ander and Goldsmith are less handicapped by tacit ideologies because they at least square at the outset with the fact that their mission is ideological (without using the word):

The first goal of this book is to help clarify the form of what is being called the global economy and to show how the rush toward globalization is likely to affect our lives. The second goal is to suggest that the process must be brought to a halt as soon as possible and reversed (3).

The volume contributors virtually form a list of Nobel Laureates in Environmental and Consumer Actitivism, including Kirkpatrick Sale, Vandana Shiva, Ralph Nader, Jeremy Rifkin, and Wendell Berry. All 43 articles develop and elaborate the theme exactly as Mander states it, varying some in their own philosophies and concerns. The central daemon is the agenda of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Uraguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), besides other institutions of the global economy, such as the World Bank (WB) and International Monetary Fund (IMF). The volume contends that GATT has established a world governing body, the World Trade Organization (WTO), composed of appointees of leading transnational corporations (TNCs; interestingly, when things get spookier, the acronyms start multiplying), endowed by law with the capability of overturning national laws that it finds conflict with interests of international trade and thus posing essentially the most potent social threat ever to environmental protection. Disputes with WTO rules can be brought to a WTO tribunal, which meets in complete secrecy and must decide unanimously to overturn a WTO rule. Thus, democratic national institutions and sovereignty around the world are neutralized. Apparently, this treaty passed the U.S. Congress without one member reading the 500-page document. Nader offered $10,000 to the charity of choice for any congressperson who would sign an affidavit swearing he or she had read the document and would answer ten basic questions about it; no one accepted. A few months later, before final vote, Sen. Hank Brown (R-CO) accepted the challenge and read the text, then held a news conference stating that, aghast, he was changing his vote to against the treaty. It passed both houses and now is law.

Though lacking such a central governing body, NAFTA overrides the sovereignty of Canada, the United States, and Mexico to enable TNCs "`to make [foreign] investments without being required to take a local partner, to export a given percentage of their output, to use local parts, or to meet a dozen other restrictions,'" (300) as U.S. GATT and NAFTA negotiator Carla Hills stated. While GATT and NAFTA ensure that "the rights of TNCs take precedence over the rights of citizens in their respective nation-states," the WB and IMF use debt renegotiations with developing countries of the South to ensure that the North can manipulate their economies as needed, through structural adjustment programs (SAPs). Through such SAPs as large-scale deregulation, privatization, expansion of natural resource, and agricultural exports, developing countries have become monocultural producers of commodities for export to the North, while growing dependent upon the North for imports of goods and services that the local economies once provided. Production costs are artificially kept low by the concentration of infrastructure in certain niches, such as logging roads or ports for export of timber; monoculture keeps the economies from developing beyond a certain level, so the countries remain impoverished, giving yet another reason for keeping costs low so TNC manufacturing facilities may move to these areas and increase their profit margins while product prices remain high worldwide. Deregulation of already slender environmental rules means that the ruination due to monoculture, such as timber harvesting or cattle ranching, is heightened --not to speak of the social devastation of poverty and, as the Harvard Working Group on New and Resurgent Diseases assert, poor health.

This scenario of the new global economy does not sound like what even most of its supporters envisioned. As Herman E. Daly in "Free Trade: The Perils of Deregulation," Davis Morris in "Free Trade: The Great Destroyer," and David C. Korten in "The Mythic Victory of Market Capitalism" present compositely, contemporary conditions preclude the materialization of benefits that nineteenth-century British economist David Ricardo predicted. Ricardo observed that countries have different technologies, customs, and resources and so incur different costs in making the same product, so if "nations specialize in products for which they have comparative advantage and trade freely to obtain others, everyone benefits." (230) Daly writes that one problem is "Ricardo's critical but often forgotten assumption that factors of production (especially capital) are internationally immobile. In today's world, where billions of dollars can be transferred between nations at the speed of light, that essential condition is not met." (230-231) As can be gathered from several of the articles, other factors in the global economy undermine Ricardo's reasoning: TNCs tend toward monopolies and thus undercut competition; production is shifted toward regions with lower standards of cost internalization, undercutting efficiency; there is worldwide leveling of standards, so product price is not reflecting cost; and national sovereignty is undermined, thus regions lose the very identity and comparative advantage that free trade is supposed to utilize, and so borders lose impermeability. As Haly points out,

