Ecocivilization: Making a World that Works for All

by Jeremy Lent

"One of the greatest thinkers of our age" ( The Guardian ) presents a new way of living—one modeled on nature's design instead of capitalism's—for fans of Guns, Germs, and Steel and Doughnut Economics

It has often been said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism—and yet that is what the historical moment urgently calls for. As climate chaos, inequality, and social fragmentation intensify, humanity faces an imminent continue with a system built on extraction and endless growth, or reimagine civilization itself. Incremental policy improvements are no longer enough—we need a deep transformation of our current civilization to continue to survive.

In Ecocivilization, leading thinker Jeremy Lent offers that reimagination, grounded in proven design principles of ecosystems and in humankind's evolved inclination toward justice, mutuality, and dignity.

What unfolds is a robust framework incorporating Lent's own expertise, and the lived experiences of those on the ground already putting ecological civilization’s core tenets into practice—justice, mutuality, diversity, and symbiosis.

From the global economy to universal housing and income, from infrastructure to agriculture, every major aspect of our society could be redesigned to work together as a coherent whole, setting the conditions for all people to flourish. Ecocivilization shows how this future on a regenerated Earth is not only desirable, but entirely feasible.

Genres: Nonfiction, Economics

400 pages, Hardcover

Published May 26, 2026

About the author

Jeremy Lent is an author and speaker whose work investigates the underlying causes of our civilization’s existential crisis, and explores pathways toward a life-affirming future.

His new book, Ecocivilization: Making a World that Works for All, (Melville House, May 2026), lays out the potential for a fundamentally different world system—an ecocivilization based on life-affirming principles rather than principles of extraction, exploitation, and wealth accumulation. It demonstrates the specifics of an alternative, positive future available for humanity, weaving together the groundbreaking work of visionary leaders, thinkers, and communities around the world.

His award-winning book, The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning, examines the way humans have made meaning from the cosmos from hunter-gatherer times to the present day. His more recent award-winning The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe offers a solid foundation for an integrative worldview that could lead humanity to a sustainable, flourishing future.

Lent has written extensively about the vision and specifics of an ecological civilization, and is a founding member of the Ecocivilization Coalition, a worldwide alliance of changemakers coming together to act as a transformation catalyst in service of this potential future. He is president of the Coalition’s parent, the Institute for Ecological Civilization, and is a board member on the executive committee of the Global Compassion Coalition.

Lent is the founder and host of the Deep Transformation Network, an online global community of over 5,000 members exploring pathways toward a life-affirming future on a regenerated Earth.

Reviews

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beyond the No-Alternative World
Jeremy Lent’s “Ecocivilization” is strongest when it makes the present feel historically made, morally contingent, and open to redesign.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | April 28th, 2026

“Ecocivilization” begins by giving inevitability a nickname. TINA – “There Is No Alternative” – is not, in Jeremy Lent’s account, merely a Thatcher-era slogan. It is the clerk at the border of the possible, stamping “denied” on every passport out of the present.

Lent is not chasing one villain through these pages. He is chasing the habit that keeps giving villains respectable names.

Capitalism, climate breakdown, neoliberalism, colonial extraction, and billionaire veto power all come in for stern and well-documented treatment, but the book’s true target is the conditioned reflex by which a society mistakes its own arrangements for fate. That is a sharper subject than sustainability, a word so overhandled it now sometimes seems to arrive pre-recycled. “Ecocivilization” is not asking how the current order might become less efficiently self-harming with better branding and a compostable lid. It asks what the world would look like if it were built around feedback, limits, diversity, reciprocity, and repair. Its most useful wager is that ecology is not an appendix to the damage report. It is a set of rules for money, law, food, housing, technology, culture, and power.

Lent’s argument moves in four stages: diagnosis, principles, institutional redesign, and transition. First, he insists that the arrangement sold to us as grown-up realism is not broken in some incidental corner.

The manual itself is the problem.

It is built on growth without limit, enclosure, colonial violence, artificial scarcity, elite accumulation, and the steady conversion of common wealth – land, labor, knowledge, infrastructure, public institutions – into private command. Climate crisis, then, is not a lone engineering problem waiting for cleaner machinery to arrive with a kit and a modest grant. It is one visible failure in a larger rulebook: an economy that turns forests, workers, rivers, animals, children, and future generations into inputs, externalities, or sentimental objections.

Lent’s historical indictment is severe. He moves from enclosure and imperialism to debt, finance, corporate power, and the long habit of calling dispossession development. The book’s Windigo motif gives that history a moral psychology: accumulation becomes appetite without limit, a hunger that devours the world and then congratulates itself on efficiency. This is one of Lent’s more forceful moves. He is not only describing bad incentives. He is describing a system that teaches appetite to speak in respectable nouns.

