Morphic resonances, emergence, multiple human entanglements with other species, the earth as a series of fecund open, interdependent systems, the ineliminability, and indispensability of myth and ritual to yesterday and today-particularly when you come to terms with the visceral register of human cultures, the atrocious costs of modern denialism, the positive contributions of indigenous modes of living, interspecies alliances, breathing as one sign of human entry into nonhuman worlds (such as photosynthesis) that exceed it, ecologies of sustenance and care.Ali Aslam, David McIvor, and Joel Schlosser, in Earthborn Democracy, draw these and other themes together to show how democracy must be ecological at its core and ecology must be sustained by multifarious movements that range across many fronts.Crossings between divergent human constituencies as well as between species, aiming to transcend the hi-tech-mastery problematic that has captured modern life, in its capitalist, socialist, colonialist, and fascist manifestations.The authors illuminate how serious things are without allowing those of us who were raised in modernist, humanist, hi-tech cultures to sink too deeply into nihilism, or cynicism, or despair before we awaken existentially and organize new morphic entanglements that draw upon multiple constituencies as they awaken latent energies and aspirations in them and us.I identify with so much in this book.I learn from it, even as I worry off and on about one or two things.The worries?The debts to indigenous modes of culture and activism soar as the text proceeds.Sometimes I sense, though I am not sure I am correct, that when the authors object to modern mastery problematics that distress nonhuman natures and distort various modes of human entanglements, they may invoke as a counter-image the idea of an organic orientation to a harmonious nature to which human cultures can become more intimately attuned.The long-term western debate itself, though, is roughly between a mastery problematic-which has very much held the upper handand an organic image-which is almost always on the defensive.So to what are we to become attuned?My instinct tells me that it may be wise to tilt things in a specific direction, a direction which draws sustenance from both pagan and indigenous cosmologies and rather recent turns in radical, western geology, oceanography, climatology, and glaciology.
William E. Connolly (Sun,) studied this question.