Irrespective of what some students of political theory might claim, transformations within the discipline—especially in terms of concept formation and substantive foci—are oftentimes closely related to developments within real-world political discourses and practices. One notable example, of course, is the way in which the feminist movement in the 1960s brought about not only important transformations in our understanding of the history of political thought (e.g., in terms of the troubling position of many canonical theorists on the “private” status of women), but also new ways to reconceptualize politics today. With the “ecological challenge” confronting the world today, it is no wonder that there is now a new subfield within the discipline of political theory (in the United States, at least, it goes under the name of “environmental political theory”), one that is involved in a major rethinking of the history of political thought, not to mention the deconstruction and reconstruction of important political traditions and concepts to meet these challenges.

In a very direct way, the essays collected in Andrew Dobson and Robyn Eckersley's Political Theory and the Ecological Challenge show how interesting and relevant the ingression of environmental concerns can be in refiguring our political theoretical discourses. While the first part of the book emphasizes how ecological issues can transform our interpretation of modern political ideologies (i.e., conservatism, liberalism, socialism, feminism, nationalism, communitarianism, and cosmopolitanism), the second part delves into their effect on important political concepts (i.e., democracy, justice, the state, representation, freedom and rights, citizenship, and security). As might be expected in a collection of essays, there are some chapters that perform this interesting deconstructive/reconstructive task better than others. Yet, despite the varying quality of these chapters, overall this book is an important and necessary contribution to political theory that will offer illuminating insights into how we can begin to think about ecological issues from within the traditional parameters of the discipline.

While all the authors in this collection are looking at how environmental concerns infuse and/or rearticulate our political theoretical landscape, there are generally two different strategies employed to perform this task: First, there is the attempt to retrieve the importance of a tradition or concept that seems clearly unrelated, if not detrimental, to solving the ecological challenge; and, second, there is the attempt to articulate the implicit way in which a tradition or concept links well with ecological concerns. Indeed, the best chapters bring both of these procedures to bear on their particular topic, allowing for a differential tension between the tradition's or concept's historical reception and its potentially immanent ecological rearticulation. The chapters that work the least (particularly those on conservatism, socialism, and feminism in the ideology section, and representation in the concept section) tend toward arguing either for the inevitable connection between a tradition or concept and its ecological potential, or for the need of adding on a separate ecological orientation to a rather unproductive and inert tradition or concept.

A representative chapter that performs the task well is Marcel Wissenburg's on the political ideology of liberalism. Wissenburg notes that while many environmentalists have seen liberalism as “the evil genius behind the ecological crisis” (given its anthropocentric commitment to human rights and social progress; its commitment to a form of democratic proceduralism, ethical neutrality and moral pluralism; and its historical promotion of property rights), its implicit “checks and balances are slowly yet perceptively greening liberalism” (p. 20). For this author, at least, such “greening” can arise given new developments within the liberal tradition that have pried open its historical attachment to a virulent anthropocentrism (allowing the potential for a qualitative concern for animals and ecosystems within the liberal rubric) and that have expanded John Stuart Mill's famous “harm principle” in such a way as to become a “forceful instrument for the protection of natural resources” (p. 26).

In terms of key political concepts, Terrence Ball's discussion of democracy is also noteworthy for the subtlety with which it explores the ramifications of the ecological challenge. Ball correctly portrays how there is no inherent connection between democracy and the promotion of ecological sustainability. Not only have some green advocates argued for the need for elite, possibly authoritarian, rule to deal with the terrifying ecological challenges facing us, but those green theorists who do promote decentralized, participatory forms of democracy have also not thought through the problematic consequences of such political forms. By promoting a more traditional form of representative democracy in which the key practice is the representation of “interests” (one that does not rely upon direct participation or communication, and is thus open to the interests of animals and biotic communities), Ball is able to deftly show how the traditional tools within the democratic tradition can be implicitly rearticulated to develop a realistic practice of green democracy or, to use his term, “biocracy” (see, in particular, pp. 134–45).

