9.03.2010

Animocracy Gives a Voice to Democracy's Silent Stakeholders

When we have the next election or convene the next big conference who'll speak for the totality of stakeholders, who'll speak for the birds and the bees, the bugs and the trees, the myriad billions of microscopic lives without whom none of us others could exist. Democracy is a myth because it assumes human dominion over all of creation, it assumes a self declared unique role for one rogue primate.

Democracy stands on the definations of stakeholder rights and who gets to vote. Remembering that not long ago we white guys were able to deceive ourselves into believing that women and blacks weren't deserving of equal stakeholder status, now we're saying only humans. We were deceiving ourselves before, and we are again.

“When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world”. - John Muir

Animocracy would, in a perfect world, give voice to the silent countless stakeholders in every bio-region not just the extractors and profiteers. Animocracy would re-draw democracy's attempt to control us all with artificial borders by re-establishing the watersheds and microclimates as the only real boundries and as an early step in re-focusing attention on the interconnectedness of our world. Animocracy is Gaian politics in action.

Over time, Life shapes the planet while the planet shapes Life. The moment one glimpses themselves as a part of that one interwoven Life the transformation from humanist to animist unfolds. We are all stakeholders in the biosphere, we will either survive together or not survive at all.