Climate change brings one paradox into intense focus - the question of time. Future generations are not part of our demos. The demos is people who live now, and dead people who made the rules under which we live. It challenges us not only to remake our economy, to think about how we equitably share the earth's limited resources, but also how we enfranchise people who aren't even with us yet.

Writer Astra Taylor dreams of democracy's radical potential, and one day reaching it - as an ancient idea we paradoxically crave and fear, a value contested by the people and the powerful, and as a platform to extend beyond electoral politics - into workplaces and schools and neighborhoods, and into the way we view the world and each other.

Astra is author of the book Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When It's Gone from Metropolitan Books.