Ecological Democracy offers an original, thought-provoking, and engaging
treatment of why and how democracy should be re-imagined in reaction to today’s
ecological crisis. The book explains that one need to re-imagine both the view
on nature and democratic ideals within the same framework in the Anthropocene,
the present geological epoch of human-made instability in the Earth system and
its planetary boundaries. This book proposes unique and challenging readings of
green political theory and its development of ecological democracy in the last four
decades. The book is the first to offer a systematic and detailed interpretation of the
role of critical theory vis-à-vis green political theory through an update regarding
current non-anthropocentric critical theorists and how they may contribute to the
further development of ecological democracy. Ecological Democracy builds further
on deep ecology, ecophenomenology, and animism by articulating an ecocentric
view on nature which defends an intrinsic moral value of all existence as well as
formulating the democratic principle of all ecologically affected parties.
This book provides a sophisticated, convincing, and accessible argument for
how to re-imagine ecological democracy as ecocentrism in practice: ecological
love. To love ecologically means caring for and encountering all existence on
the Earth and in the cosmos. This book is multi-disciplinary and will be of great
value to researchers as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students from many
disciplines.