 Welcome to the future of Eastern Europe and Eco-Democracy, a four-part podcast special produced by the Green European Foundation with the support of the Green Institute of Greece and the financial support of the European Parliament to the Green European Foundation. The podcast features extracts from interviews of delegates to the future of Eastern Europe conference, which took place on the 6th and 7th of June in Riga. The conference brought together young Green activists from different parts of Eastern Europe to talk about the future of the region, as well as the challenges and opportunities for an ecological and progressive turnaround. In this episode, we hear extracts from the Eco-Democracy workshop that took place at the conference, facilitated by Ana Maniadi and Demetris Papayoriou from the Green Institute of Greece, as well as some thoughts on Eco-Democracy from Demetris. We also hear from Anastasia Dorofieva from the Belarusian Greens, Gyukce Gamle from Green Thought Association in Turkey, and Georgiy Tskelarge from CDN Corporation and Development Network Eastern Europe. The episode focuses on the relationship between ecology and democracy and how we can make our governance systems more ecological and truly inclusive, as well as presenting a green vision of the ideal political landscape in Eastern Europe. So to smoothly start our session, we're going to have a small exercise like an energizer and I will explain what I'm talking about. Good morning from me as well. So we're going to start with a meditative exercise. We're going to get stand up and we're going to close our eyes. I want you to imagine that you're a wild animal or a domestic animal or a flower or a tree, whatever you want from nature. Choose your favorite one. Yes. And now try to become it. Try to know how it feels, what it might want, what it doesn't want. Like, give it your thought, give it your attention for one minute. Think that it's inside you, that you're guiding it, and it's guiding you. And for the next one and a half hours that our workshop will last, you don't just represent yourself here, but you represent yourself and this being, this non-human being. How does the ideal political scene in Eastern Europe look like for you? And which steps are needed to reach that ideal state according to your opinion? Okay, for me, if to dream ideal state would look like we have all strong green political movement among whole Eastern Europe. We are represented on different political levels, on local levels, and we have strong on local levels, on national levels, and we have a strong regional connection, which is connected to all European and world green movement, like ideally. And in this ideal picture, of course, greens have representation, like strong political representation in all national levels and can influence in their own countries. But as well, we have some synchronized policy towards region generally, which we could discuss together, which we could, where we can share our ideas, experiences, and when we can share resources as well, like building it all together, like to prevent all these things which are happening, still happening in region, like wars, dictatorships, and so on. We could say that this conference is an example of what you're describing, right? I hope it's one of the first steps. So it would be, like for me, it would be ideal result of this conference would be, we would do maybe some small but concrete step towards this. The fundamental question for today is going to be how do we make democracy more ecological? Like, how can we put more ecology into our democracy, into these governance systems that are now running in our countries? Which measures can be implemented according to your opinion in order to encourage first humanism instead of consumerism? I think that with the current system we have, it's very capitalist and very consumerist and very patriotic, because the current system requires someone to work as long as they are not sleeping, someone to take care of the home, take care of the children, take care of the meals of that person, and the other times they're just sleeping or having their basic needs. So I feel like if we tackle the current system in a way that people think about how do they consume and how they are currently producing things and how do they maybe affect the environment right now, and if they have time to do it, that would be better for environment and they would be more proactive instead of needing themselves to whatever the society is leading them. I would like to ask you what animal would you be in the exercise that you put to us? Well, I really enjoy traveling around the world, so I would choose to be a member of the avifawna species, so maybe I would choose to be an eagle. Okay, interesting choice. Am I grading eagle so I can live in two places? Amazing. To start with, I would like to ask you whether you think that the existing democratic governments can effectively solve the most pressing environmental problems of our time? Well, several scientists question the capacity of current democratic systems to address environmental challenges, and in my opinion, current democratic governance systems lack firstly the determination and secondly the tools to effectively address more or less critical environmental issues, and such kind of problems cannot always be fixed with the application of technical and easy to go short-term solutions, like in other areas or contexts. We know that the function of natural ecosystems is not simple, and in most cases not enough studied, and when long-existed equilibrium breaks down in the nature, it's not easy to revive them or replace them with technical approaches, because as