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The Listening Project, a national program based in North Carolina, is a community organizing and outreach tool that uses in-depth, one-on-one interviews with people in their homes. Instead of the usual quick, check-off survey, organizers ask open-ended questions about people’s values and concerns. In one home, a middle-aged European-American man complained that the biggest problem he saw was the noisy black teenagers who hung out on the streets and caused trouble. On a simple survey, that one comment might have gotten him labeled as a racist. But the organizers listened. They didn’t argue. Their questions encouraged the man to look deeper. As he talked, he began to reflect as well. By the end of the interview, he himself had restated (and re-understood) the problem in his neighborhood as the lack of recreational facilities and opportunities for young people.24

These are some of the themes of citizen democracy. What they add up to is a profoundly different approach to social change than most of us are accustomed to. It means, for both Right and Left, breaking the habit of what I call the “manifesto approach” to social change: We decide on the program, and then “sell” it to others, or preferably, “convert” others to our truths. But, if in drawing up our alternative designs, we appear merely as more “experts” with our own brand of specialized knowledge, we do nothing to diminish the sense of powerlessness that people feel. If our process mimics the dominant instrumental view of politics—or of it fuels the polarized, highly moralized brand—we do nothing to encourage prople to take on the joys and frustrations of public engagement. In so doing we fail to address the real crisis. For the real crisis is not that justice, freedom, and biological sustainability have not yet been achieved. It is that people feel increasingly disenfranchised from the public processes essential to their realization.

If this is true, then the real challenge is neither to proclaim beautiful values nor to design elegant answers ourselves; it is to create a politics of practical problem solving—one that is engaging and rewarding, that respects people and allows them to develop their own values in interaction with one another. This means learning, modeling, and mentoring the “democratic arts.”

Fully understanding democracy as a process rather than a structure of government means accepting that it can never be fully realized. In his 1990 address to the U.S. Congress, Czechoslovakia’s President Vaclav Havel reminded Americans:

One may approach [democracy] as one would the horizon, but it can never be fully attained.… You [Americans] have thousands of problems, as other countries do, but you have one great advantage. You have been approaching democracy uninterrupted for 200 years.

Can we come to believe in democracy as an ever-unfolding dynamic to which there can be no final resting point? Such a vision suggests a fragile ecology of democracy—democracy as ever-evolving relationships through which people solve common problems and meet deep human needs.

Midwives to the New

The view I have attempted here would allow us finally to leave behind the worthless debate about whether we should address environmental problems by convincing people to alter individual life choices. Or, instead, should we work for changes in our economic rules and structures?

I’ve held—and believe my intuition confirmed by people’s experience during the last 20 years—that so-called structural changes can come only as we reshape our very understanding of ourselves, gain confidence in our intuitive sense of connectedness, and therefore gain courage. That confidence and courage, as I argue throughout Diet for a Small Planet, come through making new choices in every aspect of our lives. Gaining confidence in our capacities and values, we’re able to challenge messages telling us that market exchange is a virtual divine law whose consequences we must live with; and to question economic dogma making giant corporations