1. Lucy Sargisson
Illustrations: Anna Zabdyrska
Democracy,
Nature,
and Utopia
T
here is a trend in contemporary environmental political theory towards
a call for a more democratic relationship between humanity and nature.
Deep ecologists have been doing this for a long
time but the trend I’ve observed comes from
more mainstream sources. These include John
Dryzek, who wants to develop a more ecologically responsive deliberative democracy
and Andrew Dobson, who argues in his most
recent work that we need to start a process of
democratic listening to nature. It also includes
thinker such as Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett who explore a new political ecology. All
these thinkers raise questions about political
agency and political participation: Who (or
what) belongs to the demos? And they have
all, in different ways (from diverse epistemological and ontological perspectives) arrived
at the conclusion that ‘we’ (that is to say,
humans) need to include ‘nature’ in the demos.
Re-thinking environmental politics in these
more inclusive ways involves re-thinking the
relationships between humans and non-human beings, between beings, things and stuff.
And I suggest that utopias are a good place in
which to start this process.
Calls for a ‘democracy of all
nature’
In his most recent work, Andrew Dobson issues a simple but radical challenge to green
political theory. Historically, he says, attempts to broaden democracy have focused
on enabling excluded ‘Others’ to ‘speak’ (in
order that they can participate in democratic
politics). But he argues that if we really want
to expand the demos to include non-humans,
we need to re-focus our attention onto listening.
According to Dobson, ‘the usefulness of the
capacity to speak is compromised without the
reciprocal capacity to listen – if we do not
know how to listen, how will we know what
to speak about? Given this, it seems odd that
political theorists should have spent so much
time worrying about how to get people to speak
without thinking at all about how we get them
to listen’1.
Historically, the excluded ‘Others’ have needed
to acquire political competencies. Dobson’s
suggestion that those inside the demos or
citizen body should learn to listen (above all,
to those outside the citizen body) prefigures
a very different kind of democracy. It places
the onus on those who already hold power. It
suggests that broadening the demos to include
non-humans would involve learning to ‘listen
to nature’. But it is unclear quite what this
would look like.
John Dryzek’s work on the environment and
deliberative democracy might help. He argues
that ‘democracy can exist not only among
humans, but also in human dealings with the
natural world’. and he suggests that nature
exhibits ‘a variety of levels and kinds of communication to which we might try to adapt’.
He says ‘The key is to downplay ‘centrism’
of any kind, and focus instead on the kinds
of interactions that might occur across the
boundaries between humanity and nature.’
He’s seeking an interchange with nature that
involves progressively less of what he calls
‘human autism’.2
But Dryzek doesn’t just want to use liberal democracy as the vehicle for this communicative
shift. He doesn’t think it’s sufficient to grant
legal rights and guardians to animals. ‘Any
A.Dobson, Democracy and Nature: Speaking and Listening,
‘Political Studies’ 2010, 58(4), p. 752-768
2
J.Dryzek, Political and Ecological Communication, 2007,
reprinted from: Ecology and Democracy, ed. F. Matthews,
London: Frank Cass, 1996, p. 3-29, next edition: J. Dryzek,
Political and Ecological Communication [in:] J. Dryzek, D.
Schlosberg, Debating the Earth: the environmental politics reader, Oxfrod: Oxfrod University Press, 2007, p. 637
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2. such representation might downgrade nature
to [just] another set of interests, disaggregating and isolating these interests by assigning
them to identifiable natural objects, thus
ignoring their intrinsically ecological (interconnected) character’. Instead, Dryzek turns
to Habermas’s notion of communicative rationality, grounded in ideal speech situations:
‘The key, he says, would be to treat communication, and so communicative rationality, as
extending to entities that can act as agents,
even though they lack the self-awareness that
connotes subjectivity. Agency is not the same
as subjectivity, and only the former need be
sought in nature’3.
Dryzek declines to offer a model of how this
might look, saying that it would be inappropriate to offer a ‘blueprint’ because this new
kind of democracy should emerge discursively. That’s understandable. But it’s a bit
frustrating. Dyrzek and Dobson both make
important arguments but they both stop, just
when things begin to get interesting. And
I’m going to suggest that utopian fiction and
experiments can help. I’m going to examine
2 examples, very briefly, and I’ll begin with
a real-world experimental movement. These
are ‘The Councils of All Beings’. You may feel
that they shouldn’t be included because they
are coming from a deep ecological perspective, which is incompatible with deliberative democracy - but I think they’re worth a
look. The website of Joanna Macy (author of
the book ‘Thinking Like a Mountain’ and a
founding figure in the movement), describes
the councils as a step towards ‘opening’ a new
relationship with nature. These usually occur
as guided workshops, which seek to ‘connect’
participants to the world around them, leading to a shift in consciousness and, ultimately,
to permit the ‘voices’ of non-humans to be
‘heard’. The workshops involve a series of
steps. These are ‘mourning’ (‘allow[ing] ourselves to feel the pain of the earth), ‘remembering’ (our evolutionary history and releasing the memories in our DNA) and finally
‘extending our identity’. They combine to
enable participants to ‘give voice’ to nature:
‘after finding an ally in the natural world
and making a mask to represent that ally,
we discover that we can indeed give voice to
the voiceless ones. In Council, we lend our
voices to the animals and plants and features
of the landscape and are shocked at the very
different view of the world that emerges from
their dialogue. Creative suggestions for human
actions emerge and we invoke the powers
and knowledge of these other life-forms to
empower us in our lives4.
This is a method that seeks a deeper intuitive or spiritual understanding of nature.
It invites the human participants to ‘open’
themselves and to ‘hear’ the voices of nature,
and then to represent them. I find this deeply
problematic because it appears open to all the
objections about abuses of representative politics and interpreting the needs of the Other
which have been frequently voiced against
more traditional forms of representative politics. However, it does offer us a space in which
to imagine – and perhaps experience – how it
might feel to develop a new sensibility and a
more inclusive polity from a deep ecological
perspective.
