The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Nature's Debt to Society

Abstract

Increasingly, most powerful voices on planet - heads of state, corporation, global economists - are speaking in name of environmentalism. Strange and scary days for an movement that was conceived in fierce opposition to power. Fractured, as ever, by divisions and competing agendas, movement must now confront dangerous tendency of those in power to invoke nature's laws as a model for social well-being. Partly as a result of ecology's influence, biologism is back, and specters of social Darwinism and Malthusian ideas about natural scarcity have begun to reinforce, if not translate into, calls for a reduction in rights and freedoms in civil society. This book of social and cultural criticism questions evangelical asceticism of much environmentalist thought, and calls for a renewal of libertarian, post-scarcity tradition. Opening with an essay on ethnic and socio-economic bases of cultural nationalism in Pacific Islands, it assesses continuing historical appeal of ecological romanticism, long associated with Polynesian peoples, and central today to a tourism industry that is new mode of Third World development. Turning to home, book analyzes 1993 bombing of New York's World Trade Center in ecological context of urban development that has made city a capital both of global finance and of new immigrant cultures. In a response to bombing and environmental terrorism of Gulf War, it goes on to explore ecology of images that characterized media's role in that war's carnage and in mounting collateral damage of New World Order. A fourth chapter discusses much-hyped men's movement as a response to debates among eco-feminists. The book concludes with a sweeping critique of new world view being ushered in by geneticists and biotechnology industry - a philosophy of biological determinism that Andrew Ross describes as the Chicago gangster theory of life. With an eye on crucial cultural phenomena of times, Ross's take on contradictions of green politics is tempered by his commitment to dispel movement's public image as an anti-libertarian politics that always says no, and preaches self-limitation rather than promising social fulfillment. He sees an ecological future of public affluence and not voluntary poverty, a world where nature is a participant in social plans, and not an authority locking us into some incontrovertible fate.

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