Radical ecologists don't just spike trees and ram whalers, they also monkey-wrench the ideological works. Unlike more mainstream environmentalists, who emphasize pollution or corporate responsibility or the human costs of ecosystem decay, radical ecologists also attack the philosohpical and ethical paradigms that lend emaning to the domination of flora and fauna—for example, the humanist axioms of "progress" and "mankind." By celebrating the diversity of Terra's life-forms with an exuberant materialism, they shore up the last little bit of land capable of giving one perspective on capitalism's consumerist virus and global grid of control.

But while the concerns of many boomer radicals can now be found swirling in a postmodernist stew, hardcore ecology remains a voice crying in—and for—the wilderness. Given that pomos want to undercut much of the ground that ecologists want to protect, initiating dialogue between these camps is like lossing a grizzly bear into a mall filled with s/m shops and TV monitors flashing TEXT.

When postmodernists hear nature, they reach for their revolvers. But I suspect this lunge for the scare-quotes is motivated in part by the threat hardocore ecology poses to postmodernism's most visibly progressive rhetoric: the politics of diversity. For if you take into account this planet's intense profusion of critters and habitats—now increasingly put to the knife by the relentless spread of human civilization—then the rainbow multiplicity of "contested identities" starts looking more and more like a monoculture in motley disguise. A critical postmodern ecology does wait in the wings, but for a truly mutatn dialogue to occur, ecologists need to acknowledge their forked tongues and postmodernists need to cede (seed?) some of their Astroturf.

Andrew Ross's The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life shows how far we have to go. In tracking the cultural uses of ecological rhetoric and imagery in everything from the Gulf War to Ghostbusters to sociobiology, Ross relentlessly underscores the social construction of all knowledge about nature. Nominally motivated by vague environmental concerns, Ross scrapes away some of the movement's moldy romanticism and strongly challenges political arguments based on Malthusian logic and natural "law." Yet in his haste to deconstruct Twin Peaks and expose the social control implicit in urban parks, Ross caricatures environmentalists and neglects their comples scientific, cultural, and geopolitical debates. In his desire to avoid complicating his own progressive urban politics, Ross too often sets up nature-loving straw men for a slash-and-burn critique.

Just as it's impossible to cordon off fact from cultural narratives, it's impossible to isolate Ross's writing from his academic stardom. I'm happy Ross is shaking up at least one humanities department with his "postdisciplinary" attention to juicy social phenomena like Goddess worship, cyberculture, and porn. And I applaud his ability to do intellectual work without relying on dense jargon—a skill that's earned him an enviable visibility in the no-man's-land between ivory tower and street. At the same time, by retaining the tone of politically sophisticated critique while zipping like a well-read journalist through complex cultural terrain, his readings often become shapeless things propelled mainly by a smug academic authority.

Ross's hipster tic is not a problem in "Cultural Preservation in the Poynesia of the Latter-Day Saints," The Chicago Gangster Theory's excellent analysis of the Polynesian Cultural Center, a Mormon-sponsored cultural theme park in Hawaii. Here Ross shows his strengths as a cultural critic in the trenches: in this case, the contests over meaning waged by tourists, indigenous activists, Polynesian Mormons, anthropologists, explorers, and neoromantic environmentalists. Without privileging any perspective, he saves his acid for the popular Western image of all primary peoples as ecologically harmonious, showing meanwhile how romantic notions of native wisdom, abundance, and subsequent cultural contamination are as old as Captain Cook. Not only were "Edenic" islands significantly terraformed by Polynesian nomads, but some of them were managed into ruin—before Cook.

The book's other strong essay, "Bombing the Big Apple," hammers down Ross's most important point: that environmentalist rhetoric is used to naturalize repressive austerity regimes and to perpetuate capitalism's ancient game of scarcity. By solidly tracking New York's withdrawal of services as the city was programmatically refashioned into a node of global capital, Ross plays base-and-superstructure to the urban sociologist's noodling organic metaphors, and rightly thrashes ecologists for their over-reliance on Malthusian gloom and their pat demonizing of urban experience.

But he goes too far. With the Endangered Species Act itself endangered, and with GATT set to rip off the few Band-Aids mainstream environmentalists have put in place, Ross's fears of "a paramilitary environmental-industrial comples" that would oppress us all in the name of Gaia seem like B-movie hysteria. Nor are his incessant demonstrations of the political abuse of natural law sufficient to discount what Donna Haraway calls the "reliable knowledge" of science—which today includes more than enough knowledge about the global strain of human civilization and its toxic practices.

