(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Half of the world's countries are democratic, and despite the threats to democracy, the fight to secure the global environment must take place on a democratic basis, because more authoritarian states are rarely ahead in the environmental fight. But is democracy up to the task? And can democracy help each of us come to terms with the situation?
In his broad-based and thorough book on ecology and democracy, Ecological Democracy: Caring for the Earth in the Anthropocene, the Norwegian environmental philosopher Odin Lysaker claims that democracy can only fulfill its enormous ecological tasks if it changes and develops. Just as the environmental crisis makes us reassess our ethical role as human beings, it also forces a reassessment of the foundations of politics.
The ecological policy
An ecologically designed kratos (governance) is only conceivable if we can assume an ecological arrangement demos (folk). We know that ecology, and in particular the relative balance of the major earth systems, is crucial for our lives as humans. Disturbances of the atmosphere, of the hydrological cycle, of soils and ecosystems threaten us. These insights have presented themselves rather suddenly, in terms of cultural history – and the effects in question are unfolding rather slowly. This becomes a problem for ecological policy.
On behalf of melting glaciers, the atmosphere or the fish at the bottom of a fjord, a form of ecological care arises as a consequence.
At the center of Lysaker's discussion is a similar title from 1996: Freya Mathews Ecology and Democracy – and Lysaker's book is partly a response to the challenges she formulates in the opening of this book: "Can a [representative] democracy respond adequately to a crisis that is not directly visible, i.e. when it can only be identified by experts and those who are particularly informed, but not ordinary citizens? And what is the relationship between ethics and democracy? Are democratic systems based on moral values or on self-interest? And if they rest on self-interest, can they guarantee adequate protection of the natural world?”
Have we reached a point where the limitations of democracy must bear responsibility for our collective climate defeat? Lysaker's answer is that democracy is in fact the only solution, but that its basis must be ecological and its leeway planetary.
Affected parties
Quite rightly, the constitution or the constitution on a national level is the legal and political basis for democracy, but Lysaker and the thinkers he discusses want to go deeper: What constitutes us as human beings? And what constitutes democratic forums at other levels?
Lysaker develops a fruitful thought that has its roots in the American pragmatist John Dewey: A public consists of affected parties. And a political system is by far relational: It functions as an ecosystem.
Publics that consist of affected parties can thus accommodate non-humans, landscapes and the atmosphere.
When environmentally conscious citizens speak on behalf of nature, whether it is a river, forests, birds, earthworms, soils, climate systems or glaciers, it is because they affect them directly and indirectly. Here Lysaker quotes the deep ecologist Warwick Fox, who refers to the various parts of nature as existential conditions for the earth's household, i.e. the ecology which in turn conditions our life. Publics that consist of affected parties can thus accommodate non-humans, landscapes and the atmosphere. Lysaker's approach is not only biocentric, but ecocentric.
caregiving
When a completely general understanding of the earth as the basis of life sinks in, environmental policy becomes existential – and essential. The public, as Jürgen Habermas understands it, as an arena for public discussion and democratic deliberation, can no longer be understood as a social construction. Nor can ecology be satisfied with considering 'the external world' as socially constructed, as an agreement without strong truth claims or metaphysics, Lysaker believes – and thus takes issue with parts of the Frankfurt School's thinking [See Adorno article on page 20].
That we are dependent on the earth's climatic systems, on other species and cycles, is a truth as strong as death, and the insight is both existential and metaphysical. When this insight sinks in, both ethics and politics look different.
Lysaker's project is a pronounced continuation of the eco-philosophy of Arne Johan Vetlesen – who has also made his mark internationally with his books The Denial of Nature (2015) and Cosmologies of the Anthropocene (2019), which is also represented in Routledge's environmental series. Vetlesen emphasizes, among other things, that there is a predetermined basis for ethics – which cannot be opted out – namely the bonds between people. These bonds that make up the coexistence itself can be both bonds of dependence and emotional bonds. The other's relevance to myself is a prerequisite for all ethics and politics, something that precedes all theories and systems that have to do with obligations and rights.
We must recognize that we are affected by and constantly affect all the living and non-living things that make up ecosystems.
For Lysaker, this means that love, in a broad sense, is crucial – also for democracy. And not only that, but love must be understood as broadly as possible, because we must recognize that we are touched by and constantly touch all the living and non-living things that make up ecosystems.
Natural murder or ecocide
One of the most original things in Lysaker's book is how it connects the poetic and the political, often in surprising ways. An apparently floating postulate about ecological love becomes concrete when it comes to care and abuse as opposed to natural murder or ecocide. Here, the poetic nature of the love of nature becomes both bloody seriousness and an institutional question. What kind of crime are we dealing with when a mining company accidentally dumps a ton of cyanide into a river? What crime does the Norwegian state commit, for example, when it allows the mining company Nordic Mining to dump the toxic substance SIBX in the Førdefjord?
What kind of crime are we dealing with when a mining company accidentally dumps a ton of cyanide into a river?
In a thorough review of Polly Higgins' formulations for an international ecocide legislation (which is now on its way to approval), Lysaker shows that ecological democracy actually works internationally. That citizens' assemblies, local committees and other micro-democratic units are constantly appearing at local level, especially in connection with ecological issues (such as the Førdefjorden). It shows that the parties concerned come together spontaneously, that democracy and political action, whether on behalf of melting glaciers, the atmosphere or the fish at the bottom of a fjord, arise as a consequence of a form of ecological care – or love – that also manifests itself to be deeply political.
Citizen by nature
It is difficult to convey the thorough and theoretically broad systematics in Lysaker's book. He ranges from a fairly large dry and sober political analysis as in Habermas' discourse theory to the ecopsychologist and the nature-poetic phenomenology of David Abram. In the somewhat surprising constellation of ecological (actually, frankly, cosmic) love and the question of democracy – supported by a series of well-chosen quotes – the reader gains a surprising insight: The question of ecology is perfectly suited to revitalizing political thinking and theory – which all too easily degenerates into precisely a systematized self-interest, a formalized and uninspiring tug-of-war between group interests.
In the UN declarations, in the former Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme's statement about natural murder as unacceptable, in the various formulations of the earth as an affected party and us citizens as citizens of nature and affected in a thousand ways, there is a poetic-political impulse. In this sense, the book fulfills one of the basic tasks of philosophy: to contribute to articulating truths and insights which, in a certain sense, can repent individuals. The conversion of the individual becomes part of a collective realization – a political turnaround that we badly need in our time. Here, Lysaker's book is a significant contribution to a decisive debate.
