Greening Democracy
The unparalleled greening of democracy during the past half-century extends well beyond such matters as sustainability and climate justice and is far more consequential than the birth of green parties and policy disputes about carbon pricing schemes and global emissions targets, the following lecture proposes. Delivered recently at Vienna’s Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), it suggests a new way of thinking historically about the relationship among ecosystems, energy regimes and democracy. It also asks why people with green sympathies might be expected in our times to embrace democracy for more than tactical reasons?
Noting a difficulty, that democracy is a deeply anthropocentric norm that has always imagined self-governing humans to be masters and possessors of ‘nature’, the lecture raises two key questions: what might it mean to ‘green’ democratic principles and why their redefinition has important practical implications for popular self-government in the age of monitory democracy? The lecture emphasises the urgency of addressing these questions, and concludes with a warning: democracies risk democide not only when citizens and their chosen representatives fail to spot the anti-democratic effects of extreme weather events, pestilences and other environmental emergencies. They also play dice with their own extinction when their citizens and leaders fail to understand that democracy won’t have a future unless its ideals and practices are rid of the deep-seated prejudice that ‘humans’ live separately from a ‘nature’ whose dynamics are administratively controllable and commercially exploitable for the use and enjoyment of ‘the people’.