I now propose a brief visit to Marge Piercy’s
Woman on the Edge of Time. Piercy depicts a participatory democracy embedded in a society
in which a different ecological sensibility
exists. For example, Connie is told, “We plan
Ibidem, p.638-639
“Who is that with the green hair?” [asks Connie]
“Earth-Advocate [says Luciente] - speaks for
the rights of the total environment. Beside
per is the Animal-Advocate. ... Every spring
some people dream they are the new Animal
Advocate or Earth Advocate. Those who feel
this come together and the choice among them
falls by lot”6.
The council is discussing a proposal to clear
some woodland in order to produce more
edible crops for one village. The woodland is
a rainwater catchment area and this proves
contentious:
“We have none too much water, people” a
person with green hair said…“Without water
we can grow nothing. Our ancestors destroyed
water as if there were an infinite amount of
M. Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time, New York: Alfred
Knopf, 1979, s. 125
6
Ibidem, p. 151
5
all quotations above from http://www.rainforestinfo.
org.au/deep-eco/council.htm
4
3
cooperatively. We can afford to waste nothing.
You might say our – you’d say religion? – ideas
make us see ourselves as partners with water,
air, birds, fish, trees” 5. In this utopia, humans
have learned to notice (and respond to) nonverbal communication from sentient and nonsentient nature. With some mammals this is
quite sophisticated, but it relies always on the
human learning about the mammal’s norms of
communication. At one point, Connie asks her
host (Luciente) about ‘government’. Luciente
is puzzled (because there is no state and very
little governance in Mattapoisset) but she
invites Connie to observe a meeting of the
township’s planning council. This gathering
consists of 25-30 people of mixed ages. There is
plenty of argument, but no ‘speechifying’. And
it contains two special advocates:
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3. it, sucking it out of the earth and dirtying
and poisoning it as flowed,” .. .Let us not be
cavalier about water. What does the soil bank
say?7”
The computerized soil bank indicates that the
water table will indeed be affected and the
proposal is rejected. Instead, the neighbouring
community (that needs more crops) will be
aided by plant geneticists and soil scientists to
increase the output of the existing land.
Here Piercy is deploying the twin function
of utopian criticism and creativity – what
I call the Janus face of a utopian approach.
Janus was a Roman mythical figure – he’s the
God of beginnings (the month of January is
named after Janus) and endings, change and
transitions. I use him to signify the ways that
utopias simultaneously face the present and
the future, and the ways that the utopian gaze
offers simultaneous criticism and creativity.
Piercy’s voices from an imaginary future tell
us that their ancestors messed up, and left
a depleted ecology. The creative responses
offered by Piercy include a radically egalitarian and democratic system of autonomous
governance.
Woman on the Edge of Time imagines how
(amongst other things) a small, face-to-face
democracy could contain advocates for the
shifting actors of a given context. It imagines
what kind of society might emerge from a
politics that includes natural agents. It offers
a picture of a political community containing
humans who listen to non-human life, even if
it is unclear how nature can ‘speak for itself’.
Reading it enables us to begin to contemplate
how such a society might feel and also to identify problems with it. For example, Piercy still
uses the language of rights and the politics of
7
Ibidem, p.151
advocacy and I wonder whether this raises the
same representational problems as the Councils of all Beings.
Utopias such as Woman on the Edge of Time permit
the reader imaginary visits to societies in
which communication with nature forms part
of daily life and is structured into systems
of (self) governance. This is really valuable.
Utopias open up spaces of possibility. In these
spaces we can explore positive alternatives
and anticipate problems and I suggest that
we need to do this if we are to think seriously
about something as incredible as ‘listening to
nature’. I’ve been making claims about the
value of utopianism for an environmental
democratic politics. But I don’t want to overstress its value. It has limits. In particular it
doesn’t provide models to follow or blueprints
to copy. It’s important to note about the Piercy
example, for instance, that the democratic
utopian systems and processes that I described
are embedded in a whole-society vision. It is
ontologically and culturally different from
now. It contains people who are motivated by
different values than we are. It is embedded
in a different culture. We can’t just extract
and apply the democratic processes from such
texts.
projects and they always lie over the horizon;
unrealised and unrealisable.
In this paper, we have visited two different
utopian attempts to imagine a more democratic relationship with nature. We might
feel that neither is entirely satisfactory. We
might find them deeply flawed, unattractive
or simply bizarre. But the exercise of examining them is still valuable. To explore an idea
to breaking point and to observe what happens when we do so can help us to clarify our
thoughts about its first principles. For me,
it confirms my discomfort with Dryzek’s approach and raises concerns about the politics
of representation.
This paper was first presented at the Utopian Studies
Society Annual Conference in New Lanark, UK, July 2013.
An extended version of this paper is available as Lucy
Sargisson ‘A Democracy of all Nature: taking a utopian
approach’ in the journal Politics Electronic version: 13
DEC 2012 DOI: 10.1111/1467-9256.12005 or hard copy: Politics
Volume 33, Issue 2, pages 124–134, June 2013.
Their value, for social scientists, is partly
heuristic. They permit imaginary trial-anderror thinking – they become fictive versions
of philosophical thought experiments. This
is significant and it builds on the mirror
function of utopianism that’s been identified
by scholars of canonical utopias8. They reflect
our imperfections and flaws back to us. They
encourage us onwards to something better. But
they are not perfect Utopias are impossible
M. de Geus, Utopian Sustainability: ecological utopianism,
[In:] The Transition to Sustainable Living and Practice, eds. L.
Leonard, J. Barry, Bradford: Emerald, 2009
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