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.

There is a multiplicity or pluriverse of modes or families of democracy and citizenship on this planet, from diverse types of participatory democracy to Gaia or Earth democracy. In response to the ecological and democratic crises, the aim of this volume is to disclose and survey five modes of democracy: Indigenous democracies, Local/global participatory democracies, representative democracies, international/global democracies, and Gaia democracies. We study how they are enacted and the ways in which they interact in order to show how they can coordinate and cooperate democratically in response to the ecosocial crises we face. We call this integration of democratic diversity “joining hands” and explicate six ways of joining hands in practice. The Introduction includes overviews of each chapter.