In short, the free traders are using an argument that hinges on the impermeability of national boundaries to capital to support policy aimed at making those same boundaries increasingly permeable to both capital and goods. (231) In effect, unrestricted trade imposes lower standards. (233)

f globalization is not doing what even its supporters say they want, then why does it exist? As Mander describes in "The Rules of Corporate Behavior," the diffuseness of personal responsibility within corporate structure allows the individuals within a corporation to behave (as a group) in ways they individually may not, in regards to morals --a situation partly accounting for the spread of corporate misbehavior beyond most people's desires. Certainly, pundits still propagandize the concept of globalization, so the process does not arise solely out of blind institutions that inadvertently permit unchecked corporate rapaciousness. But unless these pundits are abettors of an evil conspiracy, there seems to be a discontinuity between their concept that unchecked global corporate culture can bring the most good to all communities and the reality of institutional structures that, by definition, as Mander describes, must put profit first, grow at all costs, exploit resources, act immorally, dehumanize and quantify all actions and values, have no ties or regards to community (corporations do not exist anywhere), oppose nature, and homogenize their market --human culture-- to best exploit that market. The behavior that corporations by definition must exhibit does not, when unrestrained, hold significant promise for the ultimate good for all.

Yet, despite this grim prospect and contrary to Easterbrook's accusation of environmentalist pessimism, this anthology does not succumb to despair. The whole thrust of the volume is to exhort the reader to nurture hopeful prospects fully within our grasp. In "Exercising Power over Corporations Through State Charters," Grossman and Adams describe how corporations --including foreign ones-- monstrous as they are, still depend for their existence upon state charters, which grant them rights and limits. Through state legislatures, the fates of corporations can be determined, their rights to life revoked, and their plugs pulled if they act in irresponsible ways toward the environment and peoples throughout the world. The entire last (fourth) part of the book details ways that citizens can counteract globalization through relo-calization: by enacting Gandhi's principle of swadeshi, or local self-sufficiency; molding ecologies by bioregional principles; supporting community agriculture; strengthening local communities' authority and responsibility; organizing communities politically across borders; calling for new local protectionist measures; and even introducing homegrown currencies, as has been done in some parts of the United States.

It is difficult to say how Easterbrook would react to this version of environmental optimism, to which his brand creates stark, almost misanthropic and cynical contrast. But the fact he never points out that what he calls gloom-and-doom despair of environmentalists is usually a prelude to activism --which often circumvents and makes him feel the world is rosy-- is indicative of his buried ideology. Mander and Goldsmith's optimism is based on the fact humanity's hope rests in its working to change current ill-advised practices, while Easterbrook's Panglossian humor relies on the notion that all will simply turn out fine because it has in the past if we are all still alive and breathing. Easterbrook's ideology oozes at the seams with his contentment with the powers-that-be on Earth; though he never outright praises or criticizes their existence (in keeping with hiding his ideology), he lauds their fruits; gushes at the technological marvels of the globally unified economy, such as the Green Revolution; and eagerly awaits the future in which these forces have so thoroughly saturated our lives that our very consciousnesses are deposited into a machine of these forces' manufacture and that would require an immense and hegemonized economic infrastructure. Further exemplifying the ideological split between the two volumes, Mander and Goldsmith deplore the Green Revolution; Easterbrook upholds NAFTA and GATT as if they will increase, not lower, international environmental standards (while he grants there may be some erosion of U.S. laws in "harmonizing" clauses in both agreements); Easterbrook sees that growth should only be encouraged, not limited, as if wealth will spread to all countries and peoples and make them want to be more environmentally conscious like the United States; and the two volumes differ on the "NIMBY" ("not in my backyard) attitude --Easterbrook feeling it is an excuse for communities to shirk responsibility for wastes we all generate, Mander and Goldsmith maintaining it represents local self-determination against imperial. hegemonic trends.

