ABSTRACT
This chapter offers modern and contemporary resources to save democracy by rethinking it from the point of view of popular power and the need to avert ecological disaster. It first provides a diagnosis of the current state of representative democracy as a regime type that has corrupted into oligarchic democracy and then explores the institutional innovations offered by the Florentine Secretary Niccolò Machiavelli and by the French revolutionary Nicolas de Condorcet to deal with the systemic corruption that plagued popular modern republics. Focusing on the overlap of oligarchic power and environmental destruction, the chapter then highlights the new mechanisms and institutions that have attempted to give power to the people and protect the planet in Canada, the United States, Ecuador, and France. It concludes by arguing that the only effective way to stop climate collapse is to give the common people at the local level the necessary legal tools to defend the ecosystems they inhabit.