far as we know, current systems are trying to solve environmental issues with technical solutions, and another drawback, in my opinion, of current democratic governments is the inability to act on time. For example, decision-making. One of the main issues of democratic decision-making and implementation is that it takes a lot of time, sometimes too much. A simple change can take years to be voted, consulted, decided, and implemented, and we don't have enough time left to save this world. That's most sadly true. Now the billion-dollar question of this podcast, what is eco-democracy if you could give us a brief framework of that very wide term? Well, the term of eco-democracy, as far as I know, is still under determination. I mean, its definition is still not precisely chosen, but when we talk about eco-democracy, we refer to a democratic system of governance that is inclusive and offers fair representation of all involved beings, and not just the human being. So according to Jan Lundberg, who was one of the first people to approach the term, eco-democracy is the restructuring of our society for maximum conservation and equal rights for all species. And it basically transfers the weight from the current anthropocentric to a more eco-centric worldview. So the idea or the hypothesis is that by putting more ecology into democracy, it will help all the represented species, but will also help democracy itself to function better. You briefly touched on it already, but what entities should be represented in this new way of democracy and under which conditions? When we talk about entities that should be represented, well, such entities could be animal species or trees or whole forests or, I don't know, even soil microorganisms. It might sound extreme to some, but we really have no idea how much favorable for the human kind are the functions that these microorganisms run. One of the reasons we actually have food in this planet is because of them. And it could be even, I don't know, rivers or the mother earth as a whole or other types of entities, whatever. And regarding the conditions under which they should be represented, I would say that this is still to be determined. We already have very good examples of more ecological governance systems around the world with rivers that have acquired state of personhood. Or we also have the rights of nature principles that are being incorporated into a country's governance. So I think there is optimism in this direction. And yeah, if future generations are not represented or at least taken into account, then we cannot consider our governance systems inclusive. And I don't know, in my opinion, if we don't include future generations, we are just a group of selfish, greedy individuals that only take care of ourselves and we don't care about anything else and anyone else. In her book, The Democracy of Species, the acclaimed biologist and writer Robin Wall-Kimmerer offers a compelling vision for a profound reassessment of our relationship with our non-human relatives, based on the traditional ecological knowledge and wisdom of indigenous science and philosophy. At its core is the recognition of all species and places as living persons, not as inferior beings or inanimate objects. This notion is also at the heart of the movement advocating for legal rights for nature and making ecocider crime, both of which have been gaining traction and momentum. But reassessing our position as a species should also have consequences on the way we govern ourselves. In democratic systems, how could we begin to include our non-human relatives in decision making? What does it mean to represent not only ourselves, but also to attempt to represent others, like rivers, mountains, eagles or microorganisms in the soil? And could such an expansion of representation lead to a truly ecological form of democracy? I think the first of all the most important thing is to have a plural democratic and plural party democracy in Eastern Europe, because the biggest challenge that we are facing is the dominance of either one party dominance or two party dominance, which is making politics very corrupt and makes people not trust it, because you either have to choose one of the camps and this camp politics I think doesn't have place in the 21st century, this is very much the past. And I think it will be important to see the breakaway from this camp politics and also the biggest problem alongside these is that it is a lot around the personalities. It is a camps, but it is not ideological camps like you would see, social democrats or the conservatives or the liberals or whatever, it is more like a personality camps, very much centered around the few people and few influential people and the groups and in many cases it's like a cult and that is a very big problem and it doesn't leave this space for the policy discussions which decide the politics, so well ideal political landscape does look like more plural, which goes beyond the two dominant party systems, but of course I mean I'm green, so I would love to see more greens in a position of power, but also in a position of strong opposition, because when you have the greens in opposition it makes others do green stuff as well, because then the topics that greens are advocating for is that environmental protection or human rights or participatory democracy or human or queer rights or the feminism, all this and progressive social rights, all these things are something that really people are into it and we've seen in the polls recently that these are the things that are getting more and more and more popular, so when the greens are there who are advocating for all of this it becomes, it makes