“Ecocivilization: Making a World that Works for All” by Jeremy Lent
Melville House, 400 pages, $33
Species extinction. Billionaire capture of governments. Inequality so extreme it’s destabilizing democracies. A return to large-scale war. Such events have combined to create an everything-all-at-once situation in the world that is no coincidence, according to a new book, “Ecocivilization,” by Berkeley resident Jeremy Lent.
“There are deeper, underlying causes to these things that are making them happen at the same time,” said Lent, who has spent the past two decades building the framework that explores why civilization is fracturing — and what could replace it.
The book’s title is shorthand for “ecological civilization,” the notion that we need to change not just one part of our civilization, but create an entirely different kind of civilization, Lent said, one that allows humans to live in harmony with the natural world and each other.
Lent, the co-founder of Ecocivilization Coalition, with members from around the globe, and founder of Deep Transformation Network, is considered a leading authority on the subject. The Guardian’s George Monbiot described Lent as “one of the greatest thinkers of our age.”
Right now, “our whole global system is all about growing the economy as fast as possible, having markets determine everything, having the wealth go to whoever is able to come up with the most successful product and using technology that we have no control over,” Lent said.
He aims to show readers how bad things actually are right now but also provide hope. He proposes the idea of a life-affirming society, “a civilization that is simply based on setting the conditions for all beings to thrive on a regenerating earth,” he said.
In the book, Lent highlights five necessary changes for humanity’s flourishing:
- A universal basic income framed not as welfare but as a citizen’s share of wealth built from generations of shared knowledge, infrastructure and natural resources.
- Meaningful corporate charter reform