Deane Curtin (1999) agrees that the environmental crisis is a crisis of citizenship and of traditional democracy. Unlike the sense of “democracy” that refers to culturally specific institutions created by Western liberalism, a feminist informed “ecological democracy” refers to a vision of democracy that recognizes that we all live in both cultural and ecological communities—in familiar, enduring, socially diverse relationships to people and places, culture and nature. Ecological communities are democratic when they are committed to reconciling culture with nature in ways appropriate to what it is to be an ecological citizen—one who exercises civic virtues that foster the health of all humans and the planet (see also Katherine Pettus 1997; Sherilyn MacGregor 2004).