Ecotopia - A Novel (Paperback, Bantam trade ed)

"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,  the isolated, mysterious Ecotopia welcomes its first  officially sanctioned American visitor: New York  Times-Post reporter Will Weston.

Like a modern  Gulliver, the skeptical Weston is by turns impressed,  horrified, and overwhelmed by Ecotopia's strange  practices: employee ownership of farms and  businesses, the twenty-hour work week, the fanatical  elimination of pollution, "mini-cities" that  defeat overcrowding, devotion to trees bordering  on worship, a woman-dominated government, and  bloody, ritual war games. Bombarded by innovative,  unsettling ideas, set afire by a relationship with a  sexually forthright Ecotopian woman, Weston's  conflict of values intensifies-and leads to a startling  climax.