Havi Neeman, Simon Fraser University

download a pdf of this essay: The Sustainability Revolution

“In our belief that all that matters is the good of humankind we foolishly forget how much we depend upon all the other living things on Earth.”  James Lovelock

Climate change is the greatest human-induced crisis facing the world today. It is indiscriminate of race, culture and religion. In response to climate change, the notion of ‘sustainability’ as the potential for long-term maintenance of well being has been slowly gaining center stage and has become a wide-ranging term that can be applied to almost every facet of life on Earth. Viewed as a revolution, it has a whole encompassing nature. Ecological, economic and social orders are all coming into question and being looked at through a new worldview and value system.  In this essay, after a short introduction to the issue of climate change, I will review the origin and history of what started as the environmental movement and later developed into a sustainability revolution. I would then explore the question of what brought this revolution to a halt and what it would take to move it forward again. In the latter part of this essay, I will address the challenging question of whether there is hope for democracy in a century shaped by unprecedented environmental, resource and financial stresses.

Climate Change is Reality Change

“We are running Genesis backwards, de-creating.”  Bill McKibben

The global ecological crisis faced by humanity is now universally acknowledged by science. There is also awareness that climate change caused by human generated increase in greenhouse gas emissions, is accelerating. Recognizing that this acceleration will lead to an unpredictable sudden shift in the state of the earth system, James Hansen talks of “tipping points…fed by amplifying feedback”[i]. There are four such amplifying feedbacks:

• Rapid melting of arctic sea ice, which leads to greater absorption of solar energy.
• Release of the potent greenhouse gas methane from melting tundra.
• Ocean acidification resulting in faster carbon buildup in the atmosphere.
• Extinction of species due to changing climate resulting in the collapse of dependant ecosystems.[ii]

Many planetary changes associated with global warming trends are currently well recognized: rising sea levels, loss of tropical forests, destruction of coral reefs, massive crop losses, extreme weather events, spreading hunger and diseases. On top of the effects of climate change, tropical forests are being cleared, current agribusinesses cause soil destruction and toxic wastes are released into the environment, all for short term profit. Thomas Homer-Dixon notes that “human beings deal with their problems, mainly, by applying energy to them… (However)…just at the time when we are going to need enormous amounts of energy to cope with increasingly difficult problems like climate change, we’re entering a transition from a world of abundant, cheap energy to a world of scarce and much more expensive energy.”[iii] This is why he believes that at its core the climate problem is an energy problem, not because of the carbon emissions, but because of looming peak in global output of oil.

In his recent book Eaarth, Bill McKibben suggests that even if we respond immediately to the speed and scale of climate change, our planet “won’t be the same planet, and hence it can’t be the same civilization.” (p27) Following an exhaustive review of the current environmental and social outcomes of climate change he states, “This is the biggest thing that’s ever happened.” (p46)   McKibben has been part of a body of thinkers and doers who, for the past several decades, have gathered momentum engaging with the concept of sustainability. Where did the ideas which drive these thinkers originate?

Emergence of the Sustainability Revolution

“Only that day dawns to which we are awake.” Henry David Thoreau

At the dawn of civilization, tools and accessories developed by man were used to curb the impact of nature upon human life. In ancient times, nature was incomprehensible, frightening and thus revered and respected. However, once nature was partly restrained by his crafted tools, man began to adopt a reverence for the tools that had tamed nature. René Descartes in his Discourse on Method of 1637 has established a mind/body disconnect that contributed to the separation of man from nature and set him up to be the master of nature. He wrote:

It is possible to find a practical philosophy, by means of which, knowing the force and the actions of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens, and all the other bodies that surround us, just as distinctly as we know the various skills of our craftsmen, we might be able in the same way, to use them for all the purposes for which they are appropriate, and thus render ourselves, as it were, masters and possessors of nature. (p35)

This process might be long, maybe as long as the above Cartesian sentence, but by using his rational mind man is sure to get there. Not surprisingly, a mere 150 years after Descartes, the Industrial Revolution, marked by technological innovations, increased production capacity and economic specialization, further facilitated the shift from thinking about nature as a hostile enemy to viewing it as a defeated opponent.

Yet, human connection with nature was soon to be reestablished in the New England transcendentalist movement of the 1800s. Henry David Thoreau in his Walden of 1854, views nature as a teacher stating, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach” (p59). In describing Walden Pond he points to the significance of nature as a mystery full of symbols and spirituality, as a source of guidance and a mirror that reflects back the soul. He writes, “A field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air. It is continually receiving new life and motion from above. It is intermediate in its nature between land and sky” (p123).

