Abstract
The growing appreciation of the global environmental crisis has
generated what should have been a predictable response: those with power are using it
to appropriate for themselves the world’s diminishing resources, augmenting their
power to do so while further undermining the power of the weak to oppose them. In
taking this path, they are at the same time blocking efforts to create forms of society
that would be ecologically sustainable. If there is one word that could bring into focus
what is wrong with this response it is ‘democracy’. Democracy means power in the
hands of the people, which, by definition, means opposition to the concentration of
power. It is inconceivable that if we had genuine democracy, where people were fully
informed of the issues, they would not choose to share the burdens of scarcity and
organize to live in accordance with the limits of their environment. Yet the notion of
democracy is problematic. Those striving to concentrate power are pursuing this in the
name of democracy. They have identified democracy with the imposition of free markets
and the freedom of people to use their wealth to dominate others. In this paper I will
show how process philosophy provides the basis for justifying and further developing the
traditional notion of democracy to counter this reformed notion, providing a vision of a
democratic form of society that could address environmental problems. To achieve this,
I will argue, it is necessary to reformulate the grand narrative of civilization on the basis
of human ecology, a science which, construing humans as participants in a creative
nature, can replace economics as the master science for formulating public policy.