New directions for environmental democracy

Interpreters offer a political strategy to safeguard the natural environment and future generations. This is to be achieved through face-to-face community relationships in a democratic structure that is attentive to the otherness of Nature. A concern for such values and the future of the world, however, is something that is not necessarily self-evident within procedural liberal, market-based reforms and postmodern discourse.

A new, interpretative inspired age might be one where people relate to, and cope with, the turbulent environment in which they live and act. Accordingly, liberal and postmodern meta-ethics beg the ontological features of human identity associated as they are with environmental and political realism. Interpreters suggest that there is a connection between intrinsic value in the world and how external reasons might put people in touch with the natural world. Postmodern contingency cuts us off from our expressive sources of the self precisely when interpretation is most needed. From this, it follows that it is possible that our coping skills articulate and orient us to the world where language is the conduit through which the otherness of nature is articulated; that is, replacing sustainability with steady-state social arrangements that challenge capitalism and technological modernity.

This interpretivism can be connected with the environmental precautionary principle which states that ‘where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental damage’ (Brown, 1995, p. 67). These arguments reflected two interlocking premises. First, there was an argument outlining why secular societies have had difficulty recognising the otherness of the natural world. Second, moral realism was seen to put people directly in touch with the world. When combined a political vision that emphasised common endeavours as a reflection of humanity as the voice of Nature . It was argued that those critics who focussed on the notion of a voice of Nature invested too much in analysing his focus on community without attention to work on the politics of recognition and what is significance. Of course, a focus on the criterion of significance is not at the expense of individual rights because the purpose is about understanding our place in the world. The first issue in the present

New directions for environmental democracy 271 book asked how we arrived at rhe present disastrous environmental and political position. The second involved images of commonality, community, interpretation, and how to shape civil society. The book argued that civil society is not built on economic and regulatory systems alone.

Accordingly, a civil and environmentally aware community is more than being from free associations under the tutelage of state power. In a stronger and secondary sense, civil society exists only where society' can structure itself and co-ordinate its actions through such associations that are free of state tutelage. In this regard, an environmentally aware society' acts as an alternative or supplement to the second sense, we can speak of civil society wherever the ensemble of associations can significantly determine or inflect the course of state policy.

Furthermore, the book has responded to interpretivist criticisms levelled by some critical theorists. These criticisms are not necessarily a problem in this accountability argument because discourse using these nuanced expressions leads to new ideas and concepts that are focussed on justice. Critics do not develop the interpretive two-stage process where concepts and ideas concerning justice must be considered in the light of the place and context to which they belong. The first stage involved entering into dialogue and understanding the perspective of other interlocutors. The second stage worked out political principles of justice that allow interlocutors to live together. In reworking our understanding of being in the world, Taylor has provided a starting point for rethinking the way individuals and communities ought to be dealing politically with ecological crises. Of course, this does not mean that the interpretivist-ecological and social politics transcends individual rights. The development of the interpretivist framework, in a critical and environmentally aware direction, together with the delineation between the demands of individual rights and cultural survivance offered insights into the political and moral structures needed to create awareness that Nature is a source of the self.