other political players also in order not to lose voters or not to lose support they have to adjust their coordinates of the political positioning to what the greens are doing, so the greens even in the opposition can shape the political discussion, so I would say the political landscape, the perfect political landscape is plural where we have political parties representing the ideas and policies they want to achieve and they are working in a democratic way as a party itself and it's with strong green political entity in a political landscape, in opposition or in power, let's move on to the next chapter, okay all the ideas were amazing but would you think that we have to do this in a nonviolent way, so as a person as a specificist we have to do it in a more democratic way and we have to achieve this in a nonviolent way, so how are we gonna do that we cannot say oh it's okay we're gonna just change the democracy or something like that but we what is going to happen if we don't act democratically, like if we impose these ideas of earth democracy, echo democracy, I do you think it's a fair way to just force the change like more autocratic way because we think it's right? Even if it was right, that force can be used later, people are not thinking in a democratic way or people are not thinking in thinking about like every face every equal to dimensional way and that can be used for harming nature and harming people at the later times, so Yeah this is true, someone else went to add something or not, I mean in this case we were advocating for co-democracy which is based on democratic values and it's not at within the framework of democracy then I think it's pointless because the action and the goal contradict you know, Yeah I wanted to ask whether as violence you also mean punishment, some sort of particular parliament I think should exist like a punish ecosystem make it an international crime because democracy is not always if it's not only right you also have to do some things you have some obligation, so it's good to keep that the duality Okay but by punishment do you include like death sentence? No, legal sanctions Okay, all right Or fiscal sanctions for the big enterprises Physical sanctions? Fiscal, for linkages Oh okay, fiscal, okay So we think that in this workshop we made the first step But what is the next step through a non-violent, do you have any proposals that you can share with us? Like non-violent solutions I mean Aritina already suggested something like use the power of law like the punishment You wanted to say something? Yeah You can raise awareness using the publications, social media, traditional media, exactly If you see like this democracy thing is not working and you can out, I don't know, some stuff publicly so I don't know just giving a very specific example if I don't know if it's a reserved area and if people don't have the rights to go and I don't know chop the trees where extinct or like you know try to destroy the ecosystem of the place I don't know you can take some drone pictures before or after and try to out the things and especially in the countries where the dysregulations are not working perfectly and are very corrupted and I do think I don't know some peaceful demonstrations as well I mean especially I don't know blocking the roads I don't know if it's how it's non-violent I don't know things can get violent there as well but I don't know public campaigns or I also don't fully understand how in a violent way we can want some democracy to have more resilient ecosystem because I feel like right now we're at a point where ecosystem is not wasted but like deteriorated in a way that bringing it back and waiting for all these processes to go on and on we will not have enough time for that I feel like that's why we need to take like more bold actions and rather collections and I mean yeah violence I don't even see how we can use violence in that but like in our context like I'm coming from Azerbaijan and when it comes to environment and ecology all this process is not regulated at all and there is one ministry that is ecology and natural resources it's like a whole ministry is like a joke and whenever you approach them you never get an adequate answer and it's not functioning at all and I mean it's very highly corrupted as well literally if you have money you can just do anything to the ecology and the built environment and to the environment as well. Why do you think non-human actors of nature that could be potentially affected by ecological risks should have a say in the generation of the policy generating such risks? To me it's something even more important than their representation when it comes to a potential ecological risk. First of all when we talk about ecology we think of ecosystems and the inhabitants the living entities that exist in an ecosystem so in any given ecosystem or biotope we won't find only a single species there is always diversity there is complexity and there are always symbiotic relations. So if we consider a democratic system of governance something that is inclusive and offers fair representation of all involved beings then how can it work for the good of all of them no matter if it's about coming risks or not with only one species the humankind being the only one representative. So of course non-human beings should have a say in the generation of policies when their habitats are potentially being under pressure simply because they should have the right to protect themselves right? You've been listening to part three of the future of Eastern Europe and Ecodemocracy a full part podcast special made possible by the Green European Foundation and the Green Institute of Greece