Ross's assertion that "what we know about nature is what we know and think about our own cultures" may be true in some final, epistemological sense. But it does not erase the extremely compelling evidence that we're hairless monkeys embedded in a buzzing planetary matrix that's starting to give us, as Gary Snyder says, "nonnegotiable demands." To reject political struggles based in part on that evidence as no more than "a very old dream of science" or a Hudson River School painting is to extend the much older dream of "second nature": that human civilization is an autonomous bubble in control of its destiny. "We are in dialogue with the natural world, it is not our supreme court," Ross urges. But I'm afraid that for him, nature (not to mention science) isn't a partner in an increasingly urgent conversation, but a Rorschach blot hanging in a loft in Soho.

In his chapter on Polynesia, Ross points out that few studies of tourism investigate what tourists actually do with their intercultural knowledge. That's cultural studies' powerful ethnographic move: address the bottom-up practices (the mall rats) at least as much as the top-down texts (the mall). But when he sets his sights on the men's movement, Ross bypasses the complex desires of the movement's fans to go after its pop stars: the blowhard Robert Bly and the watery Michael Meade. (He leaves the far more formidable James Hillman alone.) While Ross is generous to similar mythic moves by feminist witches, he give the dudes no quarter. Accusing Bly of monoculturalism for focusing on European mythic figures, he then turns around and attacks the movement for "playing in full redface" when Native American mythology or practices are appropriated. Ross then supposedly exposes the murderous colonialist legacy of the Wild Man myth, totally missing depth psychology's point: colonialists projected and killed their feral shadow, while the contemporary Euro-American attempt to reconstruct pagan psychology, of which the men's movement is only a small part, is an imaginative reclaiming of a dynamic and amoral polyphony of selves.

Ross is even more contemptuous and superficial when it comes to environmentalist culture, refusing to grant ecological activists the range of complex cultural motives he once found in New Agers (Strange Weather) and beatniks (No Respect). Against the "nature nerd, groping for wisdoms," Ross feels compelled to trumpet his urban irony, proclaiming himself "a city dweller who does not regard himself as much of a naturelover" before launching into a mocking reading of SoHo's ecohip shops. (Why not visitn the herb-stuffed botanicas uptown, or the boho Wiccan dens in the East Village, for a less laughable glimpse of the urband use of the wild?) This cultural showdown reaches a head when Ross lambastes the easy middlebrow target of Bill McKibben: "This is a man who prefers the mating dance of cranes to semi-naked club kids shaking their Lycra-clad booties on MTV." As someone who would happily channel-surf past these resonating images—but who, if forced to choose, would go for the beasts over MTV's bland beats and packaged cheese—I find this snide polarization deeply unsatisfying. And when Ross insinuates that his nature-lovers are racist, I wonder why his study neglected cultural uses of "nature" (like althernative health or vegetarianism) that are far more rainbow in hue than backpacking.

Ross attacks environmentalism for its "puritanism," claiming that its "pathetic" exhortations give us nothing but a "dog's breakfast of self-denial, self-restraint, guilt, and disavowal." Instead, Ross wants some kind of hedonistic populism and a politics that "liberates human potential." Deep ecologists like Chellis Glendinning—author of My Name is Chellis, and I'm in Recovery From Western Civilization—would answer that it is urban humanists who, along with civlization itself, are in denial of the ecological costs of their own generally compulsive and illusory "liberation."

That's too strident for my taste, and I do think that deep ecologists have something to learn from the cantankerous social ecologist Murray Bookchin, who emphasizes an anarchic and avant-garde tribalism that puts social concerns at the fore. Still, to engage adequately the culture of hardcore ecology we must ask "deep" questions about what we mean by human freedom, or pleasure, or liberation. And anyone who has bothered to quaff down some serious evidence of our slow, poisonous apocalypse can probably forgive environmental activists for not always shaking their booties.

Despite such justifiable grimness, many of the essays in George Session's new collection, Deep Ecology for the 21st Century, speak to the vivid and profound exaltation that can arise from being amid beasts and wild places. These embodied intensities are far more than neoromantic clichés. Arne Naess grounds his experience of the wild in Spinoza's affirmative notion of joy, while Zen practitioner Gary Snyder speaks of the freedom and inspiration that arise when we mover "out of our little selves and into the whole mountains-and-rivers mandala universe."

In fact, Sessions's rich if inconsistence anthology speaks rather infrequently about the bitch-goddess of Gaian science and a lot more about experience, ethics, spirituality, and geopolitics. As contributor Donald Worster points out, scientists can hinder as much as help deep-ecological goals. In fact, the latest scientific paradigm of ecology argues not for a balanced ecostystem but a s constantly turbulent flow with not "natural" equilibrium. This organic and chaotic relativism is very nifty in a postmodern fractal kinda way; it's also gleeful news to polluting corporations, greedy Third World elites, and global-policy dweebs who can justify the deepening of technocratic control.

