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In September 1991, eight "biospherians" entered a space-age terrarium in the Arizona desert to spend two years "living interdependently in an ecosystem covering ocean, desert, rain forest, marshes, savannah, farm and human habitats" (Rotstein). In June 1992, representatives from one hundred and sixty nations attended the United Nations Earth Summit conference in Rio de Janeiro. Both events have become very controversial. Biosphere 2 has turned into a business enterprise and tourist attraction and only secondarily is a scientific experiment concerned with ways to use natural resources responsibly: one anthropologist even calls it "Bio Biz" (Small 74). And divisions between rich countries and poor, the developed and developing nations, conservation groups and official governmental agencies have politicized the Earth Summit's hopes of treaties and looser agreements that would link "the well-being of the environment and the prosperity of all humankind" (Raeburn; cf. Newhouse and A.P.T.). But the issues behind the hoopla and the controversies are crucial, all the same. Biosphere 2 and the Earth Summit insist that we need to rethink our relationship to the environment and that politics and economics should not be separated from social, philosophical, and spiritual values. And they share a dream of a greener and better world-a world where human values, economics, nature, and technology would be in balance.
Biosphere 2 set out to study ecological problems by establishing an actual model of a self-sustaining ecosystem; the Earth Summit turned to political agreements. I am concerned here with two imagined worlds where utopian dream and ecology interact. One of my texts is More's Utopia, which gave its name to the form it established. The other is Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia, which has been called the first "modern" utopian work to explore "the possibility that a society could live in harmony with its environment while continuing to utilize many of the advances made through modern technology" (Merchant 96). Ecotopia's title foregrounds the connection between utopia and ecology that interests me, and it highlights Michael Holquist's point that the utopist's "anthropology leads necessarily to ecology" (113). This need not be the "ecology of perfection" he speaks of, however. Rather, I want to consider to what degree each of these utopias does represent a society in which "social structure is based on an ecological philosophy...