Natural Democracy
I speak the password primeval, I give the sign of democracy,
By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.
Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” 1855
One warm March day, when my son Brook was three months old, I bundled him up, and we trekked westward in the deep snow into the forest on a trail that terminated at Gay Brook, where a waterfall made a six-foot drop. When we arrived, I held Brook out to view the thundering falls. Initially, he did not respond. Soon, his arms and legs began kicking and flailing, and he babbled with excitement long after my arms grew weary.
Brook’s waterfall vanished one spring when he was about three years old. A logging contractor had bought a forest tract upstream and proceeded to liquidate its timber value, leaving behind skidder roads gouged in the steep terrain. After a winter of above-average snowfall, followed by a warm and rainy spring, the clear-cut forest no longer acted as a sponge that retains and slowly releases water.
That spring, just above the waterfall, floodwaters slammed into the bank where Gay Brook turns south. They dislodged three-foot-high boulders, once perched upon even grander boulders to form the falls, and washed them into the pool below. Over time, the sharp drop at the falls has smoothed out. What would have taken nature’s erosive powers decades, perhaps centuries, to accomplish occurred overnight thanks to someone’s quest for quick profits.
The person responsible once had been a three-month-old child. Why do so many of us outgrow our instinctive love for the natural world? Why must our culture turn our natures against nature? How can we nurture and sustain our children’s innate, joyful response to wild nature? Why do our political institutions reward such behavior and thwart overdue reforms?
What passes today as democratic “self-governance” has failed to mitigate the climate crisis and the sixth extinction event, or to ameliorate injustice and misery. To begin the healing, we must acknowledge there has never been true democracy in the United States. The First Nations of North America did not vote for genocide and the enclosure of the Indigenous commons. Africans did not elect to be kidnapped and enslaved. Women did not campaign to be disenfranchised. Plants and animals did not cast ballots in support of habitat degradation and persecution of large predators. Unborn generations have not demanded they inherit an overheated planet.
We need a new politics that adheres to natural laws and abides by natural limits — a politics that addresses the root causes of our inability to protect land health. We need a Natural Democracy that ensures environmental and political justice for human and non-human alike.
Let us “speak the password primeval,” that we may begin to restore conditions conducive to future forests primeval. Let us “give the sign of democracy” and “accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.”
Indigenous cultures speak of “animal people” and “plant people.” Native American educator Gregory Cajete, Ph.D., a Tewa Indian from Santa Clara Pueblo, wrote: “A people’s understanding of the cycles of nature, behavior of animals, growth of plants, and interdependence of all things in nature determined their culture, that is, ethics, morals, religious expression, politics, and economics. The people came to know and to express a ‘natural democracy,’ in which humans are related and interdependent with plants, animals, stones, water, clouds, and everything else.”1
Wisdom comes from the land. Let us model our politics upon wild nature. Let us study nature’s healing powers, that we may restore the health of our lands and our institutions of self-governance. We must, as Aldo Leopold advised, save all the parts if we wish to heal the whole.
Gulf of Maine poet Gary Lawless once told me: “A community is really a conversation, and if you aren’t allowing all the voices to be present, then the community is out of balance. It can’t heal itself until all the voices are present, and no one voice is in control.”
He continued: “I think the whole planet is trying to educate us. … Everything around you is trying to educate you about how to be in that place. If you stop to listen to the wind in the trees for a minute, and look down to see what is happening under your feet, there’s stuff going on that can educate you about that place. When you start acknowledging your connection to everything, all of a sudden your language changes, because you have to find a new way of talking about who you are, and where you are, and what you’re doing.”
The elements of Natural Democracy include:
An informed electorate: Democracy flourishes when an informed electorate can freely participate in setting the agenda and voting upon it. This requires a human electorate that cherishes wild nature and is well informed about natural history and atmospheric science. An ecological education unfits a child to be a slave of consumerism and resource exploitation.
Children of Indigenous cultures learned, through direct experience with plants and animals, the smells and sounds of forests, plains, deserts, and oceans. We need citizens who can read the landscape as if their lives depend upon it, as indeed they do. For some time, funding for natural history teaching at the college and university level has been shrinking as budgets for molecular biology and genetic engineering have grown. We need more natural history education at all levels of schooling.
A vote for all: W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in The Souls of Black Folk: “the best arbiters of their own welfare are the persons directly affected; consequently that it is only by arming every hand with a ballot, — with the right to have a voice in the policy of the state, — that the greatest good to the greatest number could be attained.” Natural Democracy finds ways to enfranchise non-humans and the unborn.
Land reform: To address today’s sixth extinction crisis and climate change, we need more wildlands accompanied by low-impact management of woodlands and farmlands. Restoration of the Indigenous commons and a dramatic expansion of the public, wild commons are necessary components of land reform, as is a partial redress of environmental injustice and today’s cancerous maldistribution of wealth.
I do not propose constructing voting booths for wolves, red spruce, loons, lichens, and dragonflies. I have no standing to “speak” on behalf of non-human species and the unborn. Let us, instead, engage in a bit of whimsical seriousness and imagine we could convene a Congress of Nonhumans. What would these peoples likely tell us? Clean air, clean water, and unfragmented habitat that meets the needs of all phases of our life cycles are essential to our pursuit of life, liberty, and our evolutionary destiny. Unborn human generations may well answer: We have a natural right to inherit a low-carbon economy, characterized by low-impact land-use practices.
Everyone, everywhere is entitled to easy access to green spaces. Living within natural limits and establishing a network of wildlands for the sake of other species and the unborn, as well as for our fellow humans, is an act of grace and reciprocity.
It is unconscionable that the global economy forces rural communities to choose between jobs and ecosystem health. All life-forms deserve an economic system that values both life and the right of all — prokaryotes, protists, fungi, plants, and animals — to meet basic needs. Since we cannot alter laws of physics, chemistry, biology, and climate science, we must transform human behavior.
Let us accept limits on human aspirations and appetites so that wild nature might flourish; let our political discourse give voice to our fellow wild creatures and future generations. Our own well-being depends on how we treat others, including the unborn.
This vision represents a radical departure from today’s reality only if we consider our current high-carbon economy, habitat fragmentation and degradation, the growing extinction crisis, the climate catastrophe, and environmental injustice to be normal and desirable. If this necessary challenge were not so daunting, we could be celebrating the Natural Democracy Semiquincentennial two and a half years hence.
Human welfare shall ever be in peril while our voices drown out all other voices. Our pursuit of happiness leads nowhere if we fail to honor the pursuits of others. Their welfare is our only security, fulfillment, and happiness. In wildness, we lose and discover ourselves. May we, with gratitude, shed any conceits that disrupt the harmony of the conversation.
Adapted from Children of the Northern Forest: Wild New England’s History from Glaciers to Global Warming by Jamie Sayen, Yale University Press. Copyright © 2024 Yale University Press. Reprinted by permission of Yale University Press.
1 Cajete, G. 2003. Philosophy of native science. in Waters, ed., American Indian Thought: Philosophical Essays (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell), 46.
Jamie Sayen is a longtime wildlands activist living in northern New Hampshire. He is author of Children of the Northern Forest: Wild New England’s History from Glaciers to Global Warming (Yale University Press, 2024) and You Had a Job For Life: Story of a Company Town, first published in 2018, with a new edition published by Brandeis University Press in 2023. He serves on the Editorial Board of From the Ground Up.