Overview

Ecological crises threaten all forms of life on earth. Democracy too is endangered, as popular discontent, elite malfeasance, and unresponsive institutions imperil its survival. Present political concepts have proven inadequate to meeting these challenges, and their inadequacies are themselves symptoms of the failures of prevailing political, cultural, and ecological stories and practices. This book offers a new vision of ecological and participatory democratic life for a time of crisis. Identifying myth and ritual as key resources for contemporary politics, Earthborn Democracy excavates practices and narratives that illustrate the interdependence necessary to inspire ecological renewal. It tells stories of multispecies agency and egalitarian political organization across history, from ancient Mesopotamia and the precolonial Americas to contemporary social movements, emphasizing Indigenous traditions and resistance. Resonating across these practices and stories past and present is a belief that we are all-human as well as nonhuman-earthborn, and this can serve as the basis for reimagining democracy. Allying visionary political theory with environmental activism, Earthborn Democracy provides a foundation and a guide for collective action in pursuit of earthly flourishing.

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9780231216418

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Reviews

Are you tired of democratic theories organized only around human exceptionalism and institutional representation? Then this is the book for you. Earthborn Democracy exposes layer after layer of the unconscious modern myth, as it engages the pertinence of indigenous earthborn myths to democracy. It is time, the authors show, to replace simplified stories of causality with morphic fields of entanglement, doing so to release the potential vitality of democracy today. A bracing study, always alert to how earthborn we are. -- William E. Connolly, author of <i>Stormy Weather: Pagan Cosmologies, Christian Times, Climate Wreckage</i> I found this to be an incredibly compelling argument and discussion of the myriad ways in which democracy and environmental justice are entangled, using a nonspeciesist frame, humbly leaning upon Indigenous thinking and practices, and generously incorporating the work of other leading thinkers. -- Adrian Parr, author of <i>Earthlings: Imaginative Encounters with the Natural World</i>

Are you tired of democratic theories organized only around human exceptionalism and institutional representation? Then this is the book for you. Earthborn Democracy exposes layer after layer of the unconscious modern myth, as it engages the pertinence of indigenous earthborn myths to democracy. It is time, the authors show, to replace simplified stories of causality with morphic fields of entanglement, doing so to release the potential vitality of democracy today. A bracing study, always alert to how earthborn we are. -- William E. Connolly, author of <i>Stormy Weather: Pagan Cosmologies, Christian Times, Climate Wreckage</i> Resuscitating political theory's mission to break down outworn ways of thinking, Earthborn(e) Democracy dares to imagine alternative ways of coexisting, and even thriving. -- Keally McBride, author of <i>Collective Dreams: Political Imagination and Community</i> I found this to be an incredibly compelling argument and discussion of the myriad ways in which democracy and environmental justice are entangled, using a nonspeciesist frame, humbly leaning upon Indigenous thinking and practices, and generously incorporating the work of other leading thinkers. -- Adrian Parr, author of <i>Earthlings: Imaginative Encounters with the Natural World</i> Part manifesto, part how to guide, 100% visionary political theory, Earthborn Democracy reframes how we understand worldmaking, ecology, refusal, rituals, myths, and the experience of natality, a birth out of and by the earth. The authors invite us to reimagine democracy and discern its relationship to freedom and flourishing through acknowledging first the fundamental entanglement connecting all the world’s humans and nonhumans. -- Neil Roberts, coauthor of <i>Creolizing Hannah Arendt</i>

Author Information

Ali Aslam is associate professor of politics at Mount Holyoke College. He is the author of Ordinary Democracy: Sovereignty and Citizenship Beyond the Neoliberal Impasse (2016). David W. McIvor is associate professor of political science at Colorado State University. He is the author of Mourning in America: Race and the Politics of Loss (2016). Joel Alden Schlosser is professor of political science at Bryn Mawr College. His books include Herodotus in the Anthropocene (2020).

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