Sarah Jaquette Ray's The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture represents an important turn within environmental humanities specifically, and within environment/culture and American studies more generally. Specifically, Ray's intervention is to problematize the category of “environment” vis-à-vis critical interventions in gender and ethnic studies. In other words, she seeks to denaturalize the category of “nature,” not from the standpoint of environmental history or environmental justice, but from the perspective of interdisciplinary cultural studies, broadly defined. As Ray writes, this book “explores how the environmental movement deploys cultural disgust against various communities it sees as threats to nature” (1). Her central argument is that “the environmental movement uses discourses of the body and, in particular, of disgust.” This discursive turn to disgust in environmentalism “enforces social hierarchies even as it seeks to dismantle other forms of hegemony,” in a process which creates what Ray calls “ecological others.”

Drawing on Stacy Alaimo's notion of “corporeal ecology,” Ray suggests that discourses of the environmental body draw on normative notions of body, wholeness, and health. Her central questions are: “How does the body come to stand for ecological harmony? How does concern about the environment make anxieties about a variety of communities of color more palatable than overt racism?” (10) These are important questions that demand critical attention, as broader movements for sustainability and environmentalism gain cultural and political currency. In other words, Ray's focus on disgust and the body and her insistence on “troubling” (to draw from William Cronon's famous essay “The Trouble with Wilderness” (1995)) the category of the “environment” is an important critical project.

Ray situates her study as an interdisciplinary intervention that draws upon disability studies and environmental-justice analyses principally, with nods to cultural theory, eco-criticism and geography. Her particular chapters are focussed on wilderness/adventure narratives and conceptions of the body drawing from disability studies, a close reading of Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead (1992), and ethnographic analysis of environmentalist/anti-immigrant campaigns on the Arizona–Mexico border. Her first chapter on early conservationism and its links to eugenics is particularly interesting in tracing the historical and discursive development of wilderness and bodily ideals and their relation to race and gender in the Progressive Era. Although environmental historians have told this history before, Ray connects gendered discourses of wilderness and eugenics in new ways, drawn from disability studies. This approach brings new insights to an oft-told story about the Progressive conservation movement more generally, and President Theodore Roosevelt specifically.

As she suggests in her conclusion, the figures of “the invalid, the Indian, and the immigrant” haunt modern environmentalism by reflecting the ways that “environmentalism is complicit in maintaining social hierarchies” (179). Ray's conception of the “ecological other” is a novel framework and potentially useful in a whole host of case studies, from biological invasion, overpopulation, and anti-immigrant environmentalism to climate change. It is lively and well written, and the case studies are fascinating and draw on different methods, including close reading and ethnography.

At the same time, these exciting aspects of the book nevertheless reveal the limits of the comparative, interdisciplinary approach. In other words, within each of these categories (invalid, Indian, immigrant) is a host of complexity that can get lost in this relatively short study. For example, mainstream environmentalism is itself a deeply contested domain of cultures and politics comprising formal organizations (that differ in emphases and tactics) and informal cultural beliefs and practices. In other words, a compelling dispute at Organ Pipe National Monument (the “immigrant” case study) cannot represent more than itself, just as close reading of one Native novel cannot represent “the Indian” in environmentalist discourse. Although the book makes nods to environmental-justice literature, the trends in environmental-justice critiques of mainstream environmentalism are not adequately sourced. For example, scholars of African American environmentalism, such as Dorceta Taylor, Sylvia Washington, Dianne Glave, and Carolyn Finney, who have together dismantled the cultures of whiteness of wilderness culture and the racial cult of nature, are not cited.

That said, Ray's conception of the “ecological other” is novel and useful, and will be taken up by environmental humanists and scholars of American studies, who will apply this term and framework to an entirely new set of case studies and issues. Ray's question “how do othered perspectives revise mainstream environmentalism entirely and challenge assumptions of what ‘environmental’ means?” (180) remains a potent political issue and theoretical problem, and her study is a fascinating attempt to change existing cultural discourses through critique.