Andrew Biro's dense argument for a “denaturalized ecological politics” should have wide appeal. At one level, it should make political theorists generally—whether or not they consider themselves “ecological theorists”—reflect more systematically on how concepts of nature structure the ideas of canonical thinkers. Political ecology is too often treated like a specialty shop in the theory emporium, a boutique that one enters or not according to the inclinations of taste. In fact, its insights recast the central concerns of political theory broadly conceived. Just as feminists have uncovered how gendered concepts are woven throughout the entire fabric of political discourse, so ecological political theorists demonstrate how nature in multiple guises (wildness, savagery, emotional connectedness, fecundity, scarcity, etc.) subtly inflects the meaning of notions of rights, justice, and human well-being. In this regard, Biro's perceptive analyses of Rousseau and Marx—like John Meyer's reading of Aristotle and Hobbes in Political Nature (2001)—add heft to a growing literature that, in the name of environmental concern, wrings new meaning from familiar theorists.

Where Meyer deals with thinkers who either pitted humanity against nature or tried to derive norms for human action from it, Biro locates a distinctive modern strand of theorizing that starts from our alienation from nature. By this he means human beings' self-conscious transformation of their natural environment. Rousseau is the “progenitor” of a denaturalized ecological politics because he realized that, through labor, we irreversibly transform our surroundings and ourselves. The resulting social inequality challenges the theorist to imagine idealized social and educational institutions that forestall the corrupting effects of this process, without aiming to recover some prior, innocent nature. Biro argues that the inadequacy of Rousseau's solutions stem from an inability to distinguish between the division of labor and the capitalist system of commodity exchange.

This distinction drives Biro's argument forward to Marx. If it can be shown that not alienation from nature per se, but an historically specific form of production is the source of oppression and social irrationality, then there is hope that the transformation of nature can be made compatible with human freedom. Although Biro concedes that the later Marx dared offer only to minimize the impact of natural necessity in human life, not eliminate it, he thinks that Marx at least foreshadowed an ecologically useful distinction between “basic” and “surplus” alienation.

Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse build on Marx's achievement. Readers who follow developments in critical theory will appreciate Biro's work at a second level. He attempts to draw a nondominating approach to nature out of the Frankfurt School. Adorno's dialectics, argues Biro, redefine “nature” as “the process of ceaselessly recasting relations of identity and difference” (p. 128). Marcuse complements Adorno's essentially “negative moment” by suggesting that much domination of nature is in fact a surplus form of alienation, a naturalized social domination far in excess of anything required by the necessities of human life. In recognizing some unavoidable “necessities,” Biro counterbalances Steven Vogel's Against Nature: The Concept of Nature in Critical Theory (1996), where Marcuse is chided for dreaming of a utopian abolition of work as toil.

Biro does not squeeze direct ecological lessons out of the theorists he interprets. Surprisingly, in fact, he never dwells on Rousseau's quasi-environmentalist pastoral rhapsodies or Marx's occasional observations about pollution and soil depletion under conditions of capitalist production. Green theorists will probably be puzzled to pick up a book on “political ecology,” and then be asked to traverse broad expanses of text in which no example of an environmental problem appears at all. What all readers will find, however, is a careful sifting of Marxist, poststructuralist, liberal, and other readings of each theorist in order to show how various interpretive conundrums—Why does Rousseau's solution to alienation from labor invoke illiberal institutions like the legislator? Why does Adorno's radical critique end in politically pessimistic aestheticism?—turn on the theorists' portrayal of the dialectic of human activity and a given world.

At a third level, Biro steps right into the political ecology boutique and criticizes its wares. “Deep ecologists,” who aspire to constrain human activity out of respect for nature's intrinsic value, are too quick to attribute a fixed essence to nature and human beings. Antiessentialists, such as Jean Baudrillard and Michel Foucault, on the other hand, make it difficult to appreciate the obdurate, unexpected qualities of a world that are not merely effects of semiotic systems or of power. Antiessentialists also fail to ground any ethical stance in respect to those qualities. “Denaturalized political ecology” is supposed to avoid these shoals by making humanity's self-conscious metabolism with nature its leitmotif. Biro concludes by tentatively suggesting urban ecology as a model. According to this model, meteorological events, for example, become environmental disasters not because humanity has violated nature in some simple sense, but because of inadequate government action and social breakdowns. Hurricane Katrina's devastation was as much a social as a natural disaster. The two are conceptually and practically inseparable.

What precisely does this mean for political ecology? This is where Biro's analysis stands most in need of extension. To agree that humanity can only get at nature by self-consciously transforming it is perhaps to rule out deep ecology, but it does not say whether any particular manifestation of nature merits special efforts of preservation. Is anthropogenic climate change acceptable provided that it is self-conscious? Are the destruction of species or their transformation through genetic engineering only problems if they result from social domination? Some post-Marcuse, Frankfurt School inspired thinkers might shed additional light on these questions. Jürgen Habermas has found favor with theorists such as John Dryzek and Tim Hayward, who seek to ground a democratic political ecology in discourse ethics. Ulrich Beck's influential studies of risk society argue that reflexive modernization eventually provokes opposition to environmental risks that violate survival norms. Perhaps in his next book Biro can use his penetrating understanding of critical theory to evaluate whether such approaches advance the prospects for a “denaturalized political ecology.”