeways, from megapopulation, from sprawl, from beach TV, from stress, from road rage. And we are in touch with a much deeper reality. Of land and water and weather, of humans huddled together on the planet in a dark universe."—Ernest Callenbach, in the foreword

Twenty years have passed since Northern California, Oregon, and Washington seceded from the United States to create a new nation, Ecotopia. Rumors abound of barbaric war games, tree worship, revolutionary politics, sexual extravagance. Now, this mysterious country admits its first American investigative reporter Will Weston, whose dispatches alternate between shock and admiration. But Ecotopia gradually unravels everything Weston knows to be true about government and human nature itself, forcing him to choose between two competing views of civilization. Since it was first published in 1975, Ecotopia has inspired readers throughout the world with its vision of an ecologically and socially sustainable future. This fortieth-anniversary edition includes Ernest Callenbach's final essay, “An Epistle to the Ecotopians,” and a new foreword by Callenbach's close friend and publisher, Malcolm Margolin.

A novel both timely and prophetic, Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia is a hopeful antidote to the environmental concerns of today, set in an ecologically sound future society. Hailed by the Los Angeles Times as the “newest name after Wells, Verne, Huxley, and Orwell,” Callenbach offers a visionary blueprint for the survival of our planet . . . and our future.

Ecotopia was founded when northern California, Oregon, and Washington seceded from the Union to create a “stable-state” ecosystem: the perfect balance between human beings and the environment. Now, twenty years later, this isolated, mysterious nation is welcoming its first officially sanctioned American visitor: New York Times-Post reporter Will Weston.

Skeptical yet curious about this green new world, Weston is determined to report his findings objectively. But from the start, he’s alternately impressed and unsettled by the laws governing Ecotopia’s earth-friendly agenda: energy-efficient “mini-cities” to eliminate urban sprawl, zero-tolerance pollution control, tree worship, ritual war games, and a woman-dominated government that has instituted such peaceful revolutions as the twenty-hour workweek and employee ownership of farms and businesses. His old beliefs challenged, his cynicism replaced by hope, Weston meets a sexually forthright Ecotopian woman and undertakes a relationship whose intensity will lead him to a critical choice between two worlds.