Welcome to a website that aspires to be not just a conversation about democracy, but conversation that is itself democratic activity, conversation devoted to the hard work of thinking together about the climate crisis. The threat to the air we breathe, like the pandemic, affects the planet. It has enveloped us all, individually and collectively. It is time to put aside the deadly delusions tearing us apart and, like Huckleberry Finn, think together about what we are doing.
In 2017 I learned about “The People and Planet First Budget for Illinois.” This budget was a proposal presented to the Illinois State Legislature by a grassroots coalition that included The People’s Lobby. Some of the members of this Chicago-based political organization marched the two-hundred miles, from Chicago to Springfield, to present the budget in person. I was immediately captivated because it seemed to me to put first things first. It identified in dollars and cents what really matters to all of us. It gave first priority to the two biggest challenges facing human life collectively: the climate crisis threatening the earth, and the inequality crisis splitting the peoples of the earth apart. It was a pro-life budget.
The budget was a grand vision on a single page of numbers showing that Illinois had the resources to face up to both of these enormous challenges if it was willing to. The more I thought about the two issues the more I could sense that they were really one issue. Trying to articulate how they are interrelated launched me on a journey that ended up here with a website about the relationship between climate crisis and democracy, planetary and political order, planetary disorder and political disorder. It led me to the conviction that meeting the climate crisis head on requires democracy, or, as Bruno Latour puts it a new birth of democracy, a demo-genesis.
We are in a fight for the health and well-being of our collective life as peoples of the earth. Our power in this fight is the gift of distinctive powers, distributed, astonishingly, to each of us at birth, as individuals-in-communities of the species, from the collective common heritage of life stretching back more than a billion years.
The tradition of experiments we call democracy recognizes that the powers that flow through each of us as individual persons from the soil of our common earth only works when concentrated and shared. That’s the good news. But, and it’s a big but, when excessively concentrated; that is, anti-democratic, or fundamentalized, it can destroy rather than bear fruit. Our powers, our freedom, our dignity as persons, as co-creators of shared life from the earth, can turn against the earth, its lands, waters, air, and life itself, and self-destruct.