One of the great ironies in the story of modern representative democracy is that its geographic expansion in the closing decades of the twentieth century has been accompanied by a thinning out in its liberal Western heartland. The short-lived triumph of liberal democracy that followed the crumbling of the Berlin Wall has given way to a slowly building chorus of more sceptical voices, no less in Australia than elsewhere. Alongside the familiar problems of rising political inequality, declining political party membership and general political disaffection there is the creeping worry that liberal democracies may not be capable of handling the major challenges of the new millennium. The looming ecological crisis is widely recognised as one of these challenges, with climate change featuring as exhibit A.

Cambridge political scientist David Runciman is part of this chorus of concern. In The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War I to the Present he argued that while liberal democracies have muddled through the multiple crises of the twentieth century, we should not be lulled into thinking that they can muddle through the looming crises of the twenty-first century. The ecological crisis is singled out as one such crisis because it is unfolding too slowly, and the serious effects are too distant, for democracies to handle.