It is rather remarkable that within a few months of each other both Melissa Lane (no relation to the reviewer) and William Ophuls have published volumes arguing that a better understanding of Plato, and particularly the Republic, could show us the way to a more ecological way of life. The environmentalist engagement with the canonical texts of political thought is generally very slim (as Lane notes on p. 23) and very dismissive of any purported canonical “wisdom” that could remedy our troubled relationship with the nonhuman world. Until fairly recently, to the extent that those writing about the environment spoke of Plato at all, they saw Plato and his classical heirs as part of the problem, epitomes of a humanistic turn in Western thought that led, some would say inexorably, to the parlous state of environmental degradation and impending crisis in which we are now said to live. Both Lane and Ophuls present Plato as a source of hope and inspiration for developing more ecological approaches to our living on this planet, but they approach Plato's work, and the project of transforming our impacts on this world, in very different ways.

In general terms, we can begin with the following reflection: Lane's work is both more sophisticated and more intellectually challenging than Ophuls's. While Ophuls's engagement with Plato is neither sustained nor deep (nor all that essential to his point), Lane's reading of the Republic is rigorous, thorough, and generally fruitful.

Ophuls begins with the audacious claim, “This book completes the task I set myself many years ago—to find a humane and effective political response to the challenge of ecological scarcity.” It is quite a task that Ophuls has set for himself, and if he had in fact discovered the answer (or even an answer) to this problem, we would have much to thank him for, but I am unpersuaded that the problem has been solved very effectively. Ophuls ultimately “finds” in Plato what he had already “found” in his earlier books (Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity [Freeman, 1977] and Requiem for a Modern Politics [Westview, 1998]), and in spite of this title's suggestion that his more complete understanding is grounded in Plato, it is difficult to see how his political suggestions are more closely linked to the Republic than to a peculiarly Hobbesian reading of Rousseau's Social Contract to be applied in the contracted scale of a Jeffersonian republic (see 139–51, which he concedes in a footnote is a summary of a much longer section of Requiem). When Ophuls argues that the political solution to our environmental problems lies in conceiving “politics in the light of ecology,” he appears to use the sources of the Western philosophic tradition as resources only insofar as particular elements of this or that work might fit the “patterns or templates of life” as he argues that modern physics and ecology understand them—in a way more consonant with Plato's conception of the forms than Hobbes's materialism (see 50 and 59). Confluence between Plato's so-called doctrine of ideas may be fortuitous for purposes of argument but the connection claimed herein between the new sciences and our political ethics comes from Ophuls, not his sources.

This is ironic given that in a footnote on the relationship between Plato's Republic and the Laws, Ophuls notes, “Antique philosophy, which almost always [contains] a quest for truth, is fundamentally hostile to modern ideology, which almost always [contains] an assertion of truth” (222n37). If we judge Ophuls's own work by this standard, and particularly his repeated assertions that we must adopt entirely new systems of politics and social organizations, we might conclude that he is bent upon re-engineering an ancient philosophy to make it support his modern ideology. This work begins from an assertion of scientific “truths” that are presumed to have sufficient weight to bear all the political architecture that is then extracted from a number of selectively quoted philosophical sources—Rousseau's Social Contract at least as much as Plato's Republic, not to mention Jefferson's letters, Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws, the meditations of deep psychoanalysts, and others—and erected as the basis for what Ophuls calls “true liberation,” “a way of being civilized that does not repeat the errors of the past” and “in which men and women measure wealth in spirit not in property” (196–97).

Lane, on the other hand, approaches the Republic and our current environmental challenges from the other side. She finds the defect in our modern approach in our ethical stances and individual choices about how to be in the world, and she uses the Republic to explore how individuals might envision ourselves differently, and thus approach the world with a “healthier” perspective and more sustainable goals (6). Lane proposes that we might use the Republic as “a continued inspiration and suggestion” (163). Although she offers long and detailed readings of several of the Republic's most challenging passages, she does not claim that we can rely on the Republic to dictate the precise outlines of a more sustainable polity (contrast Lane, 96–97 with Ophuls, 116).

For all their differences, there are some similarities between the approaches taken in Plato's Revenge and Eco-Republic. Both authors make much of the classical critiques of pleonexia and hubris, and they make (not entirely original) arguments that our current relationship to the natural world reflects a change in modernity that transformed certain forms of pleonexia that were once viewed as vices into widely accepted, and even virtuous, behaviors (see Ophuls, 64–67 and Lane, chap. 2). Lane, in particular, draws our attention to how the classical caution against pursuing overweening desires and luxurious pleasures is embodied in the conversational development of the Republic. Most notably, when Plato's Socrates first sketches out a city in speech (369a–372c), he shows a due respect for what we now might call “sustainability” by insisting that the residents should be satisfied with simple foods, taking care “not [to] produce children beyond their means, keeping an eye out against poverty and war” (372b–c, trans. Bloom). Only Glaucon's infamous insistence on “relishes” and slaves to serve them while people like himself recline on couches pushes Socrates to explore how we must deal with “feverish cities.” In drawing our attention to this crucial turn in the Republic, the authors remind us that much of the complex (and controversial) political architecture of the Kallipolis is meant to constrain and control the very expansive and reckless human desires that now drive us to place such a large footprint on our planet and its resources (see Lane, 45).

