From the texts covered so far in this book a reader might not guess one of the most distinctive features of the environmental crisis. All across the world groups of people have come together outside the normal frameworks of politics to protest local outrages or environmental threats. The Indigenous Environmental Network, for instance, is ‘A network of Indigenous Peoples empowering Indigenous Nations and communities towards sustainable livelihoods, demanding environmental justice and maintaining the Sacred Fire of our traditions.’ Together with the proliferation of various non-governmental bodies, such movements now form a kind of cosmopolitan politics, its actions and concerns unconfined to the boundaries of the nation state.

The environmental crisis, Ulrich Beck argues, is itself inherently a delegitimation of traditional political structures: