Democracy & Climate Change

“Beginning with where our feet first touch the earth, we send greetings and thanks to all members of the natural world.”

Braiding Sweetgrass, Allegiance to Gratitude
Robin Wall Kimmerer

Perhaps our democracy itself is the problem, showing itself to be fragile and flawed, unable to respond to the challenges of the crisis. Multi-national institutions have failed to bring the world together with common purpose. Governments have veered back and forth in their commitment to meeting the emergency, taking decades to make any progress or dismantling progress when new parties come to power. Factions have successfully promoted ‘essential’ needs that make action on climate change undesirable, often minimizing or denying the very reality of the situation. Countries are moving away from democracy and toward authoritarian rule. Science is derided as fake, and conspiracy is taken as gospel. When nations meet for a 27th time next year will its ‘actions’ be enough or just another example of our failure as a species?

If there is a way out it is in questioning the roots of our ‘global democracy’ and freeing it from its fatal flaws. And the flaws are easy to see. Athens, that lighthouse of modern democracies, was fundamentally a slave state, with about a third of its population held in slavery. Rome, whose republic has been held as a model for our legislatures and legal systems, also maintained itself through slavery and the oppression of others, and itself failed as a democracy, succumbing to dictatorship and empire. Further, all of the urban societies emerging out of the advent of agriculture based their success on unsustainable ecological practices leading to saltification of crop land, deforestation and species extinction. Democratic or otherwise, the human project that led to urban centers and states created the fundamental human problems we have been faced with since — inequality, injustice, oppression, poverty, war, ecological destruction.

Our modern democracies of the global north, emerging alongside mercantilism and capitalism, did not so much atone for the ‘sins of their fathers’ as add to them. To slavery, inequity, oppression, war and ecological devastation was added the invention of race and racism, and the supremacy of capital or corporate interest over the individual. The idealism of our modern age has often only covered over the fundamental injustices found at the root of our democracies, instead of cleansing them of its deficiencies. Democracy “of the people, by the people, and for the people” has not so much been in danger of perishing as Abraham Lincoln suggested as being in danger of never fully being born. Our modern democracies have always been partial and constrained by anti-democratic forces built into its very design. If the countries of the world have not responded to the urgent reality of climate change it is no wonder. The interests of the many, the people, and the planet are continually neglected in the interest of the needs of the few.

More troubling, modern democratic capitalism has been the fundamental cause of our climate predicament. Democratic institutions protecting and enlarging the prerogatives and privileges of elites who wielded that power through capital and industry have made possible the emergence of a global carbon-based economy founded on open markets, exploitation of natural resources and the oppression of people. That this unfettered, ever accelerating project based in ‘fossil capitalism’ should lead to our climate crisis is a natural outgrowth of the system’s very design. The exploitation of resources and people from the beginning now threatens to extinguish the very civilization it created. Our modern democracies, in that sense, have been the blueprint of our own destruction and not the balm healing it. Partial democracy is an evil that allows the inequity and destruction build into its system to flourish while it points to ideals of peace, fellowship and common interest that are not being followed. It is no wonder that citizens often turn away from our ‘democracies’ and toward authoritarian movements based in emotion, hate and lies. Democracy is not alleviating their suffering. It is only continuing it and making it worse.

How then to better water the ‘tree of liberty,’ to nurture a kind of democracy that works? Jefferson’s prescription to water it with the “blood of patriots and tyrants” fits well the ‘revolutionary’ ethos of our modern age, but does nothing to understand the tree itself. We must plant the right kind of tree, one whose roots and branches embrace the whole, not just the part. We must look to the design of our democracies.

In the indigenous Haudenosaunee (or Iroquois) myth there is a sky tree that is uprooted in order for the world below, our world, to be. For the Confederacy of Five Nations that followed, an analogous ‘world tree’ became the central symbol of their democracy. It was the ‘Tree of Peace’ planted by the Peacekeeper himself, who instructed warriors of the five nations to bury their weapons under its roots before he planted it again. This tree became the unifying symbol of peace and unity for the Confederacy, with its four roots spreading to the four directions, with its eagle, sitting atop the tree, holding a clutch of arrows, watchful of the peace, a tree rooted in the earth, spreading out to embrace all people.

Can we not envision such a tree of peace, liberty and democracy for our world, turning to the indigenous understanding of the world that lies beneath all our new-fangled modernity and urbanism? To do so, we need to both challenge the inequities, racism, oppression and exploitation built into the system, but as important, embrace a deeper understanding of our connection with the world.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, in her Braiding Sweetgrass,** shares the story of the daily recitation of the Haudenosaunee ‘Thanksgiving Address’ at a nearby Onondaga Nation school where the students would share in reading it each week, teachers reminding students that “beginning where our feet first touch the earth, we send greetings and thanks to all member of the natural world.” All members of the natural world. This idea is so foreign to much of our modern world with its focus on the human, the individual, and its relegation of others, be they human, plant, animal or mineral, to mere resource. In the Thanksgiving Address, thanks is given one stanza at a time to a greater whole, giving each equal value to the human. The earth itself, seen as mother, the waters, the fish, the plants, our food and medicines, the trees, the animals, the birds, the winds, the lightning and the thunder, the sun, the enlightened teachers, and the creator, intending in that thanks to leave nothing out, and ending by saying, “Now our minds are one.”

“Cultures of gratitude,” concludes Kimmerer, “ must also be cultures of reciprocity. Each person, human or no, is bound to every other in a reciprocal relationship. Just as all beings have a duty to me, I have a duty to them.” This vision, embracing all beings and seeing a duty and responsibility toward all beings, is not unique to the Haudenosaunee or even indigenous culture, but it is far from the way our economic and legal gears operate in this ‘modern’ world. Seeing all species as ‘people,’ with standing and rights, seeing the ‘inanimate’ earth not simply as resource, but relationship, giving equity and equality to all people, starting with the great family of ourselves, humans, but continuing outward to all. Only in this way, with this kind of fundamental re-ordering of our vision can we truly address the climate crisis. For the climate crisis is simply the end-game of the long disaster beget by our inability to see the other as us, as connected to us, mutuality dependent, unable to thrive or survive without being in proper relationship, in reciprocity, with the other.

This, then, is the ‘metanoia’ to borrow the New Testament word, the change of mind and heart, that we all need. The bureaucrats and politicians, the scientists and engineers, the entrepreneurs and the corporate lobbyists will continue to offer their solutions within the system of modern democracy that has fashioned itself since the time of Columbus and the opening of a global civilization. Unless the technical fixes also embrace that change of heart, however, we will only continue hurtling toward our dark end. For a good two thousand years or more, the civilization project with its shining democracy has been on the wrong track, hinting at the great magnanimity of human creativity, wisdom and compassion, but only leading us in the end deeper into the abyss. Will there be a ‘great turning?’ Will, in the end, the best of our humanity lead us to return to the understanding that is our original inheritance as humans? I will start by giving thanks in the manner of all people who seek reciprocity and connection with all beings:

“Everything we need to live a good life is here on Mother Earth. For all the love that is still around us, we gather our minds together as one and send our choicest words of greetings and thanks to the Creator. Now our minds are one.”

Onondaga Thanksgiving Address
As quoted in Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, Allegiance to Gratitude

16 XI 21 – Current Global CO2 at 414.57 ppm*

* Find our current global CO2 as measured by NOAA at the Mauna Loa Observatory by visiting Daily CO2 at https://www.co2.earth/daily-co2.

**Find Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer, 2020 at https://milkweed.org/book/braiding-sweetgrass.