Plato's famous image of the cave (514a–517a) figures prominently in both books, and in general terms, Lane and Ophuls each see the problem of “our” cave fostering a certain inability to comprehend the magnitude, and the preventability, of the environmental crises we currently face. Lane is particularly effective in exploring how a more nuanced understanding of the role that “light” plays in Socrates's famous metaphor can help us reconceptualize the relationship between our ways of living in the modern world and their distance from and effects on the natural systems on which we depend (126ff.). Lane “limits” herself to “the claim that society cannot afford the luxury of indifference to the conditions for its own survival and growth” (136). She thus argues that Plato's city in speech may serve as a reminder about how a city's citizens might align their self-conceptions and self-interests with the preservation of the place to which they are inexorably tied. She argues that a more Platonic reflection on “the good” toward which our polities are aimed will allow us to recognize that “sustainability” over time is an inherent quality of the healthy city and thus must be reckoned in our political calculations.

In her most ecocentric adaptation of Socrates's images, Lane argues that “Nature may be a worthy successor to the Platonic forms” (139), a standard by which we can orient ourselves in the world and against which we can measure the sustainability of the political/social lives we lead. In doing so, Lane, like Ophuls, appears to make these questions too easy to answer. Both appear to be reaching for a level of objective clarity about what “Nature” tells us about our place in the “world” that is not as obvious as we might wish and that is not necessarily forthcoming, either from our readings of the Republic or from the latest discoveries of our physicists.

In conclusion, Lane declares, “True luxury is health and peace of mind. That is the message of the Republic” (156). There is a sense in which she is absolutely correct: the Republic leads us to believe that Glaucon accepts a healthier self-understanding and will no longer aspire to a tyranny that involves an unhealthy and slavish devotion to desires that would rob him even of their pleasures.

I think that the suggestion that we as a species are more harmed than helped by our species' tyranny over nature can be found in the Republic, but there are always difficulties in speaking of a complex work like the Republic as having “a message” in such a direct sense. Lane's conclusion appears to avoid the most directly “ecological” implication of the conversational structure of the Republic that she recognizes and that I noted above: When Glaucon insists on slaves to feed him and relishes to feast upon (372cff.), Socrates appears to be unable to counter these desires directly. He cannot teach Glaucon, nor is it clear that he can teach others, to accept this bon mot as wisdom to live by except by the most complex and circuitous of routes. If we assume that at the end of the Republic the critique of the tyrant has forever chastised Glaucon's tyrannical pleonexia, we must concede that this transformation was incredibly difficult to effect in one man, and that it did not transform everyone who heard it. In the beginning of the Timaeus, we discover that Critias apparently heard the account of the Kallipolis too, but we know he becomes a tyrant, and one of the worst.

It is this sobering realization that makes Lane's final section—an argument for invigorating our commitment to initiative in political life—most difficult for me to swallow as a conclusion of a work that proposes to take the Republic as a paradeigma (22). If Socrates ultimately dissuades Glaucon from taking political action to transform the dysfunctionalities of Athenian politics, why should we conclude that we ought to do whatever we can to transform our own polity? Note that I am not disagreeing with her conclusion—one that Lane punctuates with a quote from Edmund Burke (182), perhaps because no suitable one is to be found in Plato—but I am skeptical that it is to be found in the Republic.

If both Lane and Ophuls offer “messages” from the Republic that seem too simple to explain Plato's work and too obvious to solve our environmental problems, what are we to make of reading Plato in an unsustainable age? Here, I think Lane's work does offer a strong sense of hope, by its self-consciously Platonic methodology. Plato's dialogic method was grounded in a willingness to deal with human problems in a situational way, presenting arguments to specific persons in specific situations, and Lane is much more successful precisely because her work relies far less on sweeping claims to some “one great wisdom” that we discern from “Nature” and that answers all our questions (see Slater, quoted at Ophuls, 25). Filled with analogies and deep discussions of parallels from many different political crises and quandaries in our recent political life, Eco-Republic is an extremely thought-provoking exercise in the application of political theory to political life, and in this sense, Lane's work imitates the Republic in its methodologies as much as in its political conclusions. In interrogating the crises we have faced (economic as well as environmental ones), we can free ourselves, however imperfectly, from the cave in which the worst tragedies of our shared political life appear to be inevitable or even expressions of our virtues. In this regard, reading Eco-Republic is an exercise in political thinking that leaves us understanding both Plato and the world around us more fully than we did before. Conversely, reading Plato's Revenge leaves me wondering just why Ophuls is so convinced that Plato would sympathize with modern eco-mystics and how he can be so sure that he has provided the definitive and unarguable response to the challenge of ecological scarcity when those challenges nevertheless persist.