Of course, being an anthology of independent thinkers' work, the Mander and Goldsmith volume is not so monolithic in its outlooks and ideologies as Easterbrook's but, within limits, has some diversions in thought. Notwithstanding this reasonable diversity, the work suffers from overkill and repetition, as one article toils once again over some basic concepts it previous has covered. Instead of 43 essays and about as many authors, the editors might best have selected fewer, longer essays that cover a complete area and circumvent some redundancy.

cofeminism sets out with many of the same concerns as Case --the rise of the technocracy at the expense of nature and community, displacement of self-reliance in Third World countries by a consumer economy, the disasters wreaked by aid and development programs in these countries, and of course, general ecological ruin throughout the globe due to the culture of domination. But not only does the volume quickly diverge (in Birkeland's essay, "Ecofeminism: Linking Theory and Practice") from solutions like those in Case as still too enmeshed with the thinking and assumptions of the mainstream society to ever affect substantial change; Ecofeminism proceeds to dismiss the validity of the Western rationalist tradition that abstracts reason as an autonomous process and that engendered both the nature-dominating scientific/technological culture and the environmentalist movement. The faulted tradition is part of a worldwide historical development called "Patriarchy, an ideology whose fundamental self/other distinction is based on a sense of self that is separate, atomistic." (2) All nonecofeminist environmental movements, whatever their merits, "have been embedded in a Patriarchal construction of reality." (30) Critiquing animal liberation philosophers Tom Regan and Peter Singer, Donovan in "Animal Rights and Feminist Theory" points out "they expose the inherent bias in contemporary animal rights theory toward rationalism, which, paradoxically, in the form of Cartesian objectivism, established a major theoretical justification for animal abuse." (168) In sum, no other current theories for countering the mess that rationalist imperialism has done to the planet can really accomplish anything because they are mired in the same assumptions and philosophies of the offending culture.

Although none of the essays in the anthology explicitly sets forth the program of rescinding the notion of ideology, there is a pervasive assumption that ideologies, being grounded in ideas and concepts, are bound up with the rationalist tradition of Western culture and serve to justify its exercise of power over nature and "otherness," including the feminine, animals, and other cultures. Indeed, the volume never addresses whether all ideology is inherently ideational, rationalist, and power-wielding and therefore whether what it proposes in its place is nonetheless ideological. But the book's proposal does seek to shed the "power-based social relations" (17) of patriarchal culture, shifting the focus "from a morality based on 'power over' to one based on reciprocity and responsibility (`power to')." (19) (Birkeland does propose to transcend the "Power Paradigm," which encompasses ideology [20]; Adams' article subtitle is also telling: "Ideology: Hiding the Social Construction of the Natural"[200].) Ecofeminism posits that such a goal can be achieved through a subsumption of the self to all humans, animals, and nature --not through an expansion of the self, as the Deep Ecologists propose, which involves expanding self-interest and does not obliterate dualistic thinking and power relationships; but through "a reverence for, and empathy with, nature and all life" (20) or identification with the intrinsic value in nature. By granting such intrinsic value, one circumvents the problem of self-centeredness inherent in expanding selfinterest to all nature, which only becomes valuable because it is self. Thus, the otherness of animals and other people and nature itself is lost --in the same way that gives rise to the problems of dominance and exploitation. Ecofeminism's type of universalism embraces rationalism as well as irrationalism in its attempt to break down dualistic barriers --male/female, "thought versus action, the spiritual versus the natural, art versus science, experience versus knowledge" (20)-- and to find a holism or unity in all experience, both animate and inanimate.

The problem with such an ambitious system, which has been constructed ad hoc in answer to the characteristics its founders deemed distasteful in earlier, offending systems, such as Enlightenment philosophy and almost all Western thought, is that, despite its good intentions, it is incoherent and internally inconsistent. The direst internal inconsistency is that, in seeking to erase the barriers between dualisms, ecofeminism has itself established a rigid dualism: ecofeminism versus patriarchy (and just about anything else nonecofeminist) --rather than patriarchy versus nonpatriarchy. (The system also confuses patriarchy as an ideology: Ideology means a deliberate system of values for determining action, whereas patriarchy was never constructed as such one day by a set of people but instead is a post hoc academic device for analyzing history; but this confusion is not intrinsic to the ecofeminist system, only peripheral.) Ecofeminism also fails in its attempt to obliterate the dualism between animals and humans: It establishes "distinctions between people's carnivorism and carnivorous animals' predation" (200). Animals must not be forbidden their carnivorism because they cannot help it: "under patriarchy... we [are not] told that predatory animals generally kill other animals only for survival reasons; that, unlike humans, these animals would not survive without eating meat," (258) whereas humans operate within moral/social constructs, which can be altered by persuasion. So we are quite distinct kinds of beings from animals. There is also a distinct ecofeminist dualism between plants and animals: In arguing why it is all right to eat plants but not animals, Gaard notes that "the needs that plants may be said to have cannot be compared to the needs animals may be said to have, because the two kinds of beings are not alike." (298)

