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Ecophilosophy And Communalist Utopian Novels: Do Bicycles And Biotechnology Go Together?, Anne L. Melano

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

The period of social change from the 1960s to the 1980s saw a flowering of utopian novels, from Huxley's Island (1962) and Le Guin's The Dispossessed (1964) through to Callenbach's Ecotopia (1975) and Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976). These works were infused with a vision of an ideal world structured as a decentralised network of small villages or precincts. In each novel, local, participatory decision-making was the key to a utopian "good place" both for people and for ecological communities as a whole. The need to reharmonise with ecological systems saw a rejection of wasteful technologies which …