From Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frances-moore-lappe/before-you-give-up-on-democracy_b_3915901.html
Frances Moore Lappe
09/18/2013
Who doesn’t feel like throwing in the towel… with congressional approval ratings at a pitiful 10 percent? For pete’s sake, even the much-reviled “socialism” has more than double the fans.
Yet a moment’s reflection tells us we can’t solve any of our giant challenges without public decision-making bodies that work. So settling for the best democracy money can buy is not an option.
And just as clear?
That we can’t we fix our broken democracy without a vision of one that could work. Human beings have a hard time creating what we can’t imagine or even name. Of course, our “vision” can’t be some pie-in-the sky, fairy-tale democracy. To be motivating, it has to be hard-nosed: grounded in all we now know — the good, bad, and the ugly — about nature, including our own.
Here’s where we might begin:
First, we stop assuming that the prevailing version of liberal democracy — elections plus markets — is the best we humans can do. Then, we appreciate what ecology has to teach us about democracy. It’s a lot. Simply put, ecology holds these main lessons: that everything’s connected and everything’s changing — with all elements shaping all others moment to moment. We, like all organisms, respond to context.
“Thinking like an ecosystem,” we can see therefore that our inherited notion of democracy as an unchanging, political structure — fixed and finished — is bound to fail. With an “eco-mind,” we realize that democracy’s first questions must be:
What are our species’ essential needs?
And, then, what specific contexts have proven to elicit our species’ capacities to build societies meeting those needs?
Continue reading at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frances-moore-lappe/before-you-give-up-on-democracy_b_3915901.html
