Ecocritique: Contesting the Politics of Nature, Economy, and Culture (review)

448 Rhetoric & Public Affairs 7. See, for example, Tarla Rai Peterson, "The Will to Conservation: A Burkean Analysis of Dust Bowl Rhetoric and American Farming Motives," Southern Speech Communication Journal 52 (1986): 1-21; Tarla Rai Peterson, "Jefferson's Yeoman Farmer as Frontier Hero: A Self-Defeating Mythic Structure," Agriculture and Human Values 7 (1990): 9-19; Tarla Rai Peterson, "Telling the Farmers' Story: Competing Responses to Soil Conservation Rhetoric," Quarterly Journal of Speech 77 (1991): 289-308; and Tarla Rai Peterson and C. C. Horton, "Rooted in the Soil: How Understanding the Perspectives of Landowners Can Enhance the Management of Environmental Disputes," Quarterly Journal of Speech 81 (1995): 139-66. 8. With wonderful precision, Peterson draws upon a number of important dramatistic writings concerning the relationship between nature and language, including William H. Rueckert, Encounters With Kenneth Burke (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); and Timothy N. Thompson and Anthony J. Palmieri, "Attitudes Toward Counternature (With Notes on Nurturing a Poetic Psychosis)," in Extensions of the Burkeian System, ed. James W. Cheseboro (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993), 269-83. 9. Niklas Luhmann, Ecological Communication, trans. John Bednarz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 10. Kathy E. Ferguson, The Feminist Case Against Bureaucracy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984), 208. 11. Garrett Hardin, "The Tragedy of the Commons," Science 162 (1968): 1243-48. 12. Carol Rose, "The Comedy of the Commons: Custom, Commerce, and Inherently Public Property," University of Chicago Law Review 53 (1986): 711-81. Ecocritique: Contesting the Politics of Nature, Economy, and Culture. By Timothy W. Luke. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997; pp. ix + 253. $49.95 cloth; $19.95 paper. Luke is a critical theorist who supports an ecological revolution to supplant the existing global capitalistic economic system. In the nine chapters of Ecocritique, he examines an odd assortment of organizations, projects, and philosophies to evaluate each as a stand-alone blueprint of how the revolution could and should be accomplished. Accordingly, he finds them all to be moderately to fatally flawed in theory and unsatisfying and impractical to implement in any revolutionary way. He begins by severely criticizing action/advocacy initiatives, abruptly shifts to analyzing philosophies, and concludes with his own "speculative pursuit" to "define the more concrete policy changes for realizing this ecological revolution" (204). Luke first castigates deep ecology, a complex, evolving collection of diverse ideas and critical responses to modernism based on a fundamental recognition of the intrinsic value of all life on earth and a personal lifestyle that reflects it. He blames and dismisses this philosophy because it is not an implementable, political program on a global scale. Earth First! is presented as one version of deep ecology in action. According to Luke, the impact of Earth First!, a worldwide, loose collective of motivated activists Book Reviews 449 often associated with direct action protests against extractive industries such as old growth logging and mining, is ultimately insignificant. The discomfort Earth First! triggers in the boardrooms and the mass media "too often plays into the hands of the technocratic corporate and governmental modernizers" (55). At best, it leaves these localistic "ecoraiders operating as weak countervailing forces against the increasing pressures of global competition, performance, and accumulation" (55). Luke's analysis is based almost exclusively on limited 1983-90 sources and could benefit from an update. An especially caustic diatribe is launched against The Nature Conservancy, or, as he calls it, the Nature cemetery. Luke claims that The Nature Conservancy "baits its [middle and upper class] prey" (58) with direct mail funding appeals in order to buy "cryogennic [sic] depots" (73) of "dead nature" (noted several times) where visitors can get a "whiff of wildlife" (71). According to Luke, The Nature Conservancy's flaws are in "reducing Nature to real estate" (58), arrogantly deciding which lands are richest in biodiversity, and purchasing them with money acquired through destructive corporate activities, thereby fighting "a perpetual losing battle" (64). This chapter is based on a single 1994 direct mail appeal demographically targeted to "Dear Investor." Whereas Luke asserts that Earth First!ers' Luddite tendencies blind them to the reality of their own linkages with the corporate techno-world, The Nature Conservancy is accused of taking...