In environmental political theory, the sublime has been invoked to portray nature as an awe-inspiring site of spiritual elevation and restful contemplation. While the sublime has shaped conservation efforts, it also has perpetuated a grandiose yet static vision of nature that obscures the flourishing and vibrant ecosystemic webs of life. Drawing on Immanuel Kant’s aesthetic considerations of nature and his teleological concept of purposiveness, I recover and reconceptualize an ecological sublime, which challenges anthropocentric myth by evoking a sense of uncanniness, revealing displays of agency and creativity that undermine the dichotomous barrier between humans and non-humans. Most importantly, the ecological sublime demonstrates that the web of life will rebuild and continue past this ecological crisis, regardless of whether or not humanity remains.

While the election of authoritarian-style regimes in the West shocks those with liberal-democratic sensibilities, the authors argue it is not unexpected in a system that was founded upon the same colonial rationalities that produced the capitalist global order. The Cartesian logics that produce the liberal-democratic, autonomous-human subject also enable the emergence of the conquering (ego conquiro) and genocidal (ego extermino) subject – whether through White ignorance, White supremacy, ecocide, or other structures of violence. The authors argue, however, that this moment of shock represents a critical opportunity for us to radically (from the roots) transform our liberal democracies. Turning to multiple, extant Indigenous, alternative, and emancipatory democratic traditions, they call for the composting of liberal democracy’s hyper-individualism through a transformative politics of radical, non-anthropocentric relational democracy.

What stories might connect democracies to nonhumans and thus support the joint flourishing of humans and nonhumans? This paper examines stories where the territory is one of the main characters: Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Michel Tournier’s Friday, and stories told by activists in recent political movements for “The Defense of Water and Territory” in Latin America. Each of these rely on myths to send a political message, but the first two rely on a solitary hero who either conquers or protects the land, while the latter tell stories about becoming strong with others while respecting each one. By conveying a message of collaboration between humans and nonhumans according to democratic principles, they also seek to become new myths linking democracies to the nonhuman world.

Drawing on fermentation materially and metaphorically, this article argues an earthly democracy must be understood not only through inclusion and participation but through multispecies myths and transformations. Engaging Earthborn Democracy alongside the transdisciplinary art constellation Fermenting Feminism, the article develops three central contributions: it reconceives the demos as materially composed through multispecies processes; it advances exit and transformation as democratic values alongside inclusion; and it articulates a democratic necropolitics that treats death not as political failure but as a generative condition of democratic life. By foregrounding fermentation’s intertwining of liveliness and decay, the article expands democratic imaginaries beyond life-centered and anthropocentric frameworks, offering a political vocabulary attuned to multispecies flourishing and dying well together.

Feelings of sentimental affection for local environmental features are common—but there are good reasons to doubt that such feelings could ground a radical eco-politics. Thinking with the work of anthropologist Anna Tsing, I develop an account of “undomesticated love” that allows us to take on board forms of local eco-affection while avoiding concerns around provincialism, paternalism, and political irrelevance. Undomesticated love culminates in the work of collective action, oriented toward flourishing multispecies relationships. What’s more, this ethic primes practitioners for the work of political insurgence. I offer a radical political ethic—which I term the “virtues of articulation”—that is prefigured by undomesticated love. Ultimately, this article articulates an ecological vision beyond ruination—and a politics offering the hope of messy, imperfect love as a mode of life.

Whether “evening philosophy” or the political theory of “daybreak,” political theory and climate activism often affirm the ethical role of hope to meet this historical moment, which is characterized by ecological and political crises. This article addresses hope’s promise and limitations for meeting the demands of the day. Even when hope is divested from the narrative of progress, it retains an anticipatory residue that keeps hope bound to a cycle of disappointment or disfulfillment. In this article, I argue that hope is what James Martel refers to as an ideological archon (or invisible power), whose anticipatory gaze is bound to disappoint and diminish agency. Rather than binding climate activism to a disappointing principle or affect, I argue that political theory should move beyond hope.

As ecological and political collapse force us into collective descent, we need mythic structures that can help us integrate darkness and decline into democratic practices and institutions. Enlightenment demands for perpetual ascent from darkness toward luminosity are ill-suited for these challenges. We develop an alternative mythos through contrasting readings of two texts. First, Ursula Le Guin’s story of “Omelas” reveals how enlightened societies maintain themselves by proscribing empathetic engagement with their underworlds. Second, the Sumerian myth of Inanna’s descent to the underworld, offers a radically different cosmology wherein voluntary descent with open ears, radical vulnerability, and empathetic engagement with suffering become conditions for sociopolitical transformation. “Earth democracy” creatively embraces rhythms of descent and regeneration. We suggest ways social movements might embody these principles.

The animal question in politics is as old as politics itself. It is a question that drives my own work, where I consistently confront an absence of animals viewed on their own terms, in and for themselves, in conceptions of political life. Animals are often part of the story, but as mystical and allegorical figures, sacrificial bodies, and constitutive limits of the civil state. Modern liberal democracies take on the latter position of marking animals as the exit from politics, largely writing them (and nature more generally) out of the narrative altogether.