Democracy in a hotter time: climate change and democratic transformation

A collection of essays linking the possibilities of combating a warming climate with preserving a democracy increasingly under threat. In his spot-on foreword, Bill McKibben notes that many of the world's leading autocrats are bound up in the fossil fuel business--Putin, for instance, and the murderous Saudi regime; but also, in this country, the Koch brothers, who "have done more than anyone to deform our democracy." The point is well taken: As climate scientist James Hansen warned, "We cannot fix the climate until we first fix democracy." Some of the reasons are obvious. In an anti-majoritarian age, only a tiny number of people benefit economically from a regime that threatens the planet with irreversible climate change, just as only a small number of people benefit from tyranny. Democracy and social justice involve recruiting the largest possible number of people into the decision-making process even as the enablers of that tyrannical minority propagandize "about democracy being out of reach," as Frances Moore Lappé puts it. Meanwhile, we also have knock-on problems to deal with, such as immigration from poor nations to rich ones, the former of which suffer disproportionally from a warming planet. Even so, Princeton geoscientist Michael Oppenheimer reminds us, "most migration occurs within rather than between countries"--often climate-related, too, as with the depopulation of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Many of the policy-minded contributors offer vehicles for strengthening direct democracy, a proposition that seems, if not entirely out of reach, difficult to attain given a hostile Congress and a vast, well-funded conspiracy that opposes it. One such vehicle, write Arizona State University president Michael Crow and ASU senior research fellow William B. Dabars, is an academic culture that dares to become more activist in order to "reinvigorate and revitalize our experiment in democracy." Kim Stanley Robinson provides the afterword, and other contributors include William J. Barber III, Frederick W. Mayer, and Richard Louv. A valuable book for climate and progressive activists alike. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.