The Crises

We humans are aware that we are caught up in serious problems or crises of democratic, social and ecological sustainability and well-being. Over the last 500 years the West has developed a complex global social system that is socially and ecologically unsustainable in the long run, and ultimately self-destructive. It exploits, undermines and destroys the informal, biodiverse social and ecological conditions that sustain life on earth for Homo sapiens and many other species and ecosystems. This exceptionally complex social system – or, rather, assemblage of interlocking systems of production, consumption, regulation and warfare – has been spread around the world in the language of civilization, modernization, globalization, peace and representative democratization. It has always been met with various forms of resistance and counter-responses, and thus should be characterized, as Edward Said argued, as a ‘contrapuntal ensemble’.Footnote ¹ It is a modernizing assemblage of ‘vicious’ social systems in the technical sense that the regular feedback loops within these social systems reproduce and intensify the destructive effects of the systems on the informal, everyday social spheres, ecosphere, biosphere and abiotic sphere on which they depend and which they exploit.Footnote ²

The well-known effects are global warming, climate change, escalating pollution and the diseases it causes; the melting of polar icecaps and glaciers, and the release of even more lethal greenhouse gases this produces; the acidification of oceans and the vicious cycles this generates; the depletion of non-renewable resources; and the use of renewable resources more quickly than they can renew themselves. The economic scramble over what is left is increasingly damaging to the environment. It has cascading effects on weather and global human and species suffering. These lead to more destructive wars and war preparation to protect these unsustainable social systems; rapid increases in climate refugees and war refugees; and starvation, poverty, racism, and inequalities in life chances.

We have known that this global ensemble is unsustainable socially and ecologically since the first meetings on the sustainability crisis in the 1950s and 1960s at the United Nations. These warnings were followed by Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, the first Earth Day in 1970, The Club of Rome, The Limits to Growth, the Brundtland Report in the 1980s and the emergence of the concept of sustainability and well-being as a meta-norm in national and international relations. Thousands of scientists have reaffirmed and extended these findings and summarized them in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Yet the crisis continues despite efforts to address, govern and regulate it by state-based representative democracies and their global institutions. As David Held summarizes in Chapter 16, these institutions are in a ‘gridlock’ that sustains the trajectory of the vicious systems. We are already into the sixth mass extinction of biological diversity, and biological diversity is a necessary condition of sustainable life on earth. If these trends continue, much of the earth will be less habitable or uninhabitable by the turn of the century. This is referred to as the Medea hypothesis.Footnote ³

Thus, the great question today is: What have we learned over the last seventy years and how can we address the crises most effectively today? The regeneration of Gaia philia and Gaia democracies is my response to this question.

Four Phases of Life Systems

The first thing we have learned from the study of complex social and ecological systems is that it is not unusual for them to become vicious and unsustainable in the way ours have. They develop in such a way that they use up the conditions that sustain them, degrading or destroying the interdependent life forms on which they depend, and, thus, ultimately, destroying themselves. There are many examples of this in the history of life systems, both human and non-human, as the academic literature on civilizational collapse and super-predation shows. Moreover, and more importantly, there are also many examples of members of both social and ecological vicious systems changing their unsustainable behaviour and transforming their systems into virtuous and sustainable systems before collapse, and other examples of recovering from collapse and regenerating ‘virtuous’ or self-sustaining systems.

Accordingly, the complex life-systems sciences hypothesize that there are four phases of life systems. The first, virtuous or sustainable phase consists of cooperation, contestation and conciliation cycles. That is, the individual and collective members of these systems sustain themselves in lifeways that co-sustain the well-being of all the interdependent members, relationships and systems on whom they inter- and co-depend that comprise the complex webs of life and their strong coupling with abiotic earth systems. When some members engage in unsustainable ways of life, the systems evolve ways of conciliating these members back into sustainable life patterns. That is, life sustains life. This phase is thus ‘homeotelic’. The orientation of and to cooperation is predominant.Footnote ⁴

The second, transitional or degenerative phase occurs when a system is unable to conciliate unsustainable behaviour. The unsustainable behaviour continues to develop by means of positive feedback loops that reinforce and increase the behaviour further and further from dynamic equilibrium. Common examples of this transitory phase are the transitions from a homeotelic predator–prey system towards a super-predatory system and the escalating violence and counter-violence dialectic or ‘security dilemma’ of the global arms race. The third phase occurs when the unsustainable behaviour increases to a tipping point that transforms the system as a whole into a predominantly vicious, unsustainable and, eventually, self-destructive system. Our current global assemblage of vicious social systems and the sixth mass extinction they are causing during the ‘great acceleration’ since World War II are in this third phase. It is ‘heterotelic’: oriented to ruthless competition or struggles for existence rather than cooperation.Footnote ⁵