But without a scientific stick, deep ecology must find another way to compel societies to stem the wholesale destruction of wild places and wild species. Its philosophical attempts are often quite dodgy—totalizing, less than self-reflexive, occasionally misanthropic. Attempts to utilize the language of "rights" to protect flora and fauna have gotten stuck in some obvious bogs. And in attacking anthropocentrism and the "illusion" of second nature, Sessions himself vastly underestimates the social claims of cultural relativists and ignores the qualitative difference of human beings—surely announced, again, by our ability to tinker with genes.

The most concerted attempt to found an "ecosophy" remains the work of the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess, whose voice dominates Deep Ecology. Apparently a rustic, chipper character who lives most of the year in a little shack above timberline, Naess digs his heels into Spinoza, Gandhi, Gestalt theory, and Advaita Vedanta. In fragmentary essays like "Metaphysics of the Treeline" and "The Place of Joy in a World of Facts," Naess emphasizes beautiful acts over moral ones, and outlines his belief that by expanding our range of identification to include the diversity of this planet's life forms, we not only realize ourselves but establish a joyful and affirmative ground for ecological activism. Naess, however, is old school, and he's gotten it from postmodernists (who thrash his totalizing, overly Hegelian views) and ecofeminists (who attack his "self-realization" as just the same old male ego writ cosmic).

Deep ecologists, their grand philosophical systems hopelessly overweight, are strongest on the more tactical level of cultural critique and what Jim Cheney calls "grassroots metaphysics." How wrong Andrew Ross is when he claims that "the ecology movement has not generated its own tradition of cultural criticism." Deep ecologists critique the very metaphysical foundations of "culture" itself! In the '60s, historian Lynn White, Jr. pointed to the Christian idealogy that lingered within secular materialism and socialism, an arrogant human narcissism that justified the subjugation of nature to humanity's instrumental aims. This ideology still rules the day, and deep ecologists strive to reveal it wherever they see it—in the Sierra Club, on TV, or in the faculty lounge. To counterbalance Western biases, many deep ecologists take a hard look at non-Western cultural paradigms, from Zen to Vedanta to the lore of primary peoples.

In 1967, academic ecologist Roderick Nash presented Wilderness and the American Mind, an intellectual history of "wilderness" as a cultural construct, a tactic carried on in Deep Ecology for the 21st Century by Del Ivan Janik, Thomas Birch, and Wayland Drew. These writers are not satisfied with defining the wild as what nature does when humans leave things alone. For one thing, humans have long manipulated what we now call wilderness areas. More provocatively, these writers stress that nature and wilderness are not the same thing—as Snyder puts it, nature is the object of science, whereas the wild lurks "outside," escaping the game of subject and object. According to Drew, "Wilderness is unquantifiable. Its boundaries are vague or nonexistent, its contents unknown, its inhabitants elusive." By positing (and experiencing) wilderness as spaces that intrinsically control and instrumental rationality, intellectuals of the wild make it a place of cultural contestation. The wild is excess, the Unheimlich, the useless, the spontaneous—what urban intellectuals often sweep under the rug of the unconscious. Deep ecologists fear that when wilderness disappears, human society will have only its Brave New World, a technocracy of Prozac soma, virtual reality feelies, engineered hedonism, and utilitarian genetic tweaking.

But perhaps it's too late, and postmodernism's immense distrust of "nature" or "the wild" is merely marking the loss of that outside. In "The Incarceration of Wildness: Wilderness Areas as Prisons," Thomas Birch uses Foucault to show how designating wilderness areas to "bring the law to wildness" allows the state to absorb that liminal quality into its "carceral network." Land becomes a simulacrum of wildness, which Birch frames as a kind of inverted Baudrillardian Disneyland. "Wilderness and wildness are placed on the supermarket shelf of values...and everything is enclosed inside the supermarket." With an anarchic and imaginative suppleness, Birch calls for a revaluation of wilderness on many levels, from reserves to vacant lots, flower boxes, and cracks in the pavement.

If you want to crack through the Disneyland of the mind, deep ecologists recommend experience of wilderness within and without. As Naess says, "When you take a helicopter to the summit of a mountain, the view looks like a postcard, and, if there's a restaurant on top, you might complain that the food is not properly made. But if you struggle up from the bottom, you have this deep feeling of satisfaction, and even the sandwiches mixed with ski wax and sand taste fantastic." It's not just the exercise or clean air, but an embodied alchemy of self-conscious decentering, ritual, and awareness. John Rodman notes, "there will be no revolution in [environmental] ethics without a revolution in perception." The religious dimension of deep ecology is a frame for this widened eye. When Naess says that "clouds talk to us, but they dont' pressure us into believing anything," of Paul Shepard describes human skin as "a pond surface or a forest soil, not a shell so much as a delicate interpenetration," I glimpse some futuristic blend of critical mindfulness and resplendent animism.

