Read Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet for Free Online

environment, and—through their political influence—even broader questions.
    Today, the world’s four largest corporations enjoy a total revenue greater than the combined gross national products of 80 countries comprising half the world’s population. Yet we perceive them as private entities, beyond democratic accountability!
    Citizen democracy—the concept of ordinary people assuming greater responsibility for public decision making—challenges us to ask whether such categories of public and private still make sense.
    More and more citizens are taking responsibility for making democratically accountable such “private” economic structures. A consortium of citizen organizations developed the Valdez Principles, guidelines to ensure that oil companies take measures to avoid oil spills, the consequences of which are broadly public in every sense. The Financial Democracy Campaign is providing a vehicle for citizens to take part in devising a fairer burden-sharing of the federal Saving and Loan bailout. 21
    Evidence of the last 20 years seems definitive on one point: Without democratizing economic decision making, reversing environmental decline seems beyond our reach. In his 1990 Making Peace with the Planet , Barry Commoner updates his earlier classic, The Closing Circle . In the earlier work he predicted that only in the few cases where citizen movements were using government to require economic bureaucracies to change their technologies of production could environmental deterioration be substantially turned around. Commoner’s predictions proved correct: Real success in protecting the environment has been achieved in just a few instances: in taking lead out of gasoline, removing DDT from pesticides, and eliminating PCB from the electrical industry.
    In other words, once U.S. corporations have been permitted—through citizen noninvolvement in the process—to emit into the environment each year what now amounts to almost four pounds of toxic substances for every person on earth, it’s simply too late . To dispose safely of this enormous quantity would require several times the profits of the chemical industry. Commoner argues that the record of the last two decades demonstrates that without citizens taking greater responsibility to ensure the halt of production of toxic substances in the first place, there is no solution. 22
    But, taking a position on anything , even speaking out in the classroom or workplace, is a scary proposition for most of us. How do we gain the confidence and the capacity to participate in earth-shaping decisions?
    Citizen democracy is a learned art . Earlier I noted that we’re not born citizens. True, anyone can respond to a few TV ads and pull a lever in a polling booth. But real citizenship is an art. Like the art of dance, music, or sport, we persevere only as we learn to do it well. If we feel awkward or foolish for too long, we’ll just stop! On the other hand, if we are learning the particular challenges and rewards of an art, we continue even if our “performance” is far from perfect. So, too, with active citizenship.
    How do we as a society, and as individuals, come to take seriously building our capacities for expressing our values and interests in common problem solving?
    The process can begin in family life. In 1985, my children—Anthony and Anna—and I wrote a book together. It’s called What to Do After You Turn Off the TV . 23 Our idea was to entice families away from letting TV dominate home life, so they might discover the joys of each other’s company. We told of our own experience of eight years without TV and interviewed hundreds of other families to capture their experiences. We were struck by how many close families had developed some version of a “family meeting”—-a special time when everyone comes together to make plans and talk over problems that might have gone unresolved. Children in such families gain an early start in acquiring the capacities—for