Spearheaded by Beck and theworld risk society' thesis, contemporary commentators in search of evidence of political renewalfrom below' have discerned a convergence of environmental and cosmopolitan sensibilities. But through its foregrounding of the destabilization of matter by new technologies, thisenvironmental cosmopolitanism' tends to re-enact the conventional binary of passive nature and dynamic culture. It is suggested that this expresses a metropolitan detachment from the everyday experience of working with flows of matter and life. Drawing on the pivotal role of bioinvasion in the European colonization of the temperate periphery, an alternative perspective on ecological globalization is presented which takes account of theweedy opportunism' and inherent mobility of biological life. In this way, `globalization from below' takes on the meaning of an opening of culture to theunsettling' influence of biological and geological histories that manifest themselves at global scales'