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  • Read This Book!
  • Cheri Lucas-Jennings (bio)
Timothy Luke, Ecocritique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997)

In ECOCRITIQUE Timothy Luke is faced with the same challenge as environmental lobbyists who oppose bills that do not go far enough. Both take a risk that that opposition will be interpreted as taking the side of industry. Nothing is farther from the truth. Adroit students of environmental issues and lost fans of Marxist analysis should read this book...for several reasons. First, Luke offers relief from paralyzing enertia of contemporary analyses of sky-is-falling: pollution is replete: resource are inexorably deplete: fatalism of so called “crackpot, limosine liberals willing to put the existence of snail-darters before modern humanity’s material progress.” (p. 116)

Luke does this by thorough review of pro-active environmental strategies from the deep ecologies of Earth First!/ Nature Conservancy to the smart economies of the Worldwatch Institute, to the terraforming technologies of Biosphere 2. In providing his review Luke offers a wonderful tone of analysis. He suggests for example, of the impressive holdings of the Conservancy that nature in all “its wild mystery and awesome totality”is not being preserved by buying it up. It is, in fact, conceived as dead.

Nonetheless its memory might be kept alive at numerous burial parks all over the nation where glimpses of its spirit [in] a whiff of wildlife, the scent os a stream or the aroma of surf [are] given perpetual maintenance and loving care...by middle and upper-middle class opportunity to purchase some atonement for their anonymous sins as consumers.

(p. 71)

That this candid and richly wry tone is lent post-modernist literature as well as a variety of organizational foibles is no less impressive. The book offers full histories, complete organizational models, and refreshing, pithy analysis directed towards constructing an effective environmental agenda. Luke traces the limits of reconstructing fanciful histories of societies who lived lightly and peacefully on the earth, only to mourn their passage .He offers that in so doing “deep ecologists forget how much of modern science was itself wrapped up in enchanted, mystical visions of Nature.” (p. 13) Although Luke concedes in his first chapter as throughout the critique, that humans COULD change some of their ways, his pernicious search is for motivation, to propell visions beyond the modern Western notion of SELF as tied to hedonistic gratification. Of the movement for full standing of all creatures on the basis of inherent integrity Luke reasons that their are obvious, and Natural, socially-derived limitations

so that we MIGHT allow grizzlies to chow down on campers and live stock as their mode of self realization. We COULD even..warehouse mental patients out in tidal pools or anthills. But WILL we allow anthrax, or cholera microbes to attain self-realization in wiping out sheep herds or kindergartens?”

(p. 17)

A third, and most compelling reason to read Timothy Luke is that this author clearly does not intend smugness, or wallow in the emminently postmodern fortitude of his critique. Luke pursues a forthright political agenda, and he is at the top of his form in dismantling what he calls the Cult of Recycling and the ‘call’ of saving the earth - as movements that often provide symbolic and substantive means to rationalize resource use and “..cloak consumerism in the appearance of ecological activism” rather than truly ‘liberating’ nature from technological exploitation.

“Their marginal benefits are counterbalanced by substantial costs remaining structurally invested in thoroughly consumeristic forms of economy and culture. The ‘greening’ of product advertising and merchandise packaging...does nothing to alter fundamentally anti- ecological qualities of production in a contemporary capitalistic society.

(p. 135)

Professor Luke is obdurant, and doubtful, in his ECOCRIT!QUE of environmental movements so far: doubtful that the earth’s resources will be totally deplete BEFORE Worldwatch offers endorsement of ‘voluntary simplicity’ or ‘conspicuous frugality’: unconvinced that a Conservancy’s mission of perpetual maintenance will keep a vital ecological balance intact by pursuing an agenda that “sounds oddly like the sales pitch used by burial societies, memorial parks: sceptical whether engineered environmental productivity, or evolutionary happenstance is at the core of Biosphere 2’s “world under glass”: cynical that, left...

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