Environmental political theory is a growing subdiscipline. Over the past twenty years, a number of scholars have gone beyond both traditional political thought and environmental ethics to explore the normative political dimensions of human relationships with the rest of the biophysical world. Much of the work in environmental political theory considers the implications of nature and ecological problems for not only political institutions but also for basic understandings of politics. Less common are attempts to revisit the political theory tradition with an eye toward theorists’ conceptions of nature. There are some notable exceptions, though, including Jane Bennett’s discussion of Hegel in Unthinking Faith and Enlightenment, and John Meyer’s discussion of Aristotle and Thomas Hobbes in Political Nature, as well as David Macauley’s edited volume, Minding Nature, and Robyn Eckersley’s critique of modern political thought in the seminal Environmentalism and Political Theory. A new and very impressive addition to this growing bookshelf is Andrew Biro’s Denaturalizing Ecological Politics. Biro undertakes very close, detailed readings of four social and political theorists: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse in order to illuminate how they conceptualize human relations with nature given our fundamental condition of alienation from nature. Biro also engages in lively debates with these authors’ critics and interpreters. Throughout, he conveys the sheer intellectual pleasure of textual analysis. Let me say straight up that Biro’s discussion of alienation from nature in his four theorists is an invaluable contribution to environmental political thought and it may also help to increase awareness of the ecological dimensions of politics within the larger political theory community. This is an essential volume for students and scholars of political theory and environmental politics.

Like the other authors mentioned above, Biro is not content to simply revisit historical texts. He also seeks to provide some theoretical guidance for environmental politics today. In fact, he wants to bridge the philosophical divide between environmentalism, which warns of crisis in human relations with the rest of the biosphere but tends to rely on reified, essentialist views of nature, and postmodernism, which rejects essentialism and labels invocations of nature as discursive constructions, but leaves little basis for an ecological political program and threatens to lapse into a problematic relativism. Biro aims for a conception of ecological politics that is free of essentialism but is nevertheless robust enough to justify calls for environmental action.

This is a very ambitious project and Biro promises more than he can deliver. He provides an indispensable textual analysis of four key social critics and their conceptions of nature alienation, but the second part of his program, wherein he seeks to draw on this textual analysis to address the contemporary dilemmas of ecological politics in a postmodern age, is not quite as successful. In the end, we are still profoundly uncertain about what sort of contemporary guidance we should derive from the four thinkers he analyzes and how we ought to reconcile ecological values with postmodern critique. Indeed, I would say that Biro has written two books in one. The textual critique, which forms the middle four chapters the book, is nearly a fully realized work unto itself. The discussion of contemporary ecological and postmodern politics and theory in the second, third, and seventh chapters could easily be the basis for another volume. The ideas expressed here, while intriguing, need further development.

In the sections on contemporary thought that bookend the textual analysis, Biro rightly criticizes both ecological, or green, and postmodern thought. Focusing on several prominent green thinkers, Biro takes issue with how they attempt to derive conceptions of politics from essentialized accounts of nature, a problem also highlighted by Meyer in Political Nature. Moreover, he attacks simplistic arguments that environmental problems can be addressed by returning to a more ‘natural’ existence. As Biro notes, there is plenty that is wrong with such claims, not the least of which is the failure of deep ecologists like Bill Devall...