The centralization of power involved in nuclear energy and the extension of the police state justified by the imperatives of nuclear energy security were other grounds for protest.

    The sequel to those events has confirmed the relevance of these diagnoses, since nuclear power has imposed itself - when it could - by side-stepping the rules of public debate and information transparency. The criticism leveled against nuclear power was later generalized to cover other apt technical systems and devices, such as genetically modified organisms (GMO), nanotechnologies and ever-more-sophisticated systems of social control.

    Later, another way of analyzing the connection between democracy and ecology was proposed by philosopher Hans Jonas: in "The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age," he discussed the ability of democracies to choose the measures necessary to avoid the apocalyptic prospect shaped by the ecological crisis.

    Could "public idealism" - in other words, the virtue of citizens - pursue that "dull objective: humanity's self-moderation?" In the absence of which, that "responsibility" would have to be assumed by an "elite." However, the picture has unfolded for about a decade, and it seems ever more clear that, in capitalism's recent development, it's the oligarchy that threatens democracy by clinging to the relations of inequality on which its power is based, all the while maintaining the ecological crisis by its refusal to question the ideology of material growth.

    A good witness to this reversal of perspective is Julien Coupat in his Le Monde article of May 26, the pivot of which follows here: "What we have before us is a fork in the road, at once historic and metaphysical: either we go from a paradigm of government to a paradigm of inhabiting the government at the price of a cruel, but deeply moving revolt, or we allow this climatic disaster to impose itself at a planetary level, a disaster in which will coexist under the strict control of "e-complex" management, an imperial elite of citizens and plebian masses kept on the outside."

    We will talk about the "cruel, but deeply moving revolt;" we will stress the importance of the relations of inequality that determine the position of the "imperial elite," but the spirit of political ecology is definitely there: democracy is threatened less by the difficulty of the responses to be brought to the ecological crisis than by the oligarchy's actual behavior.

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    Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.