In the nearly 250 years since the United States’ Founders wrote the Constitution, freedom and “God-given rights” in America have been subjected to profound stresses. But the world’s oldest living democracy has survived. When stress reveals weaknesses and flaws, our tradition in the U.S. has been to learn from and fix them.The Republic has prevailed despite civil war, the Great Depression, two major oil crises, two world wars, a couple of pandemics, and periods of intense division and dissent. More than one million Americans have died in democracy’s defense.

The question today is whether it will survive a presidential election this November.

America’s Founders anticipated that tyranny would eventually challenge democracy. Thomas Jefferson warned: “Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.” James Madison described it: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands…may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

However, the Founders couldn’t foresee that democracy’s survival in the United States and elsewhere would require nations to prevail over a crisis that threatens not only freedom and government by the governed but also the biosphere–the ecological systems and conditions on which much of the planet’s life depends. Nor could they anticipate the reverse: that our ability to prevent global warming would depend in large part on the health of democracy. Simply put, the planet is warming, and the weather is becoming increasingly violent because of greed. Rich and powerful industries—particularly the fossil energy sector—stubbornly (and some say criminally) refuse to put people and the planet above their profits.

The ability to stop climate-altering pollution depends on whether the people—not rich and powerful special interests—are ultimately in control. Left unmitigated, the social, economic, and environmental effects of climate change create ideal chaotic conditions for authoritarians to move in and take control.

As we know, the threat to democracy this year goes well beyond the United States. Over 60 countries and 4 billion people will participate in elections during a wave of ascendant authoritarianism and declining global freedom. As one journalist said, “We will know whether democracy lives or dies by the end of 2024.”

Because climate change is global, so must be the solutions. But we must wonder whether governments’ failure to confront climate change adequately is in part due to the powerful’s willingness to allow conditions to deteriorate until citizens accept strongman rule.

The better alternative is governments and leaders who invoke our best impulses, aspirations, and energies. We must mature our vision of democracy and its laws to include the rights of the poor as well as the rich, the rights of posterity as well as the living, the rights of nature as well as people, and the fair distribution of costs, risks, and benefits within and between generations.

Considering the urgency of action, we must confront climate change with our current political economy, even as we accomplish system change. Our north star should be to escape the illusion that humanity can and must dominate nature, that technology can compensate for bad behavior, and that we can solve problems with the same values and paradigms that created them.

In this century, we must achieve, and in centuries to come, we must sustain a benign symbiotic relationship with the natural world, even as we venture into space and into capabilities we have not yet conceived. For nearly 250 years, America has considered itself a “shining city on a hill” and an inspiration for the rest of the world to adopt and defend governments of, by, and for their people. At the moment, its lights have dimmed. The November election in the U.S. will determine whether America powers them up again.

But the global goal is not one well-lit nation on a hill in a world of darkness. It’s a world where the lights of freedom and democracy illuminate the darkness everywhere.

The European Council has done the world a substantial service by approving a law to restore the continent’s damaged ecosystems.

Why the world? Because the EU’s new Nature Restoration Law sets an example other nations should follow. In degrading nature, we have degraded ourselves – our health, the quality of our lives, and the connections with our roots.

Besides, healthy ecosystems provide civilization with vital services at no cost. Failing to restore those services would be like leaving a trillion-dollar gift unopened.

Actually, the gift is worth much more. Ten years ago, researchers led by environmental economist Robert Costanza estimated that just 17 key ecosystems provided civilization with services worth $145 trillion annually. Unfortunately, nations sacrificed as much as $20 trillion in services by degrading lands with deforestation, urbanization, and agriculture.

The damage has been extensive in Europe, where more than 80 percent of habitats are in poor condition and one in three pollinators are in decline. The new law sets legally binding goals for member countries to restore at least 20 percent of their land and sea areas by the end of this decade, and all damaged ecosystems by 2050.

In the process, the European Union will reap a wide variety of benefits. They will include nature’s ability to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and make human settlements more resilient to global climate change. For example, wetlands and reforested watersheds will reduce floods as well as absorb CO2, recharge groundwater, and provide wildlife habitat.

In cities, permeable surfaces and green spaces reduce the cost of stormwater controls by absorbing rain where it falls. Urban forestry lowers inner-city temperatures, conserves energy, and saves lives during heat waves. Flowering plants that beautify cities attract and nourish the pollinating insects on which agriculture depends.

Barcelona, Edinburgh, Verona, and Vitoria-Gasteiz already are members of a growing Biophilic Cities Network, based on the work of the late scientist and naturalist Edward O. Wilson, who advocated closer contact between people and nature. Studies show such contact reduces stress, which emphases nature’s reintroduction to add beauty and services while giving residents closer contact with nature. Studies show that contacts improves mood, reduces stress, and is good for overall health.

The economic benefits can also be substantial. Researchers in the United States found in 2015 that ecosystem-service restoration had created 221,000 jobs and $24.5 billion in economic benefits, along with $1 billion in local and $2 billion in national tax revenues. The World Resources Institute calculates that every Euro invested in restoring degraded lands returns 30 Euros in economic benefits.

Writing in Meer last fall, I proposed that all nations join a decades-long campaign to restore the natural systems we’ve degraded and destroyed, often thinking that technology could do a better job. The philosophy of controlling floods rather than avoiding them has been a prime example. To accommodate people with the poor sense to build their homes in the paths of rivers, then built countless dams, levees, and other modifications to keep rivers out. The simpler solution was to keep people out of floodplains so rivers could do their jobs by using their meanders, wetlands, and floodplains to spread out, slow down, and control their destructive force. People could build beyond their reach.

Instead, our legacy is an estimated 1.2 million dams in 36 European countries, half of them abandoned, many past their useful life, and virtually none built to handle the precipitation events we see today because of climate change.

In 2020, the European Environment Agency reported that human-made flood barriers have degraded up to 90 percent of floodplains. Euronews reports that more than 10,000 structures built to control rivers already have been removed in the U.S. and Europe to restore the health of riverine ecosystems.

Europe’s new Nature Restoration Law is the latest development in a growing movement to recognize that nature and species have their own inherent rights, including the right to life. As of 2020, 39 countries had established nature’s rights in their constitutions, treaties, court decisions, and laws.

“They represent a new wave of nature and animal rights movements gaining traction,” the Guardian reports, “amid frustration over humanity’s ultra-exploitative relationship with other species and growing concern about the shortcomings of the technology-and-markets approach to the climate crisis.”

Even as we develop artificial intelligence and the means to settle Mars, we must maintain our close connection with the natural world on Earth. It nourishes our bodies, minds, hearts, and souls. And as David Attenborough warns, “What humans do over the next 50 years will determine the fate of all life on the planet.”