The eco-anarchist argument for direct (participatory) democracy is that effective protection of the planet's ecosystems requires that ordinary citizens be able to take part at the grassroots level in decision-making that affects their environment, since they are more likely to favour stringent environmental safeguards than the large, polluting special interests that now dominate the "representative" system of government. Thus a solution to the ecological crisis presupposes participatory democracy in the political sphere — a transformation that would amount to a political revolution.
However, as Bakunin emphasised, a political revolution of this nature must be preceded by a socio-economic revolution based on workers' self-management. This is because the daily experience of participatory decision-making, non-authoritarian modes of organisation, and personalistic human relationships in small work groups would foster creativity, spontaneity, responsibility, independence, and respect for individuality — the qualities needed for a directly democratic political system to function effectively.
Given the amount of time that most people spend at the workplace, the political importance of turning it into a training ground for the development of libertarian and democratic values can scarcely be overstated. As history has demonstrated, political revolutions that are not preceded by mass psychological transformation — that is, by a deconditioning from the master/slave attitudes absorbed from the current system — result only in the substitution of new ruling elites for the old ones (e.g. Lenin becoming the new "Tsar" and Communist Party aparatchiks becoming the new "aristocracy"). Therefore, besides having a slower growth rate, worker co-operatives with democratic self-management would lay the psychological foundations for the kind of directly democratic political system necessary to protect the biosphere. Thus "green" libertarian socialism is the only proposal radical enough to solve the ecological crisis.
In contrast, free market capitalism (an extreme example of this viewpoint being right-wing "libertarianism") not only cannot solve the ecological crisis but would in fact exacerbate it. Besides the fact that right libertarians do not propose to dismantle capitalism, which is necessarily based on "grow or die," they also do not wish to dismantle the hierarchical structure of the capitalist firm, which contributes its own greed-driven pressure for expansion, as discussed above. (Indeed, right-libertarian literature is full of arguments showing that hierarchical firms are necessary for reasons of "efficiency.") But since there would be no state regulatory apparatus to mitigate any of the negative ecological effects of capitalist expansion, "free market" capitalism would be even more environmentally malignant than the present system.
In sections E.2, to E.5 we discuss and refute some spurious free market capitalist "solutions" to the ecological crisis. Section E.7 discusses why "green consumerism," another basic capitalist assumption, is also doomed to failure.