After the indictment, the book takes out a pencil. Lent draws on systems thinking, evolutionary cooperation, Indigenous relational ethics, commons governance, and ecological science to propose a different set of rules beneath the rules: dignity rather than domination; diversity rather than homogenization; decisions made close to those who live with the consequences rather than hierarchy from afar; equity rather than extraction; cooperation rather than competitive hoarding; symbiosis rather than the polite cannibalism of accumulation. His contrast between dominant culture and ecocivilization gives the book a pocket map of its own argument. The old order treats the Earth as property, people as labor stock, and prosperity as upward suction. In Lent’s counter-order, life is relational, and value that does not circulate begins to rot.

The largest section applies those principles to the places where ideals become rent, roads, contracts, meals, ballots, debts, and courtrooms: farms, banks, charters, data systems, water, schools, housing, assemblies, supply chains. Here, “Ecocivilization” becomes more than an alarm bell with a bibliography.

Lent does not linger at the siren. He walks room to room through the burning house, asking what the building was for, who designed the exits, who collects rent on the smoke, and whether the foundations were ever meant to hold everyone.

The result is a book that wants not a map but the map room: river system, road network, buried pipes, ownership records, weather reports, and the school curriculum that taught people not to notice any of them. Its useful neighbors on the shelf clarify what Lent is, and is not, attempting. “Doughnut Economics” by Kate Raworth supplies one economic companion, with its insistence that prosperity must live between a social foundation and an ecological ceiling. “Less Is More” by Jason Hickel shares Lent’s post-growth indictment of capitalism and colonial extraction. “Braiding Sweetgrass” by Robin Wall Kimmerer is a more lyrical cousin in reciprocity with the living world. “The Dawn of Everything” by David Graeber and David Wengrow is a companion in reopening the past so the present stops pretending to be destiny.

Lent is less intimate than Kimmerer, less economically concentrated than Raworth, less compactly polemical than Hickel, and less mischievously anthropological than Graeber and Wengrow. His distinction is that he seats these conversations at the same table and refuses to let them pretend they arrived separately.

This is where the book does its most useful work. Lent makes ecology administratively serious. Nature is not scenery here, not moral wallpaper, not the potted plant brought in after finance, law, and governance have finished eating the day. Living systems become teachers of structure. Symbiosis becomes a principle for enterprise. Diversity becomes a principle for culture and democracy. Nested systems become a way of thinking about local autonomy and planetary responsibility. Regeneration becomes a standard by which to judge farms, buildings, supply chains, schools, banks, charters, courts, and constitutions. The book is strongest when it shows that ecological thought is not soft. It is demanding because it refuses the fantasy of separation.

The prose moves upright and forward: plain, declarative, impatient with euphemism. Lent writes for the reader willing to move from forests to finance without demanding that every doorway be labeled by discipline. He has a gift for images big enough to carry structures: TINA as idea-killer, the current order as a faulty operating system, capitalism as a wealth pump, existing alternatives as islands of coherence, the hoped-for future as the Symbiocene. These metaphors are not decorative trim. They show the pipes behind the faucet.

His sentences tend to move pedagogically: story, history, system, principle, application. The rhythm clarifies: each visible problem is pulled back to the rule that keeps producing it. Lent is rarely delicate in the manner of the lyric essay; he is not pressing leaves between pages. He is building scaffolding around what a public can picture before policy begins. The diction is charged by moral judgment: extraction, dignity, commons, domination, repair, reciprocity, flourishing. The book does not wear neutrality as evening clothes. At times the voltage is high enough to make cautious readers check the wiring, but the alarm is not theatrical. Lent understands despair as an honest station on the route, not the destination.

The cost of this wide-angle sweep is also clear. A book that attempts to redesign civilization will, now and then, sound like a book attempting to redesign civilization. Economy? Yes. Food? Certainly. Finance? Pull up a chair. Technology, infrastructure, law, schools, democracy, oceans, spiritual culture, planetary governance? Lent keeps opening doors until the hallway begins to resemble the world itself. One admires the reach while occasionally wanting a glass of water and a committee authorized to ask what, precisely, happens on Thursday morning.

This is not naïveté. Lent is more candid than that. He knows the fully transformed future remains a horizon, not a blueprint. The weakness is more exact: the book is better as compass than building plan. It tells us what an ecocivilization should value and shows many forms its institutions might take: public banks, participatory budgeting, citizen assemblies, agroecology, Rights of Nature, commons trusts, cooperative ownership, relational law. It is less consistently satisfying on the mechanics of transition: who moves first, who loses money, who writes the new rules, who enforces them, and who absorbs the weather when a noble principle meets a hostile budget.

And then there is the question power always asks from the back of the room: what if I refuse?

Because Lent’s arraignment of the present is so severe, his alternative cannot be allowed to survive on candlelight and good nouns. The current order is not merely confused. It is armored. It has lobbyists, debt instruments, police powers, trade rules, corporate charters, legal immunities, media habits, managerial incentives, and the heavy furniture of ordinary life: this mortgage, this commute, this grocery bill, this server farm, this bill due Friday. Durable change has to move through that furniture, not float above it. “Ecocivilization” is at its best when it speaks of ruptures, movements, experiments, and living alternatives. It is less convincing when the fragments of the future appear too ready to be stitched together, as if they have already agreed not to quarrel once assembled.

