I first saw Ecotopia in 1986. Wandering around the college bookstore as a wide-eyed freshman, I began accumulating the texts of major scientific disciplines. Biology, geology, chemistry, and calculus were on my list. But for English 101, the instructor assigned Ecotopia Emerging for the main text. This wasn’t your typical first-year composition book. Ernest Callenbach published his second fictional novel in 1981. It was a prequal.

In his first book Ecotopia, readers discovered stories of a new American nation’s birth. It formed when California as far south as the state’s Tehachapi Range joined Oregon and Washington in secession from the United States. Callenbach presented fictional dispatches from a journalist reporting on the world’s first ecologically friendly nation. Combustion engines and pesticides were banned. Toxic pollution was fanatically eliminated. Women controlled politics and government. African-Americans gained self-rule in several city-states. Oakland was renamed Soul City. Football disappeared.

Just one year after I saw Ecotopia, it got its own catchphrase. “Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”  (p. 41). The authors of Our Common Future coined the idea of sustainable development in 1987. Many portray sustainability as the harmonious nexus of ecology, economy, and equity popularized through a Venn diagram of three overlapping circles. Some fashionably advocate a triple-bottom line concept.

Now often shortened to sustainability or sustainable, the term now is ubiquitous in environmental writing and especially in urban studies and planning. For example, in a chapter on sustainability in planning, Beatly attributed Seattle with mainstreaming the sustainability idea in their 1994 comprehensive plan. Subtitled “Toward a Sustainable Seattle: A Plan for Managing Growth 1994-2014,” it expressed four core values for the city: community, environmental stewardship, social equity, and economic opportunity and security.

Seattle is often touted as a hallmark of sustainability because it launched the first indicators program, ranked first in Portney’s 2003 ranking of cities taking sustainability seriously, and won the US Environmental Protection Agency’s 2003 Climate Protection Award.

Conversely, a growing number of voices question Seattle’s environmental reputation. Matt Klingle’s Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle revealed a long history of environmental degradation and social injustice. Likewise, Sanders alluded to a side of Seattle in Seattle and the Roots of Urban Sustainability: Inventing Ecotopia that is not “. . . a story of black and white, of total success or total failure of ideals, but rather one as gray as the recycled water that Ecotopians sprinkled on their gardens. The down side of this greener urbanism may have been its tendency to reinforce a trend toward a more fractured landscape in a city that would become increasingly out of reach to working and middle-class families” (p. 214).

Likewise, one state environmental scholar regularly updates a state environmental policy assessment for the anthology Environmental Policy: New Directions for the 21st Century. In the eighth edition published in 2013, Rabe reported rankings of state adoptions of 20 different environmental policies with California (CA) in the lead for 20 different environmental policies in 2010 with Oregon (OR) among a second tier of states with 18 adoptions and Washington (WA) close behind with 17. Three years later, CA remained in a top tier of states for environmental policy commitments while OR and WA remained in a second grouping. Generally, some states like CA, OR, and WA consistently rise to the top in evaluations of environmental protection policies, others are regularly in the middle, and another cluster stay at the back of the pack.

But, in the more recent book The Divided States of America: Why Federalism Doesn’t Work published this year, emerging research benchmarking state environmental performance on air, climate, and energy was presented. Public policy scholars covered in a chapter called “E Pluribus Plura” offered a new twist by focusing on environmental results rather than just policy commitments. Riordan Frost and Daniel Fiorino normalized air pollution, carbon emissions, and energy efficiency efficiency by a states gross economic output. California remained at the top of the rankings but with a sizeable lead over over states in the top ten. Oregon and Washington fell ninth and tenth respectively. However, they trailed CA by nearly 100 points while beating the state average by only 10 points.

Thus, Ecotopia saw remarkable variation in environmental results across its three states. Only with comparative policy analysis do we uncover these important differences and their implications. I intend to continue the challenging work of connecting environmental policy variations and similarities with divergent results in a three-dimensional (3D) lens.

Sustainability planning conflicts also will be a frequent topic in this space. For instance, Scott Campbell countered that optimistic depiction of balancing economy, ecology and equity to produce sustainability. “Planners have to redefine sustainability, since its current formulation romanticizes our sustainable past and is too vaguely holistic” he wrote in 1996 (p. 296). Describing a planner’s triangle instead, he focused on the contradictions of sustainable development in the Journal of the American Planning Association (JAPA).

First, a resource conflict pits economic growth and jobs against environmental protection. Economy represents one of the triangle’s three points while ecology and equity form the other two. The second divide involves social justice versus environmental protection in a development conflict. Third, a property conflict divides economic growth and social justice. Ten years later, David Godschalk added a livability point in another JAPA publication.

A growth management conflict divides economic growth and livability while gentrification cleaves livability and equity. Last, a green cities conflict divides livability from ecology. The result is a 3D “sustainability/livability” prism with six conflicting planning challenges. In my applications of this framework and its conflicts across the cities and regions of WA, OR, and CA, I rename it Ecotopia’s Prism.

For more background on the course of my scholarly life, please see my curriculum vitae. AbelT 2023 CV Sep