Following the Second World War, a new way of thinking of nature as an ecosystem directly tied to our survival was beginning to surface in works such as A Sand County Almanac, written by American conservationist Aldo Leopold in 1949, and Rachel Carson’s 1962 classic, Silent Spring. Carson brought forth the insight that toxins and pollutants released by individuals and governments have a devastating impact on the environment. In his book The Sustainability Revolution Anders Edwards views the New England transcendentalists and early environmentalists such as Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson as the precursors and founders of what was to become the sustainability movement and later on, revolution. It was based on four basic notions: an awareness of the profound spiritual link between man and nature, a deep understanding of the biological interconnections of ecosystems, a concern with the potential damage of human impact on the environment and a strong ethical commitment to environmental activism (p14).

In addition to rising awareness of the environment, as James McCarthy comments, the first views of Earth from space in 1968 profoundly altered public and scientific conceptualization of our planet and its vulnerability. The three famous photographs of “Earth at Night”, “Earthrise” and “Blue Marble” awakened the consciousness of collective human responsibility for the future of our planet. He quotes the astronaut Pier Sellers’s remark,

Apart from letting humanity see Earth differently than ever before, the view from space has also expanded our understanding of how the planet works, and just in time to grasp the impact humanity is having on the planet and its climate system. For the first time, we see our planet as a whole, a system of intricately connected parts that interact – and can be perturbed – in ways humans had not previously glimpsed.[iv]

With this profound change in perceiving our association with the environment started the long revolutionary process of searching for a sustainable and reciprocal relationship between man and nature. In 1972 the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, Sweden was the first international gathering to address concerns such as pollution and acid rain. It also initiated the process of linking environmental concerns and economic issues such as development, growth and employment. In 1983 the UN created The World Commission on Environment and Development, which defined sustainability as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”[v] In 1992 the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, issued a declaration which brought together under the concept of sustainability the combined consideration of the environment, economic and social development.

In a recent SFU presentation, Sherilyn Macgregor asked the provocative question that will most likely be asked by future generations, ‘why didn’t we stop climate change when we had a chance?’[vi] In the same vein, one would wonder what is stalling the sustainability revolution. For the past three to four decades we have been accumulating the scientific knowledge, the political understanding and the social motivation that would potentially help us move way ahead of where we are at today. There have been more than 200 years of accelerating depletion and abuse of our planet, but it is our current generation that will have the legacy of realizing the magnitude of destruction, yet not acting in time to stop it. What is holding us back?

What is stalling the Sustainability Revolution?

“What is the proper limit to a person’s wealth? First, having what is essential, and second, having what is enough.” Seneca

Thomas Homer-Dixon believes that the technical, institutional and economic solutions that are currently part of the international climate change dialogue are insufficient and unlikely to resolve our problems in time. He suggests that a deeper change needs to take place at a cultural level. “Real solutions, I believe, ultimately reside at the level of culture broadly defined – that is, at the level of our deep values and our deep beliefs about how the world around us works.”[vii] He argues that climate change has not been addressed and will likely not be seriously tackled until a major shock or instability will mobilize humanity. He names such future events, “moments of contingency” and views them as the opportunity for a sharp non-linear fundamental change.

In his book The Natural Contract, Michel Serres talks about such deep values. He notes a rift between man and nature as the cause for the abuse of the environment by its human inhabitants.   He writes, “We no longer know the world because we have conquered it. Who respects victims?” (p35). Serres explains that somewhere in the development of our civilization, we forgot about the world. Impacted by our anthropocentric views we have waged war on the world.

Mastery and possession: these are the master words launched by Descartes at the dawn of the scientific and technological age, when our Western reason went off to conquer the universe. We dominate and appropriate it: such is the shared philosophy underlying industrial enterprise…Our fundamental relationship with objects comes down to war and property (p32).

Serres discusses a “cultural pollution that we have inflicted on long-term thoughts, those guardians of the Earth, of humanity, and of things themselves.” He urges us to struggle against this cultural pollution before we deal with the “material, technological, and industrial pollution, which exposes weather to conceivable risks” (p31). Similarly, Stephen Duguid in Nature In Modernity identifies what he calls “a mastery agenda” as one such deep cultural roadblock to the move towards sustainability. He writes,

…a frontal assault on a deeply embedded value, belief and habit of mind in Western culture; a mastery agenda that relies on a radical separation of humans from nature and a sense of humans as somehow transcendent or, as Neil Everden puts it in a less flattering way, as “nicheless exotics” who have no need to protect or nurture a home place (p xviii)

For Duguid, the commitment that modernity has to expansion and progress is at the root of the environmental decline we experience.

