GEOGRAPHY,ECOLOGY, DEMOCRACY*

Critical geography must go beyond the spaces of power to political ecology. Human activity is necessarily ecological, and so too are politics and democracy. Thus, the regulation of environmental contradictions raises fundamental issues of democratic politics and principles of social justice. The answers to environmental crises are not to be found in the state or the market, the two leviathans, but in the ability of humans to govern themselves democratically and justly in relation to the earth. Because landscape is the sedimented history of human transformations of nature, love of landscapes and their Otherness is a testing ground for a moral and democratic relation to nature.