ABSTRACT
From apprentice learning and geodesic dome-covered rooftop gardens to community credit unions and putt-a-cabs, ‘Ecotopia’ demonstrated the healthy future that could be achieved by the implementation of ecologically and socially responsible methods of American Appropriate Technology (AT). In the US, the appropriate technology movement emerged in the late-1960s from a countercultural desire to reform Establishment policies and amend traditional American consumerist and technocratic values. Since public transportation had largely replaced individual automobiles in Ecotopia, such innovative, ecological urban planning strategies abounded. For RAIN, Ecotopia was more abstract and ideological than Ernest Callenbach’s fictional society, and yet, Bender, de Moll, Johnson and Johnson saw its practical merits. The conceptually dissonant expansion and contraction of the intranational Ecotopian network the former Rainmakers built in the mid- to late 1970s revealed a crisis of purpose in RAIN and, in many ways, signalled a crisis within the AT Movement itself.
