Democracy in the Anthropocene—A critical exchange

Marit Hammond, John Dryzek and Jonathan Pickering
Contemporary Political Theory Vol. 19, 1, 127–141 | March 2020

What is the Value of Deliberative Democracy in the Anthropocene?

In The Politics of the Anthropocene, John S. Dryzek and Jonathan Pickering set out to re-evaluate not just environmental politics, but all politics (p. v). The very basis for all our political values has changed: It can no longer take for granted the Holocene conditions (the past 12,000 years or so of Earth history) of unusual stability in the Earth system. Now that humanity, as Dryzek and Pickering explain, has inescapably entered the Anthropocene, a new kind of politics is needed that takes seriously the fundamental, human-induced instability this new epoch stands for. The book discusses governance, justice, sustainability and democracy from an entirely new angle, one that understands human political actors and processes in the context of the wider, unstable Earth system, and sets them within the geological timescale.

In the Anthropocene (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000), humanity has begun to decisively influence core parameters of the Earth system (such as the global climate) in a way that causes instability to the point of posing a constant possibility for catastrophic state shifts in humans’ own ‘life support system’ on the Earth (Steffen et al,2007, p. 614). Within the vast discussion this realisation has sparked amongst political scientists and theorists (see also, for example, Biermann and Lövbrand, 2019; Arias-Maldonado and Trachtenberg, 2018), Dryzek’s andPickering’s book makes a vital contribution. Against the Promethean stance that advocates dangerous geo-engineering, they argue we must listen to nature better(2018, pp. 10–11). Against those who advocate only superficial reform effected by the same institutions that have caused the current crises, they stress the need to ‘rethink everything’ (p. 12) on an ongoing basis – what they term ‘ecological reflexivity’ (pp. 35–36). And where some may see the Anthropocene as a state of emergency justifying top-down impositions of drastic changes, they call for deeper democracy: more inclusive and better quality communication across the entire Earth system (p. 17). The book thus draws a wide range of both past and cutting-edge strands of research together to make a compelling case for a wiser, more deeply considered, more long-term oriented response to the Anthropocene than has become customary amongst some recent scholarly discourses.

The book, then, is valuable as a response to sceptics and critics of a democratic approach to environmental sustainability. What may not be immediately obvious, however, is that between the lines it simultaneously—contradictorily—undermines the very theory of democracy for which the authors’ intellectual home, the University of Canberra’s Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance, is justly renowned.