Looking at an ecoregion, its actuality and the imaginations of what it might become, can inspire vision and action throughout the world. It's the best hope we have for the regional stewardship that we need everywhere in a world whose rivers and forests and airsheds and species stubbornly refuse to respect state boundaries. As historian L.S. Stavrianos has noted, the struggle for an alternative sense of political imagination is central. Overwhelming structures of power seek to monopolize the imagination, the sense of what might be possible. Yet when power seeks to close all doors and escapes from its grasp, imagination remains the pathway to change.
Imagination can move beyond the immediately practical and feasible, beyond planning to play.
And as powerful technologies often begin as toys, so powerful movements can be sparked by the play of the mind. Envisioning how an ecological society might grow out the current society is crucial. Rooted in context, it is an Ecotopian, as opposed to Utopian, vision. That charge cannot be made against Ecotopia because it is grounded close to home. It is a dream for a place and planet growing out of a visionary landscape.