Ernest Callenbach, the author of the 1975 novel “Ecotopia,” the tale of an awakening paradise in the Pacific Northwest that developed a cult following as a harbinger of the environmental movement, died on April 16 at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 83.

The cause was cancer, said his wife, Christine Leefeldt.

Written in the throes of the Vietnam War, “Ecotopia” tells of a secessionist nation — carved from what was once Oregon, Washington and Northern California — that by 1999 has evolved toward a “stable state” of bioregionalism, in which each territory cultivates its distinct ecological character.

Mr. Callenbach, the founding editor of Film Quarterly, originally published the novel himself after 25 publishing houses had rejected the manuscript. It has now sold nearly one million copies and been translated into a dozen languages, most recently Chinese. Its readership has included hippies and New Agers, environmental activists and college and high school science students, as well as evangelical Christians increasingly concerned about the global environment. It was reprinted by Bantam Books in 1977, two years after Bantam rejected it, asserting, Mr. Callenbach recalled, that “the ecological fad is over.”

The novel is told through the accounts of a newspaper reporter who is sent to Ecotopia two decades after it seceded from an economically collapsing United States. Ecotopians realized just in time, the reporter writes, that “financial panic could be turned to advantage if the new nation could be organized to devote its real resources of energy, knowledge, skills and materials to the basic necessities of survival.”