Fortunately for life on earth, there is a fourth phase. This ‘regeneration’ phase occurs when the members of unsustainable systems find ways to practice and regenerate sustainable ways of living. Regeneration of co-sustainable forms of life grows by means of negative feedback loops and reconnecting with the power of neighbouring life systems. They gradually displace or transform the unsustainable systems, either before they collapse or afterwards. These processes are referred to as ecological succession or reconnecting with anima mundi: the power or animacy that runs through and sustains all life on earth.Footnote ⁶ For example, twenty-one human civilizations have come and gone. Life has recovered from five previous mass extinctions. Overall, life has sustained and complexified life through multiple examples of these four types of phases for 3.8 billion years or we would not be here. However, over the last seventy years the extinction of species and ecosystems (biodiversity) has occurred at a rate that far exceeds the historical norm. Although Life will survive the sixth mass extinction, whether or how many Homo sapiens will survive is unknown.Footnote ⁷

Thus, the fourth phase of complex systems – of regeneration and transformation of vicious systems – is of immense importance for us. We can learn from these examples and think of how to apply them to our own situation. The vicious social systems that cause the sustainability crises are not automatons, as the doomsayers claim. They are very complex local and global social systems to which we are subject and on which most of us depend for our livelihood. Our daily, habitual ways of thinking and acting within them reproduces them. However, we are not so enslaved to them that we cannot think or act otherwise. We are free to reflect on them and to ask the questions we are asking: namely, how can we act and live differently in order to regenerate sustainable systems and transform our unsustainable ones. Moreover, we are free to act on how we answer these questions.

I will discuss two complementary traditions in which people are responding to the sustainability crises in this way. They are examples of Gaia democracies. There are also several examples in the chapters of this volume.

The Problem to Which Gaia Democracies Are Responses

At the core of Gaia democracies responses is the hunch that the reason we have difficulty responding effectively to the sustainability and well-being crisis as a whole is that we misperceive its nature. The reason we misperceive the nature of crisis is that we view it from within the ways of thinking and acting that sustain the vicious social systems that are causing it. It is our socialization and self-formation as conscripts within the vicious social systems that discloses the world around us and our relationships with the environment in a way that overlooks or distorts how they degrade the conditions that sustain life. Thus, even when we can no longer ignore or discount the damage we are doing, we respond in the standard problem-solving ways of the vicious systems, thereby reproducing rather than changing them.

Accordingly, the problem is not simply one of misperception, but also of being caught up in an unsustainable way of life that generates this way of perceiving the world. One of the first earth scientists to point this out was Barry Commoner in 1970:Footnote ⁸

I will discuss how our exploitive social systems generate this ambiguity and illusion of externality and independence later in the chapter. I would like to begin with the following question: How do we free ourselves from the unsustainable way of life that generates this illusion and misperception and move around to seeing ourselves as interdependent participants within and with the living earth to which we belong? This is the way of becoming democratic citizens of Gaia democracies. Because our perception of the world is partly shaped by our mode of being in the world, we cannot see clearly the way forward unless we begin to change our way of being in the world to a more sustainable way. As in ecological succession, we have to begin to be the change we wish to bring about in order to see more clearly the nature of that change.Footnote ⁹

One of the first, non-Indigenous people to see this clearly was Aldo Leopold in Sand County Almanac (1949). He argued that if we are to live in ways that sustain the conditions of life on earth for us and future generations, then we have to move from seeing ourselves as the all-knowing conquerors and controllers of nature to seeing ourselves as plain members and citizens of the biotic communities in which we live and on which we depend for every breathe and step we take. We need to take this engaged turn in order to observe and learn by trial and error how to participate in these life cycles in mutually sustaining ways. In Gaia democracies humans treat all lifeforms as fellow citizens, and the interdependent relationships and responsibilities among them as co-learning and co-governance relationships. Leopold called this evolutionary transformation the ‘land ethic’. I refer to it as Gaia ethics:

The reason this transformation is necessary is that the conqueror and controller of nature role is ‘self-defeating’. It is based on the presumption that the conqueror-controller ‘knows, ex cathedra, just what makes the community clock tick, and just what and who is valuable, and what and who is worthless, in community life. It always turns out that he knows neither, and this is why his conquests eventually defeat themselves’.Footnote ¹⁰

Two Traditions of Gaia Democracies in Response to a Shared Problem

The first of two traditions of Gaia democracies is the family of ecosocial democracies that many Indigenous peoples have been practicing for thousands of years. It is embodied in the traditional ecological knowledge and wisdom (TEKW) and practices they have acquired over centuries of learning by trial and error how to participate as evolving apprentices in mutually sustainable ways with ‘mother earth’. These are referred to as earth teachings learned from studying earthways.Footnote ¹¹ The second tradition is much more recent. It comprises the communities of practice of ecosocial democracies that have developed in practice and in dialogue with the ecological and life sciences, and sometimes in dialogue with Indigenous peoples.

