As California looks forward (!) to the beginning of a new Presidential Administration, there is growing trepidation about what it might mean for the state. Is it time to secede and join with other West Coast states to create a new country?

Fifty years ago, Ernest Callenbach published Ecotopia, a vision of a new country dedicated to protecting people and the environment. In 2015, on the 40th anniversary of Ecotopia, UCSC held a conference called “Utopian Dreaming: 50 years of imagined futures in California and at UCSC.” Speakers included a number of academics, critics and dreamers. None of us, of course, imagined that Donald Trump might be the next President of the United States.

Listen to three talks from the conference: a keynote by Kim Stanley Robinson, best-known today for The Ministry of the Future; a critique by UC San Diego Professor of Latin American Literature and Chicano Literature Rosaura Sanchez; and an account of how Silicon Valley has become the generator of utopian and dystopian futures, by Fred Turner, Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University.

Robinson Sanchez Turner

You can find videos of the complete conference at https://www.youtube.com/@ronnielipschutz8900. And you can read an article on California eco-utopias at: https://ksqd.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Ecotopia-or-ecocatastrophe.pdf.