Furthermore, related to the "patriarchy/ecofeminism" dualism, in seeking to incorporate gender-consciousness into all social discourse, ecofeminism sets itself up as an authority to adjudicate which human attitudinal and behavioral characteristics are "feminine" --which are, for the most most, encouraged-- and which "masculine." The alleged purpose of such division is to make us aware that such division originally was done by the patriarchal culture tacitly, so by becoming aware, we can obliterate the dualism. The problem is that for some unexplained reason, corrupt patriarchy by bizarre serendipity made all behaviors and attitudes which it labeled "feminine" turn out to be good and something we should nonetheless (despite the fact it was created by patriarchy) carry with us into the postpatriarchical era. In other words, ecofeminists aim to institutionalize the patriarchal dualism --not lift the barriers between the two halves-- by declaring "feminine" concepts, such as "caring for another who demands preservation and growth," (or "holding") (183), "attentive love," (183) "a caring, respectful attitude," (184) and the "morality of responsibility" (184) as the ones to preserve, while pushing out such "masculine" behaviors as aggression, competition, autonomy, and scientific impersonality. There is no discussion of androgynous fusing of characteristics. There is, instead, only the implicit assertion of the superiority of one set of traits or way of thinking over another --at complete odds with Gruen's statement that "the maintenance of such dualisms allows for the continued conceptualization of hierarchies in which a theoretically privileged group or way of thinking is superior," (81) illustrating another internal inconsistency in the system. While asserting they want to bring down dualist distinctions and promote diversity and interconnectedness, most of the writers go out of their way to label people by dualistic (or greater pluralistic) distinctions and emphasizing the partitioned nature of their own experience. For example, Vance proudly breaks herself down into the very nonuniversal, patriarchally dualist labels, as a "white academic, as an Anglo, as a lesbian, as an immigrant, as a woman who moved from the working class to the middle class." (126) Lastly, though we are asked to desexualize the Earth and nature and humanity, several ecofeminists, including Kheel and Vance, insist on sexualizing the Earth as feminine, which naming thus gives them power.

These inconsistencies cannot be attributed to the fact this volume is an anthology and so the writers may not all agree on certain concepts, because the inconsistencies either reflect tenets the writers generally hold or appear within one writers work. There are also internal inconsistencies which appear within one writer's work but not not necessarily apply to the whole ecofeminist system. Chais Heller, in "For the Love of Nature," deplores the medievally rooted romanticization of woman, nature, and Mother Earth --which actually oppresses these entities-- then turns and romanticizes the mother-role-oriented kind of love with which women have been inculcated, without seeing she herself is romanticizing:

Many women develop a relational way of loving and knowing informed by their direct experience in caring for people of different ages, needs, and abilities. Women's love for those in their care does not emerge from an abstract sentiment. Instead, it emerges from an appreciation and knowledge of the particular needs, experiences, and level of development of their loved ones (233).

And Heller had just been berating the medieval "pedestaled" position of women.

The ecofeminist system is also incoherent. Vance even celebrates and encourages obscurantism and inscrutability by insisting on "conjectural history" recreating the past, based on whatever you want to say about it --"oral traditions, remnants of earlier cultures, intuitive readings of myth and ritual, and sheer speculation" (130)-- this in defiance of patriarchal attempts to "portray the past 'objectively.'" (130) Overall, the ecofeminists' ambitious program to embrace everything in the universe to counter the oppressors who scratch out only a tiny fraction for themselves and those they oppress --such tininess accounting for part of their oppression-- may be a little too broad. Not only is such an ambition bound to internal inconsistency, but like a person who has grown about as fat as the universe, it is a little too unwieldy to pick itself up and go and has nowhere to go. None of the authors bothers much describing what postpatriarchal society would look like nor how we get there. (Kheel does project a half-page future scenario, telling her great-grandniece how people once ate meat.) There is much discussion about activism; we learn meat and fur and vivisection are bad, as is pollution; but little is said about what the activism should establish. Birkeland deplores environmentalists who believe in working with legislatures and making incremental changes. (44) One can only surmise that a platform for change could be described as seeking "power over" others. The major activism thus appears to be critiquing the culture; perhaps the gentle art of persuasion is the way to give people "power to" --but power to do what? Leave the by-definition environmentally destructive cities for a more tribal, simpler life in the country? We are given no clue. There is not even much coherence in how we should critique our culture, except to feel that what most of Western thought has fed anyone is destructive. There are even horribly mixed signals about how a white American should respond to less oppressive cultures. As Gaard writes:

Native American spirituality is inseparable from Native American cultures, a unity little understood by white Euro-Americans. "A message a white woman would be more likely to hear from a medicine woman," writes [Andrea] Smith, "is to look into your own culture and find what is liberating in it."... Implicit in ecofeminist theory is the importance of being "grounded" in a particular context, while respecting cultural difference. An ecofeminist spirituality must evolve naturally from a specific geographic and cultural location. (308)

Thus, we are supposed to break down barriers and keep them up, do away with our own patriarchal culture and retain what within it (the Enlightenment?) is liberating.

Nonetheless, as an anthology, Ecofeminism works better than Case in presenting the different angles of its field within minimal redundancy: only twelve essays by eleven writers. There is even one essay, "A Cross-Cultural Critique of Ecofeminism," by Huey-li Li, that points out some of the shortcomings of ecofeminism not brought up here. Granted, it is a young discipline that has not had a chance to work out its kinks. As it is, in what amounts to an attempt to eschew ideology, Ecofeminism has only displaced it with an overly ambitious yet vastly incomplete ideology that does little more than encourage one to despise Western cultural tradition, which gave rise to democracy and in turn feminism and ecofeminism. So, ironically, the volume does not give "power to" individuals but only has "power over" them --to make Westerners disgusted by their own culture, while giving them nothing to replace it.

Ross takes issue with the ideologies --whether explicit or implicit-- of the sort in Case or Ecofeminism (though he addresses neither volume). Like Easterbrook, he demonstrates concern for many environmentalist goals --for "an ecological society," (16) "the ancient claims of the indigenous," (230) and against "the insolent propriety of agribusinesspeople, realtors, and developers." (230) And like Easterbrook, Ross can sometimes sound anti-environmentalist in his disdain for the forms the movement sometimes takes. While Case and Ecofeminism take the degraded landscape as their given, their catalyst, and then seek what in society has led to this condition so we might change it, Ross goes the opposite way, takes the environmental theory as his point of departure and asks how will this shape society. Indeed, he says, "ideas that draw upon the authority of nature nearly always have their origins in ideas about society." (15)

His greatest concern is what the notion of the scarcity of resources --a notion environmentalism so happens to share with the axioms of capitalist economists-- may do to social rights and freedoms:

[This book's] origins lay in the perception that environmentalist discourse about scarcity and limitations in the natural world was beginning to reinforce, if not translate into, calls for a reduction in rights and freedoms in our civil society. (12)

He feels that environmentalists make a connection between libertarian culture and the global rise of materialism as if, to have materialism, you must first have civil liberties (notwithstanding Singapore or Pinochet's Chile). He shivers with the idea that "aestheticism, self-denial, and guilt are the order of the day." (13)

Yet Ross never makes explicit exactly whether there is any inherent connection between a call for self-restraint in our use of natural resources and the restriction of basic human rights. The closest he comes is in his chapter on ecofeminism, "Eco-Man Evolves from Eco-Woman," when he deplores one ecofeminist's --Andrea Collard's-- call for us to subsume our needs to those of nature:

Survivalist "needs" of nature are strictly opposed to the realm of human "choice." Rather than seeing these as claims in conflict (i.e., should feminists be allowed to eat meat to demonstrate diversity and plurality), Collard demands that we choose to subordinate our freedom of choice to some relation of solidarity with nature's ways. (232)

Ross' only example of rights is that of freedom of choice in consumables. The ethical question for him is never whether a particular item should be consumable (human flesh?); his priority is that we should have the choice to consume whatever. In his final chapter, he does reveal that his concern for freedom of consumable choice is tied up with environmentalism's best interests:

People respond better to a call for social fulfillment than to a summons to physical deprivation, and that is why any social movement that uses self-denial as a vehicle for social change is as pathetic as one that uses apocalyptic threats or appeals to Mother Nature's vengeance. (261)

He refrains form telling why a complete line of consumables makes for social fulfillment, why going without, say, a Volvo is physical deprivation, and why apocalyptic threats, if pathetic, have been effective tools in mustering the populace to act. He almost states his ideological position when he says, "The 'False needs' of consumer capitalism are cited as the reasons for the inauthentic economy of our desires --no matter what the ads tell us, you're never going to get it, so get used to going without." (260) Apparently, Ross is so worldly wise as to not only know Marcusian critique but to have nurtured his sophistication far beyond it.

Unfortunately, most of Ross' volume is not dedicated to justifying his provocative thesis that self-control will lead to deprivation of human rights. As he confesses, "this book is not a theoretical tract." (18) Most of the innards is spent in what he calls, in the Derridian lingo, "narratives" or "stories" --"cultural studies," one about a Hawaiian tourist attraction, others about New York's urban ecology and about "the ecology of images" and how media images shape our idea of the environment. These sections ramble like homages to Barthes, either enthralled by a philosophy that eschews clarity as a form of oppression or subjected to simple indolence when it comes to developing theses. Despite themselves, these "narratives" (hardly stories in the sense average English speakers use the word) still unleash their tacit ideology-- which sounds as strange in the cadence of neomarxist French social analysis as fundamentalist Christian lyrics do set to heavy metal --and it is very similar to Easterbrook's: Global mass-consumer society is environmentalism's hope. "Getting rid of the concept of scarcity is part of the cultural work that is necessary in order to make a world in which hunger and poverty no longer prevail." (270-271)

o is it possible to save the planet without an ideology? The relation of author to ideology seems to be a pivotal question when facing the soul-withering, daunting task of cleaning up the environment. The ecofeminists' greatest contribution may lie in making us aware of just how tightly ideology is twined with how the land and life are used and that we may not get anywhere in harmonizing the way we live with the place we live until we set our ideological assumptions on the table. Easterbrook is the best example of how failing to disclose one's ideology fails the Earth, and he and his argument come crumbling down with his gelatinous ideology spewing out the cracks, revealing that his teutonically tidy planet remains in the hands of titans. Ross' equal apparent unawareness of his ideologies leads him to an almost farcical notion that feeding the masses all the consumerism that it can eat will somehow make them satiated enough to establish national parks and feed the hungry. Even the ecofeminists, for all their self-proclaimed self-awareness of where they fit into history and their desire to take the planet out of anyone's hands, end up either in a morass of pusillanimity or in the ironic situation of having to actually invest power in themselves ("power over") to go and yank that planet out of the oligarchs' hands --and so they end up with the potato. With respect to ideology, the environmentalist program may seem stuck in that same old quandary Marxism faces: The power of the rulers is bound up with their ideology, but to take away their power requires a power that in turn requires a new ideology of power.

Rollin, though, shows that a critique of at least one aspect of planetary ethics without ideological ax-sharpening is possible. Although Syndrome takes on only a fragment of a fragment of planetary ethics --genetic engineering of animals, a subfield of the animal rights/welfare arena --it does so within the broader context. Rollin first addresses the issue of animal genetic engineering as it has been framed by other environmental philosophers and advocates, such as environmental ethicist Holmes Rolston and activist Jeremy Rifkin. Rollin finds Rifkin's case against all genetic engineering founded on several fallacies: Rifkin faults the reductionism behind genetic engineering with desacralizing life, while Rollin notes reductionism itself is neutral on that matter; and Rifkin commits himself to two "incompatible philosophical positions --nominalism and realism," by asserting the inviolability of the individual and of the species, respectively. Rollin notes that individuals within a species can be harmed, but it makes no sense to say a species can be harmed, even by extinction. He then argues that Rifkin's case against genetic engineering's intrinsic wrongness cannot hold up; instead, the science can be consequentially wrong.