The remarkable feature of these two very different traditions is that they share a commitment to participatory democracy. For both, in different languages and ways, the power of self-government consists in people becoming a ‘people’ (demos) and ‘citizens’ in the course of exercising powers of self-government (kratos) by, with and for each other in observing, learning, discussing, interacting, contesting and resolving disputes together – of governing and being governed together – without anyone ruling over them (arche). That is, democratic self-government (demos+kratos) is engaged power and knowledge with and for each other. This is the classic Athenian conception of democracy.Footnote ¹² In contrast, all non-democratic forms of government employ different forms of power and knowledge over the governed in ruler–ruled or master–subject hierarchical relationships (arche).Footnote ¹³ These two Gaia democracy traditions extend the classic Athenian conception of democracy from the polis to Gaia.

Gaia Hypothesis

In the 1960s Sir James Lovelock, an earth systems scientist, discovered the Gaia Hypothesis. Despite the vast changes in the solar energy coming to earth over the last 3.8 billion years, and despite the vast changes in the forms of life on earth over the same long period, and despite all the changes in earth, ocean and atmospheric conditions over the same period, the atmospheric conditions and temperature of earth have somehow remained in the range that sustains life on earth. The hypothesis is that the biosphere, and all the systems of life that compose it, somehow regulate the atmosphere and temperature to sustain life. That is, the biotic and abiotic sphere as a whole is self-governing: self-organizing (sympoiesis) and self-sustaining (symbiosis and symbiogenesis).

The Gaia hypothesis has survived a number of tests and it is now considered a theory. A majority of the scientists on the IPCC have endorsed it, in slightly different ways.

This has led to attempts to explain how the systems that compose the ecosphere actually regulate the content and temperature of the atmosphere within a broad range of cycles that sustain most forms of life over vast stretches of time. This research has grown hand-in-hand with life and earth systems theory and complexity theory.Footnote ¹⁴

The Animacy of Symbiosis: Life Sustains Life

For the purposes of those of us who wish to know how we should live within this complex system in mutually sustaining ways, the important insight came from Lovelock’s colleague, the life scientist Lyn Margulis. She argued that the Gaia hypothesis is not based on the assumption that the system of systems that compose the ecosphere is itself a purposeful living being that regulates the climate and temperature to sustain life. Rather, given the holistic, regulative role that feedback loops of the system play, the self-sustaining quality of Gaia is an emergent property of the ways that the life systems that compose Gaia coordinate their interactions. In her famous words, ‘the Gaia hypothesis is just symbiosis and symbiogenesis on a planetary scale’.Footnote ¹⁵ Life systems and their members sustain themselves in ways that also co-sustain the interdependent life systems and members on which they interdepend.

Stephen Harding describes the Gaia hypothesis or theory in the following way:Footnote ¹⁶

The emergence of new properties in the course of the complex interaction of life systems is the way that life itself has developed in increasingly complex ways: that is, through life systems living-with each other in complex interdependent ways (symbiosis) and giving rise to new life systems (symbiogenesis). Spatially, symbiosis refers to the immensely complex webs or networks that link all forms of life in relationships of reciprocal interdependence. Temporally, these networks are cyclical. They form cycles in which another member uses the waste of one interdependent member in some sustaining way, so nothing is wasted, and at a temporality that enables species and ecosystem renewal. Photosynthesis is the paradigm of this spatio-temporal quality of reciprocal interdependency and cyclical renewability. Indeed, it is the basis of life sustaining life.Footnote ¹⁷

Homo sapiens, as one minor species among millions, are members and citizens just like all others, with ecosocial democratic responsibilities to participate in ways that reciprocally co-sustain the networks that sustain us: that is, in virtuous ways.

