Abstract

This chapter summarizes the volume's main ideas, a common thread of which is a renewed democratic politics, an ecological democracy. Each of the discourses analyzed in the text offers a reasonably comprehensive account of and orientation to environmental affairs at all levels, from the global to the local, and across different issue areas such as pollution, resource depletion, biodiversity, and climate change. Of the discourses surveyed, only Promethean discourse and ecological modernization provide any coherent analysis of what to do with the liberal capitalist economic order. The chapter considers how democratic pragmatism, sustainable development, ecological modernization, and green radicalism seem to provide more possibilities for learning. It also discusses several specific claims that can be made on behalf of deliberative democracy in an environmental context and concludes by arguing that ecological democracy should transcend the boundary between human social systems and natural systems.