Reviewed by: Ecocritique: Contesting the Politics of Nature, Economy, and Culture Andrew McMurry (bio) Timothy W. Luke. Ecocritique: Contesting the Politics of Nature, Economy, and Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. xx + 253 pp., $49.95, $19.95 paper. In recent years, political scientist Timothy Luke has been conducting a series of penetrating analyses of major strains of environmentalist thought and practice. Ecocritique incorporates nine of these essays, whose topics range from the unreconstructed utopianism of deep ecologists and the tree-spiking militancy of the Earth First! movement, to the neglected environmental dimensions of Herbert Marcuse and the “arcological” politics of Paolo Soleri. One gains a clear sense of Luke’s sympathy for many of his subjects even as he deconstructs their too-often naïve, politically suspect, and philosophically slack conceptions of the relationship of human and nonhuman. Taking his subjects on their own terms and teasing out the contradictions that they themselves produce, he provides valuable insights into the problems and potentialities of these “ecocritiques” and creates an important ecocritical contribution in its own right. Luke begins with studies of deep ecology and the Earth First! movement, both of which pursue a “biocentric” approach toward repairing the schism between humans and “Nature.” Compared to Luc Ferry’s widely read claims in The New Ecological Order (1995) that the implications of deep ecology and Earth First! are [End Page 399] so resolutely antihumanist and irrational that they portend a new kind of totalitarianism, Luke’s treatment of these two ecocritiques is generous—and, I think, far more to the point. Where Ferry spots a common thread that connects them to German romanticism and, ultimately, to National Socialism, Luke sees radical ecologists for what they more accurately are: principled and committed, but as yet insufficiently strategic in their thinking to do much to reverse the dangerous trajectory of modern civilization, which seems poised to very soon run up against the biotic limits of the planet. If Earth First!ers fail to see the inadequacy of their morally aware but largely particularistic acts of “monkey wrenching” and civil disobedience to problems that press at these limits, it is because they have perhaps taken too much to heart the dictum to “act locally.” Luke writes that “thus far, the inherent irrationalities in contemporary transnational exchange, which [Edward] Abbey and [Dave] Foreman so clearly describe, have only sparked Earth First! to mount limited oppositional attacks, which leaves these ecoraiders operating at best as weak countervailing forces against the increasing pressures of global competition, performance, and accumulation” (p. 55). In contrast, the Nature Conservancy and the Worldwatch Institute do take those “increasing pressures” very seriously. Both organizations work within existing frameworks of capitalism and property rights to promote their goals of nature preservation and sustainability. The obvious ironies of the “green consumer” movement generally and the Nature Conservancy specifically—chiefly, the irony of saving Nature from the market by applying market principles to its precious, scattered remains, which are to be bought or “swapped” like so many rare issues of stock—are an easy target for Luke. More compelling is his discussion of Lester Brown’s Worldwatch Institute, which, unlike even the Nature Conservancy, assumes that “Nature is gone for good” and substitutes for it an “ensemble of ecological systems, requiring human managerial oversight, administrative intervention, and organizational containment” (p. 89). This bureaucratization of what passes for the natural world is done in the name of “sustainable development,” a possibly laudable notion but one that, Luke fears, may allow not just Nature but human biological life itself to “pass into fields of control for disciplines of ecoknowledge and spheres of intervention for their management as geopower at various institutional sites, such as the Worldwatch Institute” (p. 91). This Foucauldian vision of all-seeing governmental and institutional “worldwatchers” controlling “environmentality” seems particularly invidious, given that in the final analysis what may really be under scrutiny are the modernizing Third, Second, and Fourth World nations whose increasing drain on resources will likely depress already enfeebled planetary “vital signs.” On this score, “worldwatching seems little more than a global doctrine for applying a range management philosophy to a wide array of human communities within a diverse...