Political Theory and the Ecological Challenge and African American Environmental Thought: Foundations

Extract

Political Theory and the Ecological Challenge. Edited by Andrew Dobson and Robyn Eckersley. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 270p. $75.00 cloth, $29.99 paper.

African American Environmental Thought: Foundations. By Kimberly K. Smith. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007. 264p. $29.95.

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.