Life systems are not automatically harmonious. They are often far from equilibrium, patchy, full of cheaters or free riders, and subject to perturbations that can cause virtuous systems, and their co-dependent systems, to tip into vicious states, as we have seen. Yet, despite that indeterminacy, their remarkable qualities of resilience enable them to sustain themselves over vast stretches of time. If vicious systems were the major factor in evolution, then life on earth would have ceased long ago. The opposite is the case. Life has become more complex: symbiosis and symbiogenesis have prevailed most of the time, even recovering from mass extinctions.

Vicious systems are also not automatons. They too are far from equilibrium and subject to tipping points. The resilient powers of generation of life (sympoiesis) have the capacity to regenerate symbiotic networks within and around vicious systems, or on and around the ruins of them. This is the fourth, regeneration and transformation phase of life systems. They do this not by viciously counter-attacking a vicious system, but by means of cultivating symbiotic and symbiogenetic counter-communities of practice all around it and gradually transforming or replacing it. This is ecological succession.

Ecological succession works as the means of systemic transformation because life systems are autotelic: the means employed to generate and cultivate them determine the end. This internal relationship between means and ends is one of the great discoveries or rediscoveries of the ecological and human sciences in the twentieth century.Footnote ¹⁸ In Mahatma Gandhi’s phrase, just as the type of seed prefigures the plant, so, too, humans have to be the change they wish to bring about – for example, peace by peaceful means, democracy by democratic means, and sustainable life systems by sustainable means. Here is an illustrative example provided by geographer Michael Simpson of an old-growth forest recovering from decades of clear cutting:Footnote ¹⁹

Symbiosis and Symbiogenesis in Ecosocial Systems: A New Synthesis

The human sciences have entered into a dialogue with these life and earth sciences in the following ways. First, the concepts ‘symbiosis’ and ‘symbiogenesis’ have a long history in the human sciences. They refer to how diverse individual human beings and communities have lived together in interdependent relationships of peace and mutual support. Moreover, communities of practice researchers argue that informal symbiotic social relationships of mutual aid exist within and across every social system – even within the most vicious and damaging social systems. Accordingly, the vicious social systems that are embedded within and damaging the ecosystems that sustain life are also embedded within and damaging informal symbiotic social systems that sustain the communities in which we live. As early as 1902, Peter Kropotkin, in Mutual Aid, argued that ecological and social relationships of mutual aid have been the major factor in human evolution, outweighing vicious struggles for existence.Footnote ²⁰

Second, there is widespread awareness that there are not two parallel paths of symbiotic evolution, one for non-human life and the other for human life. Rather, non-human symbiotic ecosystems and human symbiotic social systems are now perceived as evolving interdependently and reciprocally. They are studied as interdependent, coupled or co-evolving. Homo sapiens are studied as co-evolving and co-sustaining apprentices within their ecosocial systems.Footnote ²¹ This is a revolution relative to the dominant view that humans and their social systems are separate from and independent controllers of the natural world. The consequence is the realization that ‘we can no longer understand the dynamics of either the natural system or the human subsystem in isolation without understanding the dynamics of the other component’.Footnote ²² Accordingly, all social systems are ecosocial systems.

Third, the human sciences are now focusing on designing all kinds of social systems so they interact symbiotically, rather than destructively, with the ecosystems in which they are embedded. The way to do this is to design them so they interact with their surrounding ecosystems in relationships of reciprocal interdependency and cycles in which the resources we use and the ecosystems we effect always have time to renew themselves. As Fritjof Capra explains:Footnote ²³

Moreover, a key feature is that sustainable human communities are designed so the unused by-products of any enterprise are usable by other enterprises. There is thus zero waste. These circular, sustainable systems of production, use and consumption are ‘cradle to cradle’ systems, in contrast to the current ‘waste’ or ‘cradle to grave’ systems that dominate contemporary economies. They are designed on the ‘biomimicry’ of circular ecosystems such as old-growth forests.Footnote ²⁴

The Gift–Gratitude–Reciprocity Worldview

I will now try to describe some of the main features of Indigenous traditions of earth democracy that I have learned from Nuu Chah Nulth scholar Richard Atleo Senior (Umeek) and Anishinaabe scholars John Borrows and Aaron Mills. According to Umeek, the central idea is expressed in the Nuu Chah Nulth concept ‘Tsawalk’.Footnote ²⁵ It expresses the insight that every living being is connected and sustained through relationships of reciprocal interdependence. These are fundamentally cyclical kinship relationships of gift–gratitude–reciprocity. They are the ground of our being. Although humans often take selfish advantage of these sustaining relationships and take without either taking care of a gift or reciprocating by giving to others (ingratitude), and so initiate vicious cycles, Tsawalk usually outweighs and outlasts these violations. Humans learn how to live together in reciprocally sustaining ways by learning from mother earth and their more-than-human relatives, who also make mistakes.

