Ecocritique: Contesting the Politics of Nature, Economy, and Culture PDF
Preview Ecocritique: Contesting the Politics of Nature, Economy, and Culture
ECOCRITIQUE This page intentionally left blank ECOCRITIQUE CONTESTING THE POLITICS OF NATURE, ECONOMY AND CULTURE Timothy W. Luke University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London Copyright 1997 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by e University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290, Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http: / /www.upress.umn.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Second Printing 1999 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Luke, Timothy W. Ecocritique : contesting the politics of nature, economy, and culture / Timothy W. Luke, p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-8166-2846-7 (alk. paper). — ISBN 0-8166-2847-5 (pbk.: alk. paper) i. Environmentalism. 2. Green movement. I. Title. GEi9j.L85 1997 363.7—dc2i 97-12049 The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. To Nikki This page intentionally left blank Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction, Contesting the Politics of Nature, Economy, and Culture xi 1 Deep Ecology as Political Philosophy 1 2 Ecological Politics and Local Struggles: Earth First! as an Environmental Resistance Movement 28 3 The Nature Conservancy or the Nature Cemetery: Buying and Selling "Perpetual Care" as Environmental Resistance 56 4 Worldwatching at the Limits of Growth 75 5 Environmental Emulations: Terraforming Technologies and the Tourist Trade at Biosphere 2 95 6 Green Consumerism: Ecology and the Ruse of Recycling 115 7 Marcuse and the Politics of Radical Ecology 137 8 Developing an Arcological Politics: Paolo Soleri on Ecology, Architecture, and Society 153 9 Community and Ecology: Bookchin on the Politics of Ecocommunities and Ecotechnology 177 Conclusion. New Departures for Ecological Resistance 195 Notes 211 Index 249 vii This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments For more than thirty years, the environmental ills of advanced industrial societies, like those of Europe, Japan, or North America, have been poked and prodded by a diverse band of ecological critics. Posing as eco- philosophers, ecowarriors, ecopoliticians, ecoengineers, or ecoplanners, these "ecocritics" all have advanced their own unique "ecocritiques" as the correctives needed to check the spreading plague of environmental decline. Such ecocritiques constitute an important discursive tradition of critical ecological theory and environmental analysis, which can, in turn, be reevaluated to appraise how effectively green resistance move- ments have contested the politics of nature, economy, and culture in America since the 19605. This book carefully reconsiders the workings of some well-known environmental action groups, as well as the writings of several signifi- cant ecological critics, to draw a more complete picture of their political and economic agendas. As a critical rereading of ecocritiques, I implicidy elaborate my own style of ecocritique by engaging other ecological crit- ics and environmental resistance movements in a political debate over theories and practices. Each chapter articulates how I have come to under- stand several important environmental movements, groups, and thinkers as they have operated in the American context since the mid-igSos. Some sections have appeared elsewhere in different forms. Chapter i is a revised version of an article in Telos j6 (summer 1988), and chapter 2 elaborates on a paper fromCurrentPerspectivesin SocialTheory14 (1994). Chapter 3 appeared inCapitalismNatureSocialism6, no. 2 (June 1995), and another version of chapter 4 was first published in Capitalism Nature ix
The list of books you might like
