Customer Reviews

Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits (Haymarket)

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What an awful book this is.

Dana Phillips offers a great critique of Strange Weather and The Chicago Gangster Etcetera in his equally poor The Truth of Ecology. His evisceration of Ross's quasi-environmental urbanist solipsism is right on (and perhaps the only defensible moment in Phillips's work, which sadly and firmly lands in Ross's camp even while pulling tent spikes from it).

How do these people gain purchase in the academy? Strange Weather is full of straw man arguments, shoddy research, spurious logic, self-absorbed think pieces, and a crusade against New Ageism masquerading as a knowledgeable examination of environmental thought.

This book is an early product of the postructuralist assault on the material world that has come to pervade humanities studies, a burning cross on the field of interdisciplinarity. It also precipitated Ross's being revealed as a charlatan by Alan Sokal, and then Ross's profiteering from his own lack as a scholar by helping to grandstand the "Science Wars."

His current work on labor stands unfortunately on the foundation of low credibility he established for himself as in ideologue in the postmodern vein, his egotistical posturing from inside the cloisters of a university, and his quest to make of the raw material of the planet a curio cabinet for his own entertainment.

I recommend using this book as an example of how not to function as a writer of cultural criticism, and as a part of the problem we face in preserving what is left of the biosphere.