What if we are stuck in a failing story that leaves us helpless to respond to climate change?
Late into the first and perhaps last presidential debate, candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump were asked about how they would address climate change, “an issue that matters to younger voters.” Trump ignored the question, but Harris’s response was equally revelatory and disappointing.
After acknowledging climate change is “very real,” Harris claimed, “We know we can actually deal with this issue,” citing the “record level of domestic gas production” under the Biden administration.
To proudly proclaim the increase in production of fossil fuels that contribute to rising temperatures as evidence of progress to combat climate change, as Harris did, is jarring. It waves away scientific evidence by doubling down on the myth of human omnipotence at the very center of modernist narratives about unlimited economic growth and progress.
The problem is that this story is clearly failing. Human-driven unrestrained growth and progress have contributed to intensified weather patterns and ecological destruction, habitat and species loss and increasingly divergent health outcomes for those most vulnerable to the effects of a warming planet. Pretending we can continue as we have is a fantasy that ignores the reality of how, for so many, the climate crisis is not a future problem, but something that must be lived with and addressed today.
If the stories we tell each other represent the horizon of our political thinking and action, at this crucial moment we need another kind of story to empower human action.
In “Earthborn Democracy: A Political Theory of Entangled Life,” my co-authors and I offer an alternative myth of entangled life, one in which humans are not apart from other creatures, but share the same status with all earthborn creatures. Earthborn is the translation of the Greek term, autochthony: a reference to the ancient Athenian myth that the city’s inhabitants were born from the earth. As we show, this founding myth was expansive, including both human and non-human creatures.
That the first known democracy recognized multispecies entanglement as a condition of earthly existence and cooperation is an inheritance to build on, especially in a moment when the appeal of authoritarian figures has increased in tandem with decreased confidence in democratic processes, especially in regards to addressing climate change.
As we show, this inheritance is robust, stretching back not just to democratic Athens, but before it, to settlements in the premodern Americas and Mesopotamia. Moreover, action acknowledging earthly entanglement is part of the living tradition of many indigenous communities across the world. Together, these are resources for learning how to live in this moment.
This record of earthly cooperation suggests it remains in our collective powers to act in the face of climate change. We argue that these aspirations have not been extinguished in the face of climate change, and can even be strengthened through practices of what we call attunement to the myth of earthborn democracy. We need not accept climate fatalism; neither as paralysis, nor business as usual.
Attunement involves becoming aware of the deep history of cooperation among earthborn life. Specifically, how human freedom is not the product of disentanglement, premised on control of the more-than-human-world, but rather is nurtured by roots and connections that allow genuine freedom to come into being. Attuning to earthly entanglements awakens a greater aliveness to the experience of freedom and the earthly flourishing in which it plays a part. Attunement also describes the intentional practice of the seemingly immaterial or invisible elements of collective life: wishes, dreams, memories, stories, connections and obligations to ancestors and descendants, an awareness of the entangled nature of past, present and future.
The immaterial or invisible elements of collective life which make up what the psychoanalyst Carl Jung called our collective unconscious are, in the end, earthly. Because all life is born of the earth, the earth is the holding environment for our shared dreams and aspirations. Modern societies may have repressed our earthborn nature, but this knowledge lives in our collective unconsciousness.
As Jung says, it’s not a question of living without myth; the question is what kind of myth do we want to live in. The modern myth of human separation from and conquest of nature is rootlessness.
Drawing on practices of attunement can help displace, if not eventually replace, anthropocentric accounts of politics, culture and history. Attunement to the myth of earthborn democracy can help generate responses to the climate crisis that do not rehearse the tired, well-worn script of human mastery over nature through technological progress and an unyielding commitment to growth.
As summer heat intensifies wildfires and hurricanes this autumn, this narrative appears more doubtful by the day. It is time for earthborn democracy.