What is interesting is that most of the authors in the Dobson and Eckersley collection assume that the ecological challenge is best initiated by confronting the tradition or concept with a version of ecocentrism. That is, the clearest way to ensure a tradition or concept's ecological importance is to see how it fares with a version of Aldo Leopold's now-classic “land ethic,” in which humans must recognize that they represent only one facet of a larger “biotic community” (see, for example, Ball's explicit discussion of this, p. 136). What Kimberly Smith's book does is to temper such a position by consistently arguing that in relation to the conditions of African Americans within American society at least, one must assume that ecological concerns are reflected in a more socially nuanced interaction between humans and nature. For this reason alone, I think that African American Environmental Thought provides a significant and indispensable addition to the edited collection.

As Smith's title clearly intimates, her concern is to reconstruct a genealogy of African American environmental thought from the period of American slavery to the 1930s. In this well-researched and thought-provoking reconstruction, Smith argues that the current hegemony of ecocentric positions within environmental thought (and their attendant promotion of “preserving the wilderness and maintaining a viable ecosystem”) excludes “too many voices and perspectives on humans' relationship to nature, and it tends to obscure the environmental dimension to black political activism” (p. 3). Thus, what a nuanced understanding of the history of African American environmental thought can teach students of environmentalism is that one cannot discuss nature without at the same time conceptualizing the human social relationships that mediate one's experience and connection to the environment. In the case of African Americans, of course, this means understanding how the history of racial oppression (in all of its political, economic, and legal manifestations) affected their experience of the nonhuman world.

According to Smith, slavery engendered an “alienating” intimacy with the land, thereby raising a central question that would percolate throughout the tradition of black environmental thought: namely, “how black Americans could overcome the negative effects of slavery and create a home for themselves in a land cursed by injustice” (p. 10). During the nineteenth century, this enduring issue was transmuted by black agrarian thinkers to mean that slavery and peonage had destroyed the moral and spiritual worth one gets from working the land as a free person. Moreover, such exploitative social conditions ultimately destroy the physical integrity of the earth itself. Thus, a major goal—one which drew upon the tradition of democratic agrarianism initiated by Thomas Jefferson—was the acquisition of property by African Americans. To own one's own land, and in turn to acquire the citizenship rights of white Americans, would translate into the development of “a community's creative response to the land—its ability to accept and exercise responsibility for the land and to express its aesthetic and spiritual ideals by manipulating the natural world” (p. 95).

What is probably the most fascinating part of Smith's book is the discussion of how African American thinkers in the early twentieth century drew upon then-circulating forms of scientific racism to rethink the human/nature relationship. The human/nature connection developed by this racist ideology provided access to rethinking the importance of black people's relation to nature (by arguing that they were linked more closely to nature than other races), but, of course, with devastating consequences. Indeed, such prominent black theorists as W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke disputed such forms of environmental determinism and instead promoted the position that the unique culture of African Americans created singular experiences with nature. In this context, it becomes clearer why the later tradition of African American environmental thought would consistently shy away from forms of environmental determinism that paralleled the earlier arguments of scientific racism. Instead, as Smith clearly shows, what became more significant for these thinkers was the emphasis on “creative agency in humans' relationship to nature” (p. 194), in which humans engage in wise stewardship and, in so doing, respond to, rather than dominate, nature.

In reading these books together, it is very clear that environmental political theory is becoming a rich and productive terrain today for rethinking important political issues, concepts, and traditions. What is also apparent is that to continue to perform this transvaluative task well, this new subfield will have to open its critical and conceptual registers to the divergent ways in which to conceive of the ecological challenge today. This might mean critically evaluating an attachment to current hegemonic ethical positions like ecocentrism, particularly if such conceptual positions do not allow one to see the unique and singular ways in which the ecological challenge confronts diverse human life worlds.