Other Wise Democracies: What the Tree Canopies Know

Nelems argues that today’s democratic morbidity can be located in the ways it reproduces an individualist ontology to undemocratizing effects. Viewed through this lens, the growing backlashes against democracy appear as a symptom, not a cause of democracy’s crisis. However, the boundaries and enactments of representative democracies have long been troubled, stretched and shaped by democratizing processes and movements that reference an ontology of intra-being. Nelems proposes the “ecocycle” within the living ecosystems of tree canopies as a relational model of intra-being through which we might re-examine and re-imagine democratizing and undemocratizing processes. The ecocycle’s two “traps” of poverty and rigidity offer critical insights into the points of connect and disconnect between these processes, as well as the relationship between the lifeways they generate. In their porous, dynamic, entangled, and grounded relationality, tree canopies offer pathways by which the roots of a constellation of democracies might be deparochialized with a view to leveraging the transformative potential of other/wise democracies.