To fix our broken democratic system, the environmental movement needs to help reinvent it to ensure people can be active participants in the decisions that affect their daily lives.
“Democracy is a process, not a static condition. It is becoming rather than being. It can easily be lost, but never truly won. Its essence is eternal struggle.”— Justice William H. Hastie, the first African-American Federal judge
The community of Boxtown in southwestern Memphis, Tennessee, has long been accustomed to fighting for its rights. Founded in 1863 shortly after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, this neighborhood of 3,000 people has a long history of battles against the unjust siting of polluting industries, which have increased residents’ health risks and lowered life expectancy. And today, the community is at the center of a growing fight between the future of our freedoms and technocrats.
In June of 2024, Boxtown residents discovered that xAI, an artificial intelligence company founded by Elon Musk, intended to locate the “world’s largest” supercomputer in their community—without environmental reviews or community outreach. They mobilized to fight back, citing concerns about the possible environmental impact and lingering issues of injustice, including the preferential treatment offered to industry, such as favorable energy use charge rates, while charging residents a disproportionately high rate.
As Boxtown residents are showing us, the fight against this new frontier of technocratic takeover of democracy requires much more than what normal times would demand, beyond risk analysis or data. It requires completely rethinking our democratic processes, so that no large project of this size could be initiated with no public input or transparency again.
Our democracy is broken and it urgently needs to change. To repair it, we need to reinvent democratic practice to ensure that people can be informed, active participants in the decisions that shape their lives—and the environmental movement must be central actors in its organizing mission.
We Are in Crisis
Democracy in the U.S. is profoundly broken, in many ways.
Americans are aware of this brokenness. A 2020 study found 80 percent of Americans view our democracy as either “in crisis” or “facing serious challenges,” with half feeling that racism makes it difficult for some to participate in civic and political life, including two-thirds of Black Americans, and about half of whites and Latinos. Additionally, forty percent of Americans think significant changes are needed to the structure of government so that ordinary people have more voice in governance and can solve problems more effectively.
Years of democratic dysfunction at all levels have increased cynicism to the point where despite overwhelming evidence of the dangers posed by populist authoritarians, a recent survey by the Democracy Fund found that many Americans will accept undemocratic actions if it benefits their side of the political aisle.
The lack of enthusiasm in our elections is matched by heightened levels of political polarization, making it difficult to advance and sustain substantive changes through the existing electoral process. (While analysts lament this deepening polarization, most fail to understand that in a two-party, zero-sum system, polarization is actually the point, not an aberration.)
Appeals for an era when our politics could be more “bipartisan” forget that racism was the common value that enabled it. Until the passage of the Civil Rights Act (1964) and Voting Rights Act (1965), southern segregationists within the Democratic Party and northeastern liberal Republicans gave rise to and fostered conservative and liberal wings of each party, respectively. While this allowed for more agreement across the aisle, political realignment post-Civil Rights era made bipartisanship increasingly difficult to achieve, and has resulted in drawing our political “center” even more to the right.
More simply put, we are relying on an outdated democratic model designed in the 18th century by 17th-century philosophers. That system has not kept up with a world dealing with climate disruptions, civil and economic conflict, and a rising technological oligarchy. Social solidarity, trust and democratic commitment are suffering as a result leading to zero-sum thinking that undermines any incentives for more just and inclusive governance.
Despite widespread discontent with our current system, movements for reform remainsmall and isolated from mainstream political discourse as if imagining a system change is beyond our capacity. But this is where the environmental and climate movements can step in and play a critical role showing how these interconnected issues can inspire real change.
The Environmental Imperative to Rebuilding Democracy
A report from the World Meteorological Organization confirmed that 2024 was the hottest year on record and the first year with average daily temperatures of 1.5 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial era. Millions of Americans have already been impacted by drought, wildfires, flooding, storms, and other extreme weather events due to rising average temperatures, with more severe impacts predicted as we continue to push past heat thresholds. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s warnings about the risk of rising temperatures are becoming increasingly more desperate.
We know that we have the technological means to decarbonize the economy. What we lack is the political will to meet the scale we need to achieve a goal so immense. As Dave Roberts once summed up:
Think about the political will we need: to immediately cease fossil fuel exploration, start shutting down coal mines, and put in place a plan for managed decline of the fossil fuel industry; to double or triple the global budget for clean energy research, development, and deployment; to transfer billions of dollars from wealthy countries to poorer ones, to protect them from climate impacts they are most vulnerable to but least responsible for; and quite possibly, if it comes to it, to limit the consumptive choices of the globe’s wealthiest and most carbon-intensive citizens.
A transition of that scale cannot be achieved without sustained support and participation from people, whose lives are being affected in multiple ways. And while rapid decarbonization is indeed an urgent need, many within the climate movement are convinced that deploying clean energy technologies as quickly and on as grand a scale as possible should take priority over ensuring an inclusive process or equitable benefits.
Building the political will necessary to meet our climate goals will only be possible through collective action and democratic engagement in solutions.
