The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture by Sarah Jaquette (review)

The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture, by Sarah Jaquette Ray, brings together the fields of environmental studies, ethnic literary studies, and disability studies. Arguing that “Environmentalism can be seen as a disabling set of practices and beliefs for any number of individuals or communities,” Ray suggests that the wilderness movement of the early twentieth century is linked to social hygiene reforms and restricting immigration policies such as the Chinese Exclusion Act (10–13). Such movements attempted to shape an American identity through controlling and restricting access to American land: from both a recreational perspective, with the formation of the national parks, and through immigration policy, which was informed by the pseudoscience of eugenics. Through three case studies, Ray offers a number of ways in which environmental rhetoric actively discriminates against “ecological others,” such as Native Americans, illegal immigrants, and people with disabilities. Using textual evidence as disparate as advertisements, novels, and national monument rules for hikers, Ray reveals how the extreme sports industry, for-profit science “edutainment” organizations, border patrol, and the National Parks Service all utilize language that appears to exalt and preserve wilderness spaces and sustainable ecologies but, in reality, includes racist and often ableist arguments that uphold the historical legacy of imperialist projects: that is, the preservation of America’s geography and population to the exclusion of historically categorized Others. Such rhetoric centers on concepts such as purity, fitness, cleanliness, and other evaluative and often exclusionary concepts.

Ray’s most convincing arguments occur in the third and final chapter of her book. She explores Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument’s illegal immigration issues and the ways in which groups—namely, politicians, journalists, militias, and other biased groups and organizations—have made this government-controlled space a new battleground for restrictive immigration policies through publicizing rhetoric about trash issues and environmental destruction caused by migrants illegally crossing through the monument. Such policies, and the rhetoric of environmental destruction that these groups sensationalize, draw the conflict toward the issue of illegal immigration rather than toward the United States’s draconian immigration policies or its reconstruction of the park land after its seizure from the Tohono O’odham Tribe (159). The National Park’s policies ignore the larger contextual issues that cause migrants to cross increasingly dangerous desert spaces. Ray identifies the passing of the REAL ID Act in 2005 as a water-shed moment in the restructuring of migrant crossing patterns. The act allowed the US government to bypass any preexisting environmental laws in order to build a wall along the country’s border with Mexico (167). Because of the specific source material that Ray relies on to explore “The Poetics of Trash,” as she titles Chapter Three, she explicitly roots her discussion of the issues with contemporary environmentalist rhetoric in relevant contemporary government policies and social movements, such as the Coalition to Bring Down the Wall in 2003 (171).

Other and less convincing arguments in The Ecological Other attempt to explore the roots of evolutionary theory and concepts such as genetic fitness through literary fiction. Her second chapter, in which she characterizes “edutainment” institutions such as Bodies ... The Exhibition, the Eden Project, and Biosphere 2 as “biomedical utopia[s],” blurs the lines between pseudoscientific entertainment-focused for-profit organizations and peer-reviewed and Internal Review Board monitored scientific research (116). Ray’s project could have benefitted from inclusion of history of science work on the development of ecology as a scientific field and the development of the field of evolution. At times, she does little to distinguish between legitimate scientific research on evolutionary theory and concepts such as genetic fitness from the discredited eugenics movement, a concern that the field of evolutionary ecology has been attempting to delimit since shortly after Charles Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species (1859). Her movement between scientific research and literary analysis of Almanac of the Dead (1991), by Leslie Marmon Silko, could have been bolstered by current...