Denaturalizing Ecological Politics: Alienation from Nature from Rousseau to the Frankfurt School and Beyond (review)

In his engaging book, Denaturalizing Ecological Politics, Andrew Biro tries to address the complicated relationship people have with nature. He does so by interpreting how earlier political thinkers thought about humanity's relationship to the nonhuman world and offering theoretical distinctions and analytical categories to clarify the perennial challenge of situating ourselves, as a species, within the whole. He believes that by going back and appreciating how some of our greatest thinkers knocked their heads against the enigma of humanity's place in the natural world we will develop a more productive ecological politics.

Biro's tour of previous political thought includes insightful interpretations of Rousseau, Marx, Adorno and Marcuse, focusing on the theme of alienation. These writers believe that humans are in a perverse relationship to the nonhuman world; we are estranged from the natural world that surrounds us in one way or another. This alienation occurs not because there is something inherently wrong with the natural world but rather because of problems with our social order. Our social relations are marked by injustice, domination and excessive hierarchy, and we take these qualities with us as we interact with the nonhuman world, making it difficult to know what is natural and how to behave in ecologically-sound ways.

Biro distinguishes two kinds of alienation: basic and surplus. Basic alienation is the necessary distance humans assume to develop culture, enrich social relations and otherwise cultivate sociality. Surplus alienation, in contrast, is our estrangement from nature that results from our impulse to master the natural world, an impulse that inspires us to naturalize social domination. One sees these two forms in, for example, Rousseau, who both praises and laments humanity's leaving the state of nature to enter society. He praises it as a necessary step to forming social institutions and human culture more generally; we must experience basic alienation to develop meaningful bonds of social life. He laments this estrangement, however, to the extent that leaving the state of nature requires that we develop a modicum of mastery over the natural world, and such mastery quickly translates into social domination. Put differently, through surplus alienation, humans reify the qualities of supremacy over nature into social distinctions that then appear natural. In both cases, as Biro illustrates through instructive additional interpretations of Marx, Adorno and Marcuse, our understanding and relations with the world beyond that of just humans are matters of social practice, not unmediated readings of what nature genuinely is and what it might require.

One of the highlights of the book is Biro's insistence that none of the thinkers he examines really resolves the problem of alienation. In praising and lamenting alienation, Rousseau does not prescribe a return to a pre-social existence, which is neither possible nor desirable, nor does he confidently and clearly recommend vamping up sociality so we can somehow leave our noble savagery behind. Marx, Adorno, and Marcuse also outline different dimensions of the challenge but none offers a way out. Their contributions, rather, are to provide particular insights into how we construct the relationship between humanity and the more-than-human world. Biro hopes that such insights may provide a prolegomena to a "denaturalized" ecological politics, wherein nature is not the main protagonist but social relations are.

Biro's book is challenging. The prose is often dense and his interpretations of various thinkers frequently veer off in distracting directions. The book could use a good edit. It could also use, however, a less ambitious object. Biro has bitten off more than most of us can chew. He is taken by a paradox that sits at the center of all environmental and much philosophical thought in general, the category of nature itself. As humans, we are both subject to and subjects of nature. We are biological animals who are part and parcel of the natural world and yet creatures who are not completely at nature's whim, which puts...