Earthborn Democracy

Political theorists Ali Aslam (Mount Holyoke College), David McIvor (Colorado State University), and Joel Alden Schlosser (Bryn Mawr College) have written a new book focusing on the ways in which humans and the rest of the species on earth need to look to each other to co-exist in the precarious future of the globe. The analysis in Earthborn Democracy: A Political Theory of Entangled Life use three different approaches within political theory to frame the conversation: ancient political theory and the parameters of the ancient/classical world, environmental political theory, and contemporary political theory and praxis. Aslam, McIvor, and Schlosser have been working on this book, in some form, since their days in graduate school, and they have created a text that was not written by each of them separately, but in a very consciously collaborative way, with a single voice. And like their writing process, the authors are exploring how cooperation can happen across differences, in this case, across various kinds of specie differences.

Earthborn Democracy examines how to recover interspecies entanglements, which are present, but we need to learn to recognize them as such. As a species, and through our political systems and understandings of ideas like nation-states, we have absorbed the stories of disentanglement between humans and the rest of the living world. The concept that humans need to or should dominate all other species is a myth, but it is a myth to which we all abide, and it comes to us through so many different narratives and foundational approaches to human life. Part of the argument in Earthborn Democracy is to interrogate these foundational myths and to reorient our thinking to a more collaborative approach across species. As the authors note, all species are, in fact, earthborn and borne by the earth. This commonality is key to our engagement across species, drawing us and all other species within the sustainability of the earth itself and its capacity to continue to bear us all.

Earthborn Democracy: A Political Theory of Entangled Life examines the ways in which humans have disconnected from the earth and the natural linkages between species. The final section of the book highlights different examples of some entanglements that are also pushing against the current myths that shape human activities and thinking. While there is no simple or easy solution to the current disconnection, Aslam, McIvor, and Schlosser provide some paths and ways of reconfiguring myths that can lead to more entanglement among species. All the earthborn(e) species may well depend on that re-connection and re-engagement.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social