Still, much of Deep Ecology for the 21st Century seems hunkered down behind the sand bags. Eight-point platforms, tedious term definitions, and low degrees of rhetorical play show a movement just poking out of its self-righteous shell. Much of Sessions's anthology phases in and out of a rhetorical time warp. And the strongest criticism of Naess's notion of self-realization—that it is a cosmic identification that erases any real difference—shows itself to be even more true of his followers, as they brusquely stamp out the fires of their critics rather than allowing the flames to clear ground for new mutants to grow.

Which is why Michael Zimmerman's Contesting Earth's Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity is so impressive. Inspired by ecological urgency but wary of reactionary tendencies in the movement, Zimmerman points toward what he calls critical postmodernism: an "intriguing intersection of modernity's emancipatory goals, postmodern theory's decentered subject, and radical ecology's vision of an increasingly nondomineering relationship between humans and nonhumans." Unusually open-minded and even-handed, Zimmerman synthesizes conflicting perspectives without fudging their real differences. What he gives us is less an argument than an elegant superimposition of deep ecology and poststructuralism, anarchic tribalism and chaos theory, Buddhism and Heidegger and the many stripes of ecofeminism. Though Zimmerman's not the juiciest writer, and his constant flip-flop from one hand to the other can wear a person down, I doubt there's a more kaleidoscopic overview of ecological debate than Contesting Earth's Future.

Given his bouquet of sympathies, Zimmerman can make room for heated issues that engage many levels of being: organic, historical, social, spiritual. Rather than entere directly into, say, the fractious ecofeminist debates surrounding Goddess worship, Zimmerman clears lots of space for an ecology of specific voices to emerge. Elsewhere, he uses both Derrida and Buddhism to critique Naess's notion of "self-realization," producing some intriguing resonances between postmodernism and nondualistic modes of consciousness: both decenter the self, find no foundation to the world, and experience phenomena as "play, not purpose."

While accepting the basic validity of most postmodern gripes, he keeps them in their corner, leaving open the possibility that postmodernism's cynical, sometimes apocalyptic hypercriticism is both a last-ditch humanism and a symptom of a more affirmative historical mutation. That's why he can embrace most of Haraway's famous cyborg manifesto while still celebrating the egghead transpersonal psychologist Ken Wilber, whose metaphysical vision of the historical evolution of consciousness would drive most punk cyborgs up the wall.

Particularly insightful and refreshing is Zimmerman's treatment of what has become a chestnut: that the links among Nazism, nature religion, and Heidegger prove the fascism of radical ecological views. Like many hardcore ecological thinkers, Zimmerman deeply respects Heidegger's thought, but he never dodges the fact that the phenomenologist's politics need to be taken into account in any nature-based critique of modernist instrumental rationality. Similarly, he traces the numerous parallels between radical ecology and proto-Nazi German conservation movements before concluding that "far more crucial to the rise of Nazism than either empathy for nonhuman life or nature mysticism, however, were the Führer principle, xenophobic nationalism, male chauvinism, militarism, statism, anti-Semitism, and Social Darwinism"—all elements that, with the possible exception of the male strut, are absent from deep ecology.

Though Zimmerman directly confronts the more authoritarian deep ecologists, he shows that nature mysticism—including that of German romanticism—is not intrinsically authoritarian. Hopis may hate Navajos, but they're not fascist. Seeing fascism as feeding off our unconscious desire to live on through something greater than ourselves, Zimmerman emphasizes the need to look straight at the blank wall of our own limit and death. Far from a puritan ethic of self-restraint, Zimmerman sees this spiritual turn away from the relentless expansion of the fearful and grasping self as an "affirmation of personal and species mortality, limitation, finitude, and dependence"—an affirmation of being bound in an earthly matrix. His even-handed treatment of spirituality and intuition is a rejoinder to secular critics who demonize and essentialize these traditions rather than see them as ambiguous forces that interact within a changing historical field—and are beginning to play a central role in our bizarre and ominous passage into an intimately networked world.

Zimmerman has written a philosophical portrait of this webbed world. By staging an open-ended and collective dialogue, Zimmerman describes with position papers what Ross's Polynesian chapter suggest in terms of cultural politics: a dynamic play of continual interpenetration and perennially shifting local contests in which "tolerance for such ambiguity and uncertainty is a prerequisite for taking action." But how do we engage this open holism, this bristling web woven of ecology, networks of difference and nondualism, geopolitics, the Internet, and the transnational grid of capital? Are we just nodes, clusters of eclectic and competing allegiances? The dance between the part and the whole is a very crusty subject indeed, but it's revivified in an era where radical cultural multiplicity and a white-hot global capitalism present conditions that the rational subject can only describe as out of control. Revolution returns, not as a greenshirt putsch at the UN but as global digital currency, or a plague virus escaping a smoldering rainforest, or the first genetically engineered trait passed on to a child that can never again exactly be called human. It remains to be seen whether thought can keep up at all.