Aldous Huxley’s Ecotopian Vision in His Final Novel, Island

November 19, 2025

By Derek DiMatteo

Brave New World (1932), Aldous Huxley’s vision of a dystopian future, is counterbalanced 30 years later by Huxley’s final novel, Island (1962), which was about an ecotopia. He uses Pala, the novel’s ecotopian island paradise, to show readers a vision of an alternative way of life characterized by sustainable ecological practices and a high standard of living. It is a rare novel that depicts such a hopeful vision of a different way of living, and a welcome change from the usual dystopian fare. Rather than warning us that humanity is on a slippery slope to self-destruction, Island suggests that avoiding dystopian outcomes is possible if society were willing to change its values.

Island depicts an island in the Pacific named Pala on which an ecotopian society has flourished for 120 years without any sustained contact with the rest of the world due in part to its unique geography (there are no beaches for landing boats, only tall cliffs). The idea of an ecological utopia is one in which the environment and society are not only stable but flourishing based on ecological principles that emphasize the balance of humans within nature. For most of the novel, the Palanese society operates in harmony with the non-human world, eschewing mass production and mass consumption alike. Our witness to Pala is a newspaperman named Faranby who is actually working for an oil magnate, and who wants to open up Pala so that his employer can profit. As Faranby becomes less cynical about Palanese society and becomes a convert to their way of life, he regrets his actions, which have doomed Pala to colonization by a foreign government and an oil corporation.

The novel’s primary tension is between ecological balance and industrialization. Pala’s old guard want to preserve the island’s existing way of life, which is characterized as “an oasis of freedom and happiness” (p. 66). By following ecological principles, the island’s society has controlled its population growth while avoiding the ills and evils that have ravaged most of the rest of the world in terms of overproduction, overconsumption, and “bigger and bigger slums or suburbs” (p. 66). However, the young new raja, who is inaugurated at the end of the novel, believes strongly in industrialization. He wants to compete with neighboring countries and intends to build factories that would be nominally for manufacturing fertilizer and insecticide but really intended for chemical and biological weapons. In addition, he wishes to allow oil rigs to be built off the coast to further speed industrialization. The intention is to use industrialization “to make Pala strong. To make other people respect us” (p. 50).

What makes Palanese society so successful is its blending of the best of western empirical science and Eastern philosophy. And one of the symbols of this blending is the mynah bird, which live throughout the island. Their mimicry of human speech resulted in them repeating the words “attention” and “here and now” (p. 12). These words serve as a reminder to everyone to pay attention to what’s happening in the here and now—to be present and mindful—and also to remember that true happiness does not rest in “a vague promise of future happiness engendered by a trust in progress” (Matter, p. 149). But the directive to pay attention is mutable, as the novel’s narrative reveals, so at times the call is to notice “avarice,” “hypocrisy,” and “vulgar cynicism” (p. 70). These negative forces ultimately doom the island. The rest of the world suffers in “misery” while Pala is a utopia, a situation that outsiders deem “sheer hubris” and “a deliberate affront to the rest of humanity” (p. 66) such that the outside world will try to drag Pala down with them like crabs in a bucket (pp. 76–77) rather than trying to learn from Pala to improve the rest of the world.

Unfortunately, although Island presents a wonderfully imaginative ecotopian society on Pala, the novel ends with the new raja betraying his people, exposing Pala to extractive capitalism. It seems that despite being optimistic enough to imagine a utopia, Huxley was pessimistic about its chances for survival. Fortunately, that doesn’t come until the end of the novel, so readers are given quite a long time to dwell within Huxley’s thought experiment. This, however, brings me to the strongest criticism of the novel: it is entirely too explanatory. As someone from our environmental reading group said, the characters felt like NPCs whose only purpose was to tell you about the world, which makes the overall effect of the novel more like a lecture than a story. But if instead of expecting a dramatic story, you are able to engage with the novel as more of a thought experiment on Huxley’s part, where you get to peek into his mind to see what he could envision, then you are likely to have a more enjoyable experience. The philosophical ideas were really interesting and worth the read.

References and Resources

Beauchamp, Gorman. “Island: Aldous Huxley’s Psychedelic Utopia.” Utopian Studies, Vo. 1, No. 1 (1990), pp. 59–72. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20718958.

Huxley, Aldous. Island. Harper Perennial, [1962] 2009.

Matter, William W. The Utopian Tradition and Aldous Huxley.” Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Jul., 1975), pp. 146–151. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4238937.