Humans begin to learn ecoliteracy through participatory self-formation and self-understanding as participants engaging reciprocally with ecosocial webs of life. By apprenticeship in the practices passed on by their ancestors, they come to acquire ways of perceiving and orienting oneself in the world that discloses it as a living system and humans as one species among an extended family of more-than-human relatives. This is a participatory, kincentric and cyclical way of life. The flora and fauna, sun and moon, creeks and oceans, are our kin – interdependent relatives or relations. They grow up to realize they have responsibilities to co-sustain the ecosocial relationships on which we depend. They are participatory democratic agents in the life systems as a whole, just like other earthlings. Mother Earth takes care of us and we take care of her in gratitude and reciprocity. Moreover, humans learn from these basic life cycles to be grateful for the gifts and to reciprocate in turn, thereby bringing into being cyclical human relationships of mutual aid.Footnote ²⁶

Potawatomi Environment and Forest biologist Robin Lee Kimmerer explains the richness of the gift-reciprocity view by showing its similarity to Western systems view of life:Footnote ²⁷

The Cedar Trees Institute that hosted the Workshop for this volume is founded on this gift–gratitude–reciprocity worldview, as far as we understand it, and in respect and reciprocity for being accepted as guests on the traditional territories of the WSÁNEĆ (Saanich), Songhees (Lkwungen), and Wyomilth (Esquimalt) First Nations.

The role of clans, masks, dancing, storytelling and giving thanks to mother earth is to help us learn these earth ways and lifeways. We learn by putting ourselves in the shoes of other relatives and learning how they sustain themselves, and thus how we can reciprocally relate to them in co-sustaining ways. We also train to enter into perceptual dialogical relationships with the animate earth through all our senses (synaesthesia). Through participation, apprentices begin to experience the animacy of the living earth: the power of gift-reciprocity relationships. It animates all life and is by far the greatest power on earth. By participating in its relationships and cycles in good ways we experience being animated by and belonging to mother earth.

Having learned these lessons from Mother Earth and her earth ways, Indigenous people apply them in their lifeways. They design their social systems on the life-sustaining, gift-reciprocity earth systems. The Indigenous word for governance among the northwest coast nations is ‘potlatche’. It is translated as the English word ‘gift’. However, unlike the English word ‘gift’, potlatche refers to the mutual exchange of gifts that always derive from and give rise to relations of reciprocity. They exist in and sustain life cycles. They reunite life-sustaining circles that either have been breached or simply need to be recollected and re-animated. This is Indigenous democratic, reconciliatory governance.

Four Phases of Gift–Gratitude–Reciprocity Systems

Indigenous gift-reciprocity relationships also go through virtuous, degenerative, vicious and regenerative phases. Indigenous ecosocial knowledge is pragmatic knowledge learned by trial and error. Once we see ourselves as plain members and citizens within Mother Earth this is the only way we can learn. The Raven Cycle Stories shared among the Indigenous peoples of the Northwest coast are full of learning stories of this kind. The most common Raven story is of some people failing to reciprocate for the gifts given to them by mother earth, their fellow flora and fauna or from fellow human beings. They become selfish, independent aggressive, greedy, avaricious and ungrateful. They take without reciprocating. When this happens, Raven comes along and tells stories that illustrate the mistakes they make and point in the general direction of how to correct them by reconnecting and regenerating good gift-reciprocity relationships. He always does this in puzzling, paradoxical, self-contradictory and hilarious ways that show he too is far from omniscient. This technique is in itself an important lesson in epistemic humility.

Robert Davidson, a great contemporary Haida artist, gives an example. When people become vicious, Raven points out this misperception and self-centredness by taking away one eye of the persons involved. In so doing, Raven enables them, paradoxically, to see the damage they are doing to mother earth and to future generations by not reciprocating. They lack the depth of vision to see the gift-reciprocity relations they are damaging. The next step, then, is to return to the earth teachings, reconnect with the broader gift-reciprocity systems, and regenerate healthy relationships with mother earth and each other. According to Davidson, this kind of reconnective and regenerative Gaia citizenship is what the Haida are doing on Haida Gwaii today in response to four generations of vicious settler resource extraction and the participation of some Haida in it.Footnote ²⁸

Many Indigenous peoples have similar stories. The Anishinaabe call vicious actors ‘Windigo’ and the Cree call them ‘Wetiko’. On the Northwest coast, the Kwakwaka’wakw people have a famous Atla’gimma (‘Spirits of the Forests’) dance in which the virtuous citizens overpower the vicious members by surrounding them with gift–gratitude–reciprocity activities and offers of joining hands until the vicious members see the benefits of cooperation.Footnote ²⁹ It enacts the spirit of ecological succession that Mike Simpson describes in the botanical terminology noted earlier.