[In France for example, after the “yellow vest” movement forced the government to pull back plans for a nationwide carbon tax, they entered into a two year process of facilitated Climate Assemblies to develop solutions in a more democratic manner. As a result of this more democratic process, twenty percent of recommendations have been implemented, with another 51 percent implemented in a modified form.]
Deepening democratic engagement works. It creates better, more inclusive policy solutions that are more durable and resistant to political shifts because they are produced collectively and are popular.
A more participatory relationship between governments and the communities they serve can accelerate the shift to clean energy and reduce GHG emissions by reducing misinformation, improving decisions, maintaining public confidence and legitimacy by ensuring an inclusive, equitable transition.
We need to be more ambitious and take action to ensure that climate policies and the interventions they enable are developed in an open and inclusive manner, and implemented with the public’s support and understanding. To accomplish that, environmental advocates must recognize the reciprocal relationship between having effective climate policy and a healthy, inclusive democracy, and devote resources to ensuring a functioning and fair democratic system within which to advocate.
While the larger environmental movement questions its role in advocating for a stronger democracy; environmental justice advocates and frontline communities have long demanded more equitable participation in policy making. However, those demands often lack real operational and organizational clarity without a strategic focus on transforming the levers of democracy.
We also need to acknowledge the challenges environmental justice groups face, including limited capacities of both community-based advocates and local governments; in addition to the political difficulties of supporting communities when their interests are in opposition to the interest of large financial investors. This only becomes more complicated when democratic systems fail to hold powerful actors accountable to the communities most at risk, as what happened in the Flint Water Crisis.
[State level gerrymandering is the practice whereby politicians in power draw district lines in a way that increases their chances of reelection, which can often disenfranchise voters of the opposite party. The roots of the Flint water crisis was in the gerrymandered State legislative districts that allowed Republicans to control the State House despite Democratic House candidates winning 54.7% of the total vote. Republican control at the state level allowed the removal of local control of water from the people of Flint, by installing the “Emergency Manager” that created the water crisis. The need for alignment between democracy and environmental justice advocacy couldn’t be more clear as in the case of Flint.]
Bridging environmental justice and participatory democracy movements can offer needed invigoration of both, while movements for localized reforms can establish the democratic cultures that drive greater reform at national levels.
We Need A Grassroots Pro-Democracy Environmental Movement
One key way to resist rising authoritarianism is to start locally. While cities struggle to find ways to resist the threats of the Trump administration directly, they can indirectly lead a national movement to reimagine democracy by supporting efforts to deepen participatory forms of democracy at the local level. This may look like supporting efforts to bring public participation in local budgets; transitioning to proportional representation and ranked choice voting; and implementing efforts at participatory planning to respond to the challenges of climate change.
However, strategies aimed at increasing participatory democracy are only beginning to be applied to solutions for environmental sustainability and the climate crisis. But examples are emerging. In June of this year, 20 cities across the U.S. will come together as part of the All America City Awards to discuss and learn how they can “strengthen environmental sustainability through inclusive community engagement”.
And it’s not just in the U.S..
Around the world city leaders and advocates are using participatory democracy as a tool to solve the climate crisis and to overcome the threats of rising authoritarianism. Across Europe, cities are using Climate Assemblies to help break political deadlocks on climate action. In the UK; community groups like People Powered Retrofit and Retrofit for All are organizing communities into energy co-ops to manage local energy planning and target retrofitting resources to homes and businesses. While in March of this year, six European cities came together as part of the Climate Democracy Lab to explore how participatory democracy can strengthen local climate action.
Advocacy in the U.S. can learn a lot from looking at the examples of advocates abroad.
Just as the Trump administration has attempted to follow the example of Viktor Orban in Hungary, so should American city leaders and advocates look to their counterparts there for ideas on how to resist an authoritarian regime. Hungarian cities for example, have begun experiments with participatory democracy as a way to teach and deepen citizen commitment to democracy from the ground up.
The only way to ensure people don’t choose autocracy is to make democracy work to empower them and provide solutions for their needs.
Pro-democracy advocacy in the U.S. is still relatively small, and siloed between conversations focused on national-level electoral reforms and those working on participatory democracy at the local level. We need a movement that unites the two, ultimately targeting federal reforms but recognizing that the democratic culture and civic infrastructure we need must first be built from the ground up.
For example, on April 5th, more than 1,200 individual “Hands-off” protests were organized in major cities across all 50 states against the Trump administration, involving hundreds of thousands of people. They spoke out against government cutbacks, the targeting and disappearances of immigrants (especially pro-Palestine activists), growing financial turmoil and the administration’s attacks on democracy. If future protests can rally people to specifically advocate for a more participatory democracy in the cities they live in, we can begin to shift the conversation from what we’re against to what type of democracy we want and then scale up the fight.
There are no shortcuts to achieve a truly fair and just transition. Especially now. We must ensure active democratic participation and governance, which requires strengthening all aspects of our democracies, including institutions, the rule of law, and local civic infrastructures, while simultaneously fostering innovative approaches to community participation.
Stronger democratic institutions go hand in hand with stronger environmental policy. Understood in this way, democracy is both a tool and solution to the climate crisis.
Teaser image credit: Retrofit for all/Carbon Coop stall from their Facebook page.