Bill McKibben suggests that it is modernity’s attachment to the concept of growth as the solution for economical problems that is halting the sustainability revolution. Infinite growth is not sustainable, and he points out that the reason for stalling on change already twenty years ago is “precisely because it would have interfered with economic growth” (p 52). He then asserts that this belief in growth is so deeply embedded in us that “we lack the vocabulary and the metaphors we need for life on a different scale. We’re so used to growth that we can’t imagine alternatives” (p102).

Michel Puech conceives the missing link in the move forward as ethical, rather than political, economical, or institutional. He notes that currently we attempt to move toward sustainability through change by government structures. This, he proposes, is a reform. However, to have a sustainability revolution, a change of governing structures is needed. He refers to “institutions” as “a collective entity whose power and interest systematically predominates over those of its individual human members” and argues that institutions offer only “symbolic” change and that “it looks like we have found a way to use symbolic change in order not to promote but replace real change.”[viii] For Puech it is our loyalty to the institutions that is holding back the sustainability revolution. Comparably, James Hansen points out how governments are trapped in the hands of a strong “minority of people, termed fossil interests”. As our modern capitalist democracy seems to be easily swayed by such an interest group, he too suggests that maybe we shouldn’t trust that a solution will come from the government. He says, “Civil resistance is not easy, but if governments continue to abdicate their responsibility to citizens, in favor of special interests, it seems essential.”[ix]

Moving the Sustainability Revolution forward

“Small shifts in deeply held belief and values can massively alter societal behavior and results -in fact, may be the only thing that ever have.” Dee Hock

What then is necessary to make the precariously stalled sustainability revolution move forward? Some would suggest it will require a natural disaster to shake humanity into action. However, judging by the mild reaction to the natural disasters that are already upon us, this will have to be a much bigger scale catastrophe.

It’s in times of crisis that human beings are often most creative and ingenious and that they pull together most effectively to solve their problems. I am convinced that we won’t really address the climate change problem until it produces some major shocks or instabilities that mobilize broad populations…only at these historical junctures will we have the potential to achieve sharp, non-linear shifts in fundamental aspects of our societies- in their culture, patterns of social behavior, and institutions.[x]

William Catton claims that today there are two sociologically distinguishable subspecies of Homo Sapiens, who are different in their ecological relations to the biosphere. While in many third world countries Homo Sapiens is unchanged,  Catton refers to people living in the industrialized world as Homo Colossus to reflect our gigantic per capita resource appetites and environmental impacts.[xi] But since Earth is finite, and we are already overusing it, we use what he calls “prosthetic devices” as makeshift substitutes for damaged or missing original equipment that had been engineered by nature. Cars, jet engines and other transportation devices are all such “ability enlarging prostheses on a grand scale” (p513). Catton then goes on to say that like the biological function of the immune system, ethnocentrism is our cultural immune system. However he suggests that much like in special medical conditions where the biological immune system needs to be suppressed to ensure the success of a radical treatment, so “the occasions when ethnocentrism must be somehow overcome (or put aside) are increasingly numerous and potentially serious” (p515). This ethnocentrism is a conceptual bubble we all live in which restricts the way we see our world, in which “we have collectively entrapped ourselves by the great progress we achieved in the twentieth century.” He asserts that there is simply not enough habitat for a creature with resource demands so monstrous as those of H. Colossus and that unless we break out of the anthropocentric immune bubble and start downsizing H. colossus we will face the die-off that normally befalls populations confronting a carrying capacity deficit (p522).

In a recent report from the environment group WWF, Tom Crompton, in his project “Common Cause”, demonstrates that instead of performing a rational cost-benefit analysis, people accept information which confirms their identity and values, and reject information that conflicts with them.  Looking at psychological tests in nearly 70 countries, his project found that values cluster together in remarkably consistent patterns. Those who strongly value financial success, for example, have less empathy, stronger manipulative tendencies, a stronger attraction to hierarchy, stronger prejudices towards strangers and fewer concerns about human rights and the environment. Those who have a strong sense of self-acceptance have more empathy and a greater concern about human rights, social justice and the environment. We are not born with our values; rather they are shaped by the social environment. Common Cause proposes that it is our burying of our values instead of explaining them that renders us easy to manipulate by forces such as the advertising industry-which make us insecure, selfish and passive in terms of political involvement needed to move on with the sustainability revolution.[xii]

Can Democracy Survive in the Age of Climate Change Politics?

“We must decide on peace among ourselves to protect the world, and peace with the world to protect ourselves.” Michel Serres

The sustainability revolution is not moving fast enough to respond to climate change and its impacts. Whether it is an external force that is needed to revitalize it, such as a natural disaster, or an internal change of perceptions, values, and beliefs, the most disturbing suggestion in my mind is that democracy is too weak, slow and inefficient to tackle the kind of transformation that climate change demands of humanity. “We need a more authoritative world”, says James Lovelock– the author of the Gaia Theory– in a recent interview to the Guardian newspaper. “I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.”[xiii] “I don’t agree with those whose reaction is to warn against restricting civil freedoms”, writes Vaclav Havel in the New York Times. “Were the forecasts of certain climatologists to come true, our freedoms would be tantamount to those of someone hanging from a 20^th story parapet.”[xiv] In their book The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy David Shearman and Joseph Wayne Smith argue that the fundamental problem causing environmental destruction – and climate change in particular – is the operation of liberal democracy. “The market economy, now the linchpin of western culture, is fused with liberal democracy, such that each is dependent upon the other for survival. Together they have developed a liberty for the individual that has environmentally destructive consequences.”[xv] They then go on to put forward the idea of authoritarian action led by experts to address the ecological emergency.

The idea of giving up democracy to save our planet is difficult to accept. It may be that what is stalling the Sustainability Revolution is our current practice of democracy, which itself needs to be revolutionized first.  Do current democracies support sustainability when compared to other regimes? It is easy to conceive that free speech and press rights associated with democracies make citizens better informed about the importance of the environment and ways to alleviate environmental stresses. Furthermore, armed with this knowledge, citizens of democracies will place greater pressure on their government for positive environmental policy. However, in reality, what is the correlation between different regimes and sustainability?  Whitford and Wong examined which political systems and social arrangements lead to greater sustainability and whether democratization increases sustainability.[xvi] They quantitatively investigated several possible foundations for environmental sustainability, as measured across countries with varying geography, development patterns, social customs, and political arrangements. However, they were able to find only moderate evidence for a direct role for democratization. They also found that this was directly related to the country’s national income, with the richer countries being better able to protect their populations from environmental health problems. In regards to the countries with the lower national income, they have found that democracy has no direct role- unless it works through other proximate causes of sustainability, such as voluntary compliance of firms with environmental management systems (e.g. ISO1400). It is interesting to note that the environmental benefits resulting from concerned citizens acting in a free society and from investments made possible by rising wealth are likely local in nature. However, liberal democracies as the richest nations on earth are themselves responsible for a disproportionate share of global resource and waste generation in other faraway locations.

Naomi Klein brings Bolivia, which is not a rich country, as an example to a transforming democracy that has nationalized key industries and elevated the voices of indigenous people through participatory democracy.[xvii] She recognizes however that regardless of how sustainable the Bolivians choose to live, they are powerless to save their glaciers which are melting as a result of climate change. She suggests that democracy at the global level should follow the lead of the Bolivians and quotes their UN ambassador as saying “The only thing that can save mankind from a tragedy is the exercise of global democracy.” Discussing global politics and governance is beyond the scope of this paper; however any dream of revolutionizing democracy to facilitate a sustainability revolution will have to include a global component of equal participation.

Douglas Hine explores the threat to democracy from looming stark predictions of climate change outcomes. He recognizes that possibly “mechanisms for restricting our personal behavior will be required, but we should demand involvement in restricting rather than petitioning the state to relieve us of our freedom”[xviii] He quotes Al Gore talking at his British premiere of An Inconvenient Truth,

In order to solve the climate crisis we have to address the democracy crisis…I believe that a campaign that’s based on a very large set of ideas focused on the future and the public interest now faces such a withering headwind that a higher priority is to change democracy and open it up again to citizens. (Al Gore in Hine, 2007)

Hine goes on to assert that “There is a kind of political freedom which is distinct from consumer freedom and also from the “freedom from fear” promised by pervasive state control” He believes this is the kind of freedom that grows from individual and shared self-reliance.  Bill McKibben is also suggesting individual and shared self reliance. He advocates for “small, not big; dispersed not centralized.” (p120) He talks about our current state of “hyperindividualism” and the need to rebuild communities as functioning economic entities bringing the example of the Transition Town Movement through which “in one city after another, people are building barter networks, expanding community gardens.” (p133) This is an example of true participatory and democratic society at the community level.