Transition to the Vicious Systems

In summary, I am suggesting there is a convergence or kinship between the Gaia democracies of Indigenous peoples and of the contemporary non-Indigenous ecosocial communities of practice influenced by recent western life and earth sciences. They appear to converge on the characterization of virtuous, degenerative and vicious ecosocial systems, and on the symbiotic way to transition from a vicious to a virtuous system. If this conjecture is at least partially correct, then it provides some common ground on which to discuss joining hands and working together in mutually respectful, democratic ways in response to the shared crises. However, before I turn to examples, I will describe briefly the main features of the global social systems that are causing the crises. These are the vicious systems that Gaia citizens need to understand and change.

The Great Transformation and Acceleration

Rather than building social systems that participate in and co-sustain the social and ecological relationships of reciprocal interdependence on which they depend, the West built social systems that commodify, exploit and degrade them, and spread them around the world by imperial processes of colonization, modernization, globalization and representative democratization. These violent processes are presented as the universal and necessary linear stages of development and progress to modernization, democracy and world peace. Most of the major modern Western political traditions from the Enlightenment to the present share this generic worldview, while differing over specifics on the left, centre and right. In the 1940s, Karl Polanyi argued that these modernizing processes disembed humans from life-sustaining ecosocial systems and re-embed them in abstract, global vicious social systems that overlook, exploit and destroy the underlying virtuous ecosocial systems on which they depend. He called these processes the ‘great transformation’. The more recent social science on the ‘great acceleration’ since World War II builds on this base. Polanyi also predicted that if humans did not transform these systems they would destroy sustainable social systems and the environment. His analysis continues to be updated and applied to the ‘great acceleration’ after World War II. Nevertheless, the dire warnings are met with both inaction and gridlock or, at best, mitigation within the shared worldview and its constitutive institutions.Footnote ³⁰

One of the main reasons that moderns have difficulty in seeing clearly the ways these modernizing systems cause the sustainability crises is that, as subjects of them, they are deeply socialized into its legitimating worldview and the competing interpretations within it. Consequently, they misperceive through this modernist lens the destructive relationships between the processes and the background, informal social and ecological systems they exploit yet also depend upon, as Barry Commoner argued. I will now describe these processes briefly so we can see how they operate and then how the dominant form of modern government – representative democracy – is subject to them.Footnote ³¹

The first process was the enclosure of common lands in Europe, and the second enclosure through the dispossession of the embedded lifeways of indigenous peoples throughout the world by means of colonization. These processes involved genocide, slavery, displacement, reservations, residential schools and the discrediting of their embedded ways of knowing and being as ‘primitive’ and at the lowest possible level of cognitive and historical development.

The second set of processes consisted in the conversion of most of the earth into the private property of corporations by the global spread of Western corporate and property law and its violent enforcement by colonial authorities and, after decolonization, neocolonial military-political complexes. These processes reconceive the living earth as a limitless storehouse of commodifiable ‘natural resources’ disembedded from their interdependent participation in the fragile symbiotic networks and renewability cycles that sustain life for billions of years. These resources are re-embedded in the abstract, competitive relations of the global market system. The competition among corporations, driven by profit-seeking and exploitive technological development, is exhausting non-renewable resources and using up renewables more rapidly than they renew themselves naturally.Footnote ³² The destruction that this system causes to the earth systems throughout the chains of dispossession, extraction, finance, commodification, production, consumption and waste disposal is treated as an externality for which the corporations are not responsible. They tend to resist regulation unless the costs are subsidized.