Rollin turns against Rolston's arguments for basing an environmental ethic on the implied inherent or intrinsic value in nature, including nonsentient entities like mountains, a value Rolston says exists without our anthropogenic bestowal. Rollin finds faults in all of Ralston's supports for an ethic based on intrinsic value. Rollin points out that two kinds of things have intrinsic value: those that are set forth by an agent as having value for their own sake rather than instrumentally, e.g., piano playing; and those that do not depend upon a relationship, e.g., conscious beings that have value intrinsic to themselves. The first sense has no moral dimension; only the second does, and it applies only to the being itself, not to mountains. Thus, Rolston's idea that because something has aesthetic value, it has moral value, does not hold up. Rollin further finds that Rolston's idea that nature, being able to produce intrinsically valued things like humans, must itself be of intrinsic value, commits the genetic fallacy of saying that whatever produces something good must be good itself. Finally, Rolston apparently uses analogy to say that the creative, self-preserving, self-repairing, dynamic, and adaptable characteristics in life to which we ascribe moral value are all found in nonsentient nature, which is thus worthy of similar moral valuing, while Rollin notes it is sentience that gives the moral valuing in the first place, and without it, the similarities between sentience and nonsentience are irrelevant. Again, Rollin says that the possible wrongs against nature are not intrinsic to our alterations of it but consequential.

To find an ethic concerning our actions toward nature --specifically, animals for genetic engineering-- Rollin employs a more Socratic method:

we need to recall... as Plato stressed, that those wishing to criticize or advance ethical positions cannot teach, they can only remind.... I, as a moralist, cannot walk in and give you a list of what is right and wrong and expect you to accept it. The natural response to such a move is, "Says who?"... To be plausible, I must extract (or have you extract) my conclusions from ethical premises you already accept as true, but which extraction you have hither not done. The moral philosopher, says Socrates, is a midwife. (50)

Rollin then turns to us readers and what we as a society already hold true to get us to go through an "ethical recollection regarding the ignored consequences of our accepted social ethic" (146) concerning genetic engineering of animals. Throughout, he refers to "the Greshem's Law for ethics" --bad moral thinking driving out the good on the matter of use of science and technology. People in general are too busy to reflect properly on the questions; opportunists come in; and he is here to help guide the people in their own thinking. The problem has arisen because of a split between society at large and the subset of scientific enterprise that has developed its own ideology. People have come to regard genetic engineering as another "Frankenstein thing:" "Frankenstein created new life with potentially hellish consequences," (12) and so might genetic engineering. But to turn our heads away in fright of the development is the worst thing we could do, for then the technology would develop without our input and truly become a monster. (134) Rollin describes three versions or aspects of the "Frankenstein thing" as it concerns genetic engineering: It is wrong inherently; because of unknown but inevitable dangers it entails (68); and because of the plight of the creatures it creates. Each aspect he answers in each of the book's three chapters, the first through answering Rifkin and Rolston's ojections to the technology's inherent wrongness, and the second and third through "reminding" us of our own beliefs.

Rollin grants that the "experts" --the scientists themselves-- because of both their ideology and their inurement to the dangers of their daily scientific operations, tend to overlook risk. Scientific ideology pretends to be objective and valueless, but in so being, when its operations rub up against society, it necessarily establishes a value for itself and so is hardly valueless in its outlook on the world. Rollin contends that the experts from the fray of genetic engineering are not to be trusted with regulating themselves and the potential dangers they may create; in fact, that community has already balked at outside control. As a model of regulation, Rollin proposes something similar to what both citizens and scientists have accepted for animal experimentation: committees composed mostly of citizens, who assess whether a prospective genetic engineering experiment would pose a threat to them and the community. Rollin's case becomes more subtle concerning whether the technology can harm animals and if so, should we allow it. As he has determined that genetic engineering cannot be deemed intrinsically wrong, we must look at what sort of wrongs its abuse might bring about. Again, we can turn to what we have done in the past and what we now believe about animal welfare. Our criteria, enacted in recent laws, for animal use has come to dictate that the animal's telos --e.g., the dog's dogness-- and its interests not be infringed. "Social animals need to be with others of their kind; animals built to run need to run." (159) All animals have the interest of food, water, and avoiding pain. An artificially introduced gene may change the animal's telos, but if it does not harm the animal, then it is not necessarily unethical. Rollin feels that society may have to weigh carefully whether it would tolerate, say, a manufactured chicken that is perfectly happy spending its life in a cage, growing to a quick slaughter; he feels society would likely vote against such a prospect as both aesthetically repulsive and jarring to its sense of what is happening to itself:

Some of the reluctance would probably stem from slippery slope concerns --what next?... Do we really want to encourage a mind-set willing to change venerable and tested aspects of nature at the drop of a hat for the sake of a few pennies? (176)

Again, he finds that a citizen-involved approach with oversight committees is the best way to keep research from causing the animals undue suffering. "While genetic engineering of animals does not compel the creation of animal suffering, it is likely to lead to it in the current exploitative business context." (182-182)

In this bright and clear-as-a-brook volume, Rollin is thus able to analyze a certain nature-use problem and propose a solution without pushing a particular ideology. He has noted that society in general has come to the point of concern for animals' welfare when subject to human use --believing that animals have some rights more important than just anyone's fast buck-- and that genetic engineering really proposes nothing new in light of our belief of what animals and their rights and integrities are. His approach, of course, has some possible objections. Sometimes it sounds like morality by market research: "Eight out of ten readers poled by Parents magazine affirmed their belief that animals have rights," (149) "though 84 percent also believes that it is permissible to use animals for human benefit." (157) By some perspectives, morality by survey could be suspect as wide-eyed delusion about modern democracy --because who may sway public opinion? What if public opinion, fickle thing, were to drastically fluctuate year-to-year-- so shall animals' plights? Or shall, one year, horrible genetic hosts be unleashed, then we go back to distrusting the scientists? Rollin is confident, with an almost Hegelian historicism, that society is progressing toward greater sympathy with animal rights. Of course, only time will prove. But is there no role for ethical leadership?

Related to this question of the sociohistorical relation between public-citizen regulators and the regulated is a harsh inconsistency in the book. On the one hand, Rollin paints a boding inevitability to the development of genetic engineering --as if such a science is almost in our genetic natures themselves:

We cannot abandon or bury the science and technology we find unintelligible and frightening --though at various times most of us feel that urge. Rifkin notwithstanding, it will not go away or be abandoned. (32)... One may indeed affirm that it is natural for humans to effect conventional changes in nature. (46)... Genetic engineering of animals, indeed all of biotechnology, is a tool, like all tools humans have deployed, from clay pots to nuclear reactors. (213)

On the other hand, he asserts that genetic engineers are starting to understand they must mend their ways or the public that allows their existence and enterprise will pull the plugs. "Plainly, biotechnology will stand or fall with public acceptance or rejection, not with the progress of the science." (102) So which is it --inevitable no matter what we want, or dependent upon whether we want it? Similarly to Rolston, Rollin grasps for two incompatible schools of philosophy: determinism and free will. Is genetic engineering going to happen anyway, and is the best we can do is temper it? Or do we really hold the reins and we can halt its whole existence if it does not trot out what we want? The answer to these questions can make the whole difference in what a policy on genetic engineering can do and whether citizens can be mustered to implement it.

Pointing out that the thrust of the argument is nonideological does not deny Rollin has his own ideologies --which he does not hide: He states that he believes our society has devised "the best answer to" balancing conflict between individual and public welfare with the "moral notions" of rights. (155-156) He definitely believes in the democratic method to solving ethical dilemmas. But his entire analysis and solution does not consist of a program for the way our species should or should not use the planet; there is thus no power-over-Earth ideology. Perhaps the ecofeminists would object that he is inevitably ideological just by his remorseless position within the Western philosophical tradition and the fact he critiques environmental philosophies and policies without bringing to the fore the gender dualisms that reputedly underlie all power relations, and so he is implicitly complying with patriarchal ideology. But such an objection would not arise from a system that itself has freed itself of ideologies and dualisms. This excellent book, steeped in the author's Scottish Commonsense School, provides a round if incomplete example of how we might begin to think about discussing human relations to the environment, the planet, and its resources, without an ideological agenda.

But the central problem remains: We are not just social creatures, but without society, we are not even human. We are ideational. To act, to do, we require an idea. Our particular relation to the planet is an idea, and to act in relation to the Earth --since each individual is necessarily only a peg of society-- seems to necessitate an ideology. How can we possibly exist without turning our planet and all life on it into commodities? If we must use some ideology, what is the best one, and how can we determine it? Here, no one has yet even tiptoed.