necessitated the imposition of sociopolitical limits through coercive and
authoritarian political rule. Yet as the years passed, this narrative suggests,
environmental political theory recognized the errors of this anti-democratic
perspective and came to embrace democracy as either compatible with or
necessary for the project of addressing environmental problems (e.g.
Eckersley 1992 , 11 – 21 ; Humphrey 2004 , 115 ). Unlike earlier authors, today we
Wnd almost no one who identiWes their own theory as anti-democratic; the
position has become one attributed to theories by critics.
The limitations of this storyline lie,Wrst, in the suggestion that democracy
is at issue primarily when it is an explicit subject of debate and, second, in the
overly conWdent assessment that we are (almost) all democrats now. By
contrast, I wish to suggest that questions of democracy are both more perva-
sive and engender less unanimity than the above narrative suggests. An
excellent illustration of this can be found in an unconventional book edited
by John Martin Gillroy and Joe Bowersox ( 2002 ). In this book, leading
empirical analysts oVer a series of speciWc environmental policy prescriptions,
which are intertwined with both essays and transcripts of actual dialogue
among prominent environmental theorists. The latter’s comments are initially
structured around a variety of particular themes, including the role of science,
the relationship of environmental to social justice, and the valuation of
nature. Yet by the conclusion of the volume, it has become clear that these
diverse discussions have all converged (in a manner seemingly unintended by
the organizers) upon a singular set of questions about democratic competence
and accountability (Gillroy and Bowersox 2002 ). In a similar manner, the
substantive debates sketched above can all be reconstructed as converging
upon core democratic questions—more particularly, as questions about the
level of, and conditions for, one’s faith in a democratic public as an agent for
positive environmental change. In its broadest sense, the post-exuberant
tendency in environmental political theory centers its project squarely upon
this question of democracy, whether or not it is the explicit topic of study.
Consider the debate over ‘‘nature.’’ Much of the public vehemence of this
debate seems diYcult to explain if it is centered on a disagreement over
ontology or epistemology. Instead, the worry expressed by many is a prag-
matic and political one. 8 In his critique of social constructionist arguments
about nature, for example, poet Gary Snyder confesses to ‘‘getting a bit
grumpy about the dumb arguments being put forth by high-paid intellectual
8 An excellent and evenhanded guide to this terrain is Soper ( 1995 ).political theory and the environment 783