The structure is where the book’s strength and strain become the same object. The four-part design is lucid and meaningful. Diagnosis before design makes the alternative feel necessary rather than ornamental. Principles before policy prevent the book from becoming a shopping basket of worthy reforms with a green ribbon on the handle. Then the sector chapters enact Lent’s deepest claim: the economy touches law; law touches property; property touches enclosure; enclosure touches colonialism; colonialism touches finance; finance touches politics; politics touches culture; culture touches rivers, forests, insects, animals, watersheds, and soil.

The architecture is the argument.

Yet the long middle can feel like linked position papers with a shared moral spine. Many chapters follow a recognizable path: expose capture, recover the commons, decentralize power, redesign for cooperation, distinguish transitional reforms from deeper transformation. The Second and Third Horizon framework gives the chapters a useful rhythm: here is what might disrupt the present order; here is what a deeper transformation might resemble. It also becomes audible. After a while the reader can sense the chapter shape before reaching the particulars. Extraction, dignity, mutuality, commons, regeneration – these are the book’s beams. They hold. They also show.

Repetition, though, is not mere padding. It is Lent’s teaching method. He wants the reader to see the same hinge opening across money, food, housing, data, schools, prisons, water, and law. He is not adding topics for bulk; he is demonstrating recurrence. Sometimes that recurrence is revelatory. Sometimes it tidies the mess of politics before the guests arrive.

The book manages its emotional route carefully. “Ecocivilization” begins in foreclosure, with the deadening claim that no other order is possible. It descends into ecological dread and historical anger. It then turns toward design, and finally toward hope with its shoes on. The epilogue’s movement toward the Symbiocene is one of Lent’s most revealing choices. By asking whether intelligent species tend to destroy themselves unless they learn cooperation at a higher level, he raises the stakes from climate policy to power learning restraint.

Ecocivilization becomes not simply a better arrangement of institutions, but a test of whether technological power can be joined to wisdom before it becomes an efficient method of self-erasure.

That ending works because it sharpens the book’s core question. The issue is not whether every proposal here can be enacted exactly as described. The issue is whether humanity can stop rewarding the devouring impulse and calling the dividend prosperity. Lent’s answer is hopeful, but not airy. He does not hand over a finished future. He hands over a vocabulary, a map of rehearsals, and the unsettling suggestion that realism may be despair after a wardrobe change.

The book does not need relevance stapled to its jacket; the present is already leaning hard against it. We are living amid heat, fire, floods, vanished insects, wealth concentration, democratic distrust, expensive groceries, debt burdens, and platforms that turn data into enclosure. Lent’s provocation is that incrementalism may be the least realistic posture available when the system being improved is still driving toward collapse. “Ecocivilization” is diagnostic first, predictive second, and enduring in its central question: how can humans live without turning home into feedstock?

The division among readers will begin exactly where the book’s confidence begins. Some will find it clarifying, even liberating: finally, a work that refuses to treat climate, inequality, democracy, law, finance, agriculture, and culture as separate emergencies. Others will find it too sweeping, too severe toward capitalism, too ready to believe that scattered alternatives can become a whole. Some will want more failure inside the vision: more bad meetings, more corruption, more tradeoffs, more proof that beautiful principles can survive procurement, elections, scarcity, factionalism, and boredom.

Those objections are not ankle-biting. They go straight to the bridge Lent asks readers to cross.

“Ecocivilization” can bear the weight of that scrutiny. Its value is not that every tool is new; it is that Lent lays them on the same table and asks what they might build together. Post-growth economics, commons governance, Rights of Nature, participatory democracy, agroecology, cooperative ownership, relational law, regenerative infrastructure, Indigenous ethics, systems theory – here they are less a display case than a shared workbench.

My final rating is 86/100, or 4/5 stars. That score fits a book of high conceptual ambition and real moral pressure, limited by sprawl, repetition, and a transition argument that sometimes gestures more gracefully than it demonstrates. It is the kind of imperfect book whose reach is more valuable than many tidier books’ restraint.

What lingers after “Ecocivilization” is not a single policy or chapter. It is the reversal by which Lent makes the present seem strange again. The order we are told is practical begins to look fantastical in the worst sense: a civilization demanding infinite growth on a finite planet, calling hunger necessary, calling hoarding success, calling ecological unraveling a cost of doing business. Against that, Lent proposes not paradise but a discipline of attention. He asks us to stop treating the future as a market forecast and begin treating it as work no one can outsource to markets, ministers, or machines.

The book leaves the reader among islands of coherence: cooperatives, commons, assemblies, farms, legal experiments, care networks, technologies turned toward participation rather than capture. The water around them is high, and rising. The coastline has changed. What looked like scattered refuge may also be the first rough outline of land.