[Ecotheology 9.3 (2004) 338-358] Ecotheology (print) ISSN 1363-7320 Ecotheology (online) ISSN 1743-1689 © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2004, Unit 6, The Village, 101 Amies Street, London SW11 2JW. Augustinian Ecological Democracy: Postmodern Nature and the City of God Bronislaw Szerszynski Chair of the Centre for the Study of Environmental Change, Institute for Environment, Philosophy and Public Policy, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YG bron@lancaster.ac.uk Abstract In this article I critically explore the work of the social theorists Klaus Eder and Ulrich Beck, who in different ways use an account of the ‘postmodern’, plural character of contemporary ideas of nature to argue for the necessity and possibility of an ecological democracy. I argue that within such social theoretical understandings of the contemporary politics of nature is a tension between pagan and Christian understandings of difference— between an understanding of difference as fundamentally irreducible and irreconcilable, and one that sees difference as contained within an over- arching harmony. I cast suspicion on an account of postmodern difference which would see it as the resurgence of a pagan polytheism which had merely suppressed by two millennia of monotheism, in favour of an alter- native account in which it appears as a historical product of the contingent path taken by the development of the Western sacred. I then explore ways in which Christian thought can provide the basis for an ontology of original peace in contrast to the original violence of pagan thought, on the basis of which might be built a different, ‘gothic’ understanding of ecological democracy, in which consensus is not grounded in the suppres- sion of polysemy but in the harmonization of generative difference. Introduction It has become commonplace to describe nature as having been post- modernized in the late twentieth century. From the 1970s at least, the unity and monopoly of scientific representations of nature has been increasingly challenged, and nature has become plural—became ‘natures’. At the beginning of the 1970s, Thomas Kuhn demonstrated how scientific investigations at any moment in history depended on a