In their policy network paper, David Held and Angus Fane Hervey also address the need for citizen participation. They explore the issue of democracy versus autocracy in regards to climate change on both the nation state and the global level. They recognize that implementation of policies that reduce global warming may infringe on the democratic preferences of citizens, yet  propose that good democratic leadership is not confined to policymaking, but also involves educating constituents about pressing issues that may not be obvious to them. They suggest the tradition of Deliberative Democracy as such an approach to democratic “will formation”. In the deliberative approach, democracy becomes a “learning process through which people come to terms with the range of issues they need to understand in order to hold defensible positions….Individual points of view need to be tested in and through social encounters which take into account the point of view of others.”[xix] They furthermore claim that the concerns of environmental justice require the political process to be as inclusive as possible, giving voice to those under-represented, including future generations. Of course hand in hand with the involvement of citizens and civil society in the making and delivery of policies; such leadership is needed which is able to confront narrow interests (p17).

Similarly, Mathew Humphrey suggests that “those that reject democracy conceive of it in its current liberal from, which is seen as something far worse than merely a mechanism for aggregating preferences. It is seen as a vehicle for the continuing domination of an economic and political elite, who are able to manipulate the party-based electoral system and mass media.” (p3)[xx] Yet he reminds the reader that there is no reason to expect an authoritarian green state to be better than the Soviet Union had been at overcoming the internal division, inefficiencies and corruption. He too supports a deliberative form of democracy, but states that it is not enough and argues that there is justification for the use of direct covert law-breaking actions, in order to call attention to special issues for which the deliberative process might be too lengthy or cumbersome. An open and tolerant form of democracy is needed in which the boundaries of acceptable democratic behavior are broadened. He says,

When groups are beginning from marginal positions, and seek to challenge existing conceptions of justice or definitions of the democratic community, they need to be able to make use of a range of innovative and confrontational strategies that will challenge people’s ingrained assumptions…If history of progressive politics should teach us anything, it should teach us that we close down the range of political strategies considered to be legitimate at our peril. (p142)

To revitalize or rather revolutionize democracy, a change to the concept of citizenship will be required. Andrew Dobson and Derek Bell in their book Environmental Citizenship point out the difference between behaviors and attitudes. They argue that while market based policies might be effective at changing behaviors, they do very little to alter attitudes. Nicholas Nash and Alan Lewis also stress the need for deeper commitment to ecological principles in order to have dedicated “ecological citizens”. [xxi] They propose that in order to create this commitment, individuals need to feel responsible at a local level and the democratic system needs to be conductive to citizen-led action. They believe “that authoritarian forms of governance, or an ecologist king, will only serve to coerce citizens and fail to create a true commitment to ecology” (p176).

At moments of enormous human challenge such as the one humanity is currently facing, formal and informal education has a potentially crucial role to play. In order to increase individuals’ commitment to ecological citizenship an alteration to the educational response to climate change is required. Kagawa and Selby critique the current central focus of curriculums on imparting the science rather than grappling with the ethics of global warming. They suggest that alternatively, the learning process needs to have a personal and societal transformative potential, flowing directly and naturally into community engagement.[xxii] They bring as an example Harold Glasser’s concept of “active social learning” as opposed to “passive social learning”, quoting Glasser:

Active social learning can take place in the context of a conversation, a course employing the Socratic method, dancing with a partner, symphony practice, a community meeting, an open, participatory review process and although less visceral, video conferencing over the internet (p5).

Referring to the internet as a democratic tool is also Bill McKibben. He suggests that the internet is a pliable medium of infinite information that is relatively cheap, has a small environmental footprint and most importantly is decentralized in terms of the sources disseminating the information (p197).

