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It is difficult to see why anyone should have bothered to put this particular collection of articles together in one volume. Democracy and green politics is, to be sure, an increasingly important and interesting area of concern, but to offer up something as incoherent and ill-written as this does nobody any favours.

A lot of this must be attributed to the editors. They provide the reader with no overview of the terrain to be covered or of the history of the debate so far. The choice of some of the topics used to help map out that terrain (nonviolence, cooperatives and so on) is arbitrary and wholly unrepresentative of green politics as it is currently practised. All the best articles come towards the end of the collection, by which time any self-respecting lay reader (let alone green activist) will have given up in disgust. And more than 50 per cent of the articles are written in an unacceptably impenetrable style, with the standard argot of political science indigestibly glutinised by liberal helpings of green jargon.

It is a sorely wasted opportunity. For there is certainly a case to be answered. Most greens are indeed keen to see the processes of liberal democracy radically transformed. A few spit on these processes as tools of an inherently corrupt and unsustainable world system, and reject them utterly. And those who argue that there are natural laws that are non-negotiable in any political system have to explain how they expect those preconditions to be made operational through democratic processes.

It is this kind of concern that has led theorists like Goodin and Saward (the former mysteriously absent from this collection; the latter represented by a depressingly inconsequential article) to attack the democratic credentials of green politicians. Both of them in different ways have argued that a commitment to democracy is not intrinsic to green politics, but merely contingent - ie on balance, it provides the most expeditious means of achieving green goals.

Most green activists are so unimpressed by this precautionary paranoia that they have always seen it as a complete nondebate. For a start, whether they are right or wrong, most Greens believe that the need to live within the carrying capacity of our natural systems is a self-evident truth - not some disputable political theory. Frustrating and slow though it may be, by far the best way of arriving at the truth is through democratic debate.

Advocating a different pattern of consumption, or even a pattern of sharply reduced consumption is neither antidemocratic nor incompatible with democratic processes. As Marius de Deus points out: "The essence of individual liberty in western liberal democracy does not primarily exist in an unlimited freedom of choice or consumption, but in having a right to participate in politics and to enjoy a protected position with regard to the state."

What is more, contrary to a quite heroic misperception about green politics, most Greens care about the natural world because they care first and foremost about their fellow human beings. Disgracefully anthropocentric though this may be, the point of "saving the earth" is to improve the lot of the human species. It follows therefore that if the price of saving the earth is to be compelled to renounce democracy and live as slaves in some eco-authoritarian dystopia, then the game simply is not worth the candle. Though both Andrew Dobson and Robyn Eckersley touch on these pragmatic rebuttals of the alleged antidemocratic nature of green politics, their more common sense approach is overwhelmed by the irrepressible urge of many of their co-authors to deal only with the extremes in green politics. There are umpteen references to the likes of Ophuls and Heilbroner (who carried a rather tattered flag for eco-authoritarianism back in the 1970s), names that most activists today will never have heard of, let alone read.

One cannot help wondering when most of these academics living in their chlorophyll tower last talked to a real living green activist, or even to a member of the National Trust. This detachment from reality is the only explanation I can find for the fact that almost all the really important and interesting issues in the green politics and democracy debate today are completely absent from this collection. Apart from a few throw away paragraphs, there is nothing about extraparliamentary green politics, nothing about the limitations of the national state in an increasingly unaccountable global economy, nothing about science and democracy (or the lack of it), nothing about the compatibility between green politics and market economics, nothing about the importance of the spiritual dimension to green politics, and so on.

It is a fair criticism that most green activists are not particularly interested in political theory and are often naive in their discourse on power, wealth and democracy. But in reading a collection like Democracy and Green Political Thought, one wonders how pertinent (let alone useful) that scrutiny is likely to prove. The gap between what green politics today is actually about and what these commentators think it is about, is disturbing. I suspect that gap persists largely because they tend to quote only each other (never the green activists whose ideas and actions they feed off), disappearing in the process up each others' misdirected intelligence.

Jonathon Porritt is director, Forum for the Future.