The crises that spur Earthborn Democracy are all too familiar: ecological and environmental degradation joined with rising authoritarianism, populist anger and despair, erosion of institutional safeguards, decline in democratic norms, practices, and institutions, and the atrophy of citizen knowledge, experience, and fitness.In response, Earthborn Democracy offers both a visionary argument and a vigorous appeal for reimagining and regenerating democratic practices and possibilities as responsive not only to current concerns and anguish but also attuned to the deep and resonant aspiration for democracy recurrent across distant space and time.As the authors argue, "democratic capacities" are our "species inheritance and part of what it means to live a flourishing, earthly life." 1 Earthborn Democracy leads us through a wide range of practices of collective life-among them, cooperative systems, people's assemblies, and village councils-which offer revitalizing alternatives to the hollowed-out institutionalization of electoral politics and consumer capitalism.These examples reinforce a vision of democratic flourishing that is intimately and undeniably connected with ecological flourishing.I learned an enormous amount in reading Earthborn Democracy: the authors move with agility through so many dimensions of various deep political wellsprings and sources, such as morphic fields, the conscious and the unconscious, archetypes of movement and community, myth and storytelling, and rituals of meaning.And I was drawn into the power and the depth of their argument and, in particular, by the richness of various examples in the book-the tactile, sensory features of Maple Nation, the durational and daily practices of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's land as pedagogy, the people's assemblies and responsive coops of Cooperation Jackson.Earthborn Democracy also generated a number of questions for me as well.And I' d like to sketch out three areas that I' d love the authors to expand upon: I' d like to know more about the joint authorship of Earthborn Democracy.I imagine, as a collective effort, that this book was the result of a long and complex process of collaboration, mutuality, and even attunement.As I read it, I thought quite a bit about Mara Lugones and Elizabeth Spelman's classic "Have We Got A Theory for You!"-a feminist classic that I often read with my students, who find
Vicki Hsueh (Sun,) studied this question.