The third set of modernizing processes effect a similar transformation of human productive capacities. They disembed humans and their capacities to produce and consume from the informal, intersubjective, symbiotic, informal social relationships that sustain them, their families and their communities (social capital). They re-embed individual productive capacities into the abstract, competitive, and unequal relationships of the global labour market as commodities for sale to private or public corporations for a wage or salary. The corporations govern their employees non-democratically. Individuals and unions are constrained to compete for jobs with other workers near and far, as well as with automation, the unemployed and the precarious informal global economies of the poor. The degradation and destruction that these processes cause to the cultivation of cooperative, democratic working and socializing ethics and relationships of mutual aid that sustain human communities and their well-being are treated as another externality of modernization. Corporations are seldom held responsible for these effects, yet they function perversely to drive wages further down.Footnote ³³

The fourth and more recent process is the emergence of the global age of surveillance capitalism with the Internet. Every aspect of the behaviour of individual users of the Internet is mined by large internet corporations, sold to other corporations, processed through algorithms and then employed to subtlety influence and govern the future behaviour of users in almost every area of their lives in a post-truth age. As a result, users are disembedded from their ecosocial lifeworld and freely subject themselves to the world of cyberspace. Simultaneously, the political and military institutions of modern states also engage in the surveillance of their own citizens and the citizens and governments of other states. The damage that these algorithmic modes of governance, meme interpolation and alienation from the ecosocial lifeworld do to ecosocial, democratic self-formation through tough, critical, truth-seeking and accountable dialogues with differently situated fellow citizens here and now is unacknowledged or treated as another externality.Footnote ³⁴

In short, the modern assemblage of systemic processes are extractive and exploitive rather than regenerative, linear rather than cyclical, externalizing rather than internalizing, and thus vicious and life-destroying rather than virtuous and sustainable. As Kimmerer, Joanna Macy, and others argue, it is a monstrous vicious system; a Windigo that super-preys on life’s gift–gratitude–reciprocity relationships.Footnote ³⁵ In these respects, it is the antithesis of cyclical, ecosocial economics and politics.Footnote ³⁶

Modern Representative Government: The Great Democratic Disconnection and Deficit

The fifth systemic process of modernization is the spread of representative government around the world of modern states and international institutions as the mode of governance of this assemblage of systems. This process of ‘democratization’, as it is called, began in eighteenth-century Western Europe, spread to the non-Western world through colonization and decolonization, the Mandate System of the League of Nations, and is continued today under the auspices of the United Nations Constitutional Assistance Programs. Like the other processes, it is imposed on non-Western societies by violent means on the widely shared premise of modern political thought that authoritarian means are necessary and they lead ‘less-developed’ peoples up through stages of development to representative democracy, the rule of law, free markets, international institutions and perpetual peace.Footnote ³⁷

The best ‘democratic’ argument for elected representative government to replace monarchy in the eighteenth century was presented by William Paine in The Rights of Man (1792):Footnote ³⁸

On this hopeful democratic view, representative governments would grow out of and extend thriving local democracies, just as a grafted branch extends an already living tree and its permaculture. It would thus solve the scale problem of size and population of governments in modern states without abandoning democracy. Unfortunately, as John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx and Peter Kropotkin pointed out fifty years later, this is not what happened. Instead of the people governing themselves, competing political parties campaigned and governed over the people, yet always in the name of the people. The proper name for ruler/ruled form of government should be demoarchy (rule over (arche) and in the name of the people by the elected party), not democracy (the self-government of the people themselves). Mill and Marx argued that it tends to be rule by the class that controls public opinion. Since the claim that the party which gains a majority or plurality of votes is governing for the people can be used to justify just about any legislation, Mill presented the classic liberal response that has become the global norm of legitimacy. The government has to be constrained by a constitution that places certain fundamental rights beyond democratic negotiation: that is, ‘constitutional democracy’ (or, more accurately, constitutional representative demoarchy).Footnote ³⁹

This has had two consequences. The first is that the modern legal systems constitutionalized, or constitutionally protected, the constitutive features of the four vicious and unsustainable systemic processes of the previous section, thereby placing them beyond democratic negotiation. Second, the democratic participation of citizens is legalized as the ‘civil’ rights to participate within the institutions of the representative system: voting, campaigning, expressing opinions and deliberating within the official public spheres in hopes of influencing public policy and elected officials, and the right to civil disobedience if it is exercised with the objective of promoting constitutional democracy. In these two main ways, constitutional representative demoarchy is disconnected from, rather than ‘ingrafted upon’, participatory democracy.