Another aspect of citizenship is the boundaries of who is considered a citizen participating in the process of democracy. Jeremy Rifkin in his latest book, The Empathic Civilization explains that the Enlightenment’s perception of human beings as rational, autonomous and utilitarian leads to our current unsustainable global economic and environmental breakdown. He notes recent discoveries from brain science of mirror-neurons – the so called empathy neurons, which allow human beings to feel and experience another’s situation as if it were one’s own.  He views this as an opportunity to examine history from an empathic lens and suggests an alternative narrative to human evolution which recognizes the intensification and extension of empathy to more diverse others. Rifkin identifies historical pivotal turning points in human consciousness occurring when new energy regimes converge with new communication revolutions to create new economic eras. “By extending the central nervous system of each individual and the societies as a whole, communication revolutions provide an evermore inclusive playing field for empathy to mature and consciousness to expand.”[xxiii] He sees today’s convergence of distributed renewable energies and distributed communication via internet as the opportunity to extend empathic sensibility to the biosphere as a whole and all of life on earth as the global overall unifying purpose. “If we can harness our empathic sensibility to establish a new global ethic that recognizes and acts to harmonize the many relationships that make up the life sustaining forces of the planet, we will have moved beyond the detached, self-interested and utilitarian philosophical assumptions that accompanied national markets and nation state governance and into a new era of biosphere consciousness.”(ibid) Similarly Michel Serres suggests that we need to expand the social contract to include a natural contract:

…we must add to the exclusively social contract a natural contract of symbiosis and reciprocity in which our relationship to things would set aside mastery and possession in favor of admiring attention, reciprocity, contemplation, and respect; where knowledge would no longer imply property, nor action mastery, nor would property and mastery imply their excremental results and origins (p38).

We must do this according to Serres, not only to be virtuous but also to ensure our own survival.

Stephen Duguid proposes a different way to viewing our history. If we look at history as a fluid and circular process rather than a liner story of progress, we might identify what he coins “shadows of modernity” which can help us get on a path different than the one we are on. “The time is clearly right for a reformulation of the modern”[xxiv] Similar to Rifkin’s idea of empathic civilization, Duguid shows through a thorough review of the history of modernity that there exists an alternative modernity which is built on sympathy, mutuality and reciprocity. This modernity might allow us to replace the mastery agenda by an intimate relationship with nature. To be able to make the shift, Duguid asserts we need to break through the barrier of anthropocentrism, stop objectifying nature and extend moral concerns to the natural world. He then suggests that it is time to consider the idea of ‘citizen nature’, and says, “a case can be made for an extension of moral standing to include nature, for an extension of our identification with or sympathetic understanding of the various parts of nature and for an extension of legal rights in some form. We are, then, essentially looking at an expansion of the social contract” (p283).

Conclusions

“The evil that men do lives after them.” Henry David Thoreau

Faced with the single most significant threat to our existence as a whole, humanity should be overwhelmed by the current evidence and future predictions of climate change. Yet, enthralled in immediate local and global economic and social issues, it is sometimes easier for individuals and nations to push aside long term concerns such as climate change.  Also, discouraged by governance which is driven and controlled by capitalist motives and interests, it may seem democracy has failed humanity and the Earth. Some environmentally concerned voices even go as far as to suggest that authoritarian governance is required to bring the necessary change at the scale and speed it is needed.

Nordhaus and Shellenberger have posited the interesting thought, “Imagine how history would have turned out had Martin Luther King given an ‘I have a nightmare’ speech.”[xxv] Most of the readings I have done for the writing of this paper were of the “I have a nightmare” type. In the last section of this paper while writing about democracy and climate change, I wrote in an “I have a dream” mode and attempted to imagine what revolutionized democratic system will move forward the Sustainability Revolution.

Contemplating different governance options, there is no evidence that an authoritarian regime will be able to successfully implement policies that will benefit its citizens and the environment. Also, considering human nature, coercion through authoritarian policies might result in partial change of behaviors, but not in change of deep values and beliefs of citizens.  It is only through democracy that individuals may engage in discussions and debates that will allow them to reevaluate their values and create the conditions for collective movement/revolution.

I have been imagining the kind of democracy which would revitalize the stalled Sustainability Revolution:

• While being decentralized and community based, it will maintain global connection and global shared responsibility through the internet.
• It will be based on direct citizen participation through deliberative processes.
• Legal boundaries will be broad enough to allow for some radical actions such as civil disobedience to give voice to new, less obvious points of view.
• Education will focus on early childhood, elementary, high school and adult active social learning of environmental curriculum.
• Civilization will be marked by empathy and will have historical narrative and ethos of respectful, reciprocal relationship between man and nature.
• The social contract will include a natural contract where such underrepresented elements as future generations, and “citizen nature” are equally considered in the democratic process.

George Bernard Shaw has said, “Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.” I am yet hopeful that humanity can transform to deserve my dream democracy and sustainable planet.

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