In this respect, the establishment and eventual globalization of representative constitutional demoarchy as the primary meaning of ‘democracy’ and ‘democratization’ serves to legitimate the triumph of the elite republican model that the propertied authors of The Federalist Papers advanced against democracy, yet cleverly disguised under the name of democracy. They wrote:Footnote ⁴⁰

As the young Marx pointed out, and as we will see in the following section, participatory democracy did not disappear. Humans exercising powers of self-government with and for each other informally in everyday relationships and systems is the basis of all sustainable social life, as our increasingly divisive and anti-social age reminds us. These informal relations continue under any form of government. Constitutional representative demoarchy, like other forms of ruler/ruled constitutions, depends on and colonizes this unacknowledged democratic lifeworld, and, as noted, concentrates official political power in representative institutions, thereby weakening and disempowering local self-government.Footnote ⁴¹ The reconceptualization of this form of government as ‘democracy’ and ‘democratization’ is one of the great conceptual transformations that accompanied and continues to legitimate modernization.Footnote ⁴² Participatory democracy was renamed ‘radical democracy’, cooperativism, community-based organization and, by Kropotkin, ‘anarchy’ (that is, self-government without the division of the people into rulers and ruled).Footnote ⁴³

The justification of representative demoarchy as ‘democratic’ is not participation, but, rather, the consent of the governed for the party that wins the majority or plurality of votes in elections, whether or not the individual votes for the winning party; or simply by the tacit consent of going along with the outcome without voting. The people are said to ‘delegate’ or ‘alienate’ their powers of self-government to the ruling party in elections. Yet, this too is a conceptual innovation. Voters do not delegate or alienate their powers of self-government to elected representatives. Rather, as Rousseau noted, they abnegate their exercise of them. They delegate or alienate to elected representatives the right to exercise political power-over them by means of legislation and enforcement through the rule of law.

Representatives rarely exercise the democratic powers with each other as free and equal co-governors by working ‘across the aisle’ with members of other parties. Rather, they legislate by means of majority votes over minority party members. Even within governing parties, power-over is concentrated further in presidencies, prime ministers, cabinets, whipping party members and various hierarchical offices. These are classic forms of power-over, not democratic power-with, which facilitate rather than foreclose the iron law of oligarchy.Footnote ⁴⁴ Moreover, non-democratic, bureaucratic ministries, hierarchical public and private institutions and military-industrial-research-expertise complexes surround representative institutions. Furthermore, representatives are dependent on private corporations for campaign funding, jobs in their ridings and taxes, and subject to continual lobbying. They are thus constrained to act in accord with the linear economic development model or face defeat in the next election. Despite these manifestly non-democratic systems, these modern states are routinely called ‘democratic societies’. Finally, since World War II, representative governments and corporations have constructed a system of institutions of global governance and international law that can override domestic governments that attempt to change the unsustainable status quo.Footnote ⁴⁵ As David Held concludes, ‘Representative democracy, accordingly, is democracy ‘made safe’ for the modern world and, particularly, for the modern capitalist economy’.Footnote ⁴⁶

For these reasons, as David Held and his co-authors have shown, it is not surprising that state-centred representative governments and international institutions generate vicious, systemic gridlock or minor changes when actors attempt to address the sustainability crises through these channels.Footnote ⁴⁷ It is the gridlock of systemic processes of democratic disconnection and deficit.Footnote ⁴⁸

The fatal flaw of these demoarchic, power-over forms of government is that the governing parties do not have to listen to and work with the opposition parties or citizens who voted against them. They can simply impose their will, often with a patina of ‘consultation’ to give it the appearance of democratic legitimacy. This power-over position invariably comes with the presumption that they also have knowledge-over what is best for the demos. Modern political theory reinforces this presumption. Yet, the only way governors can learn what counts as ill-being, repair and sustainable well-being of the diverse, interdependent members and situations of the people is to enter into dialogues of mutual education and enlightenment with them as equals. They can then work up sustainable ways of cooperating, putting them into practice, reviewing and contesting them, and beginning the learning cycle again. This is the pragmatic public reasoning-with and exercising power-with of equal citizens and governors that participatory democracy enables and enacts in conjunction with responsive representative democracy.Footnote ⁴⁹

Aristotle was among the first to articulate the unique, epistemic superiority of democracy in comparison with ruler/ruled forms of government:Footnote ⁵⁰

Leopold also pointed out the power-over flaw of presumptive knowledge, not only over the demos but also over the natural world. It is ‘eventually self-defeating’. In addition, Davidson argued that power-over leads the holders to be ‘one-eyed’, voracious and self-destructive, rather than listening to, learning from and cooperating with their fellow citizens, human and more-than-human. Accordingly, the task today is to extend linguistic dialogues of mutual learning among ‘all affected’ humans to perceptual dialogues among humans and more-than-human lifeforms so we can learn their sustainability conditions. These dialogues are taking place among Indigenous knowledge holders, ecological and social scientists, stakeholders, government officials and many other participants.Footnote ⁵¹ These are examples of democratic Gaian ‘joining hands’ – of public reasoning and acting together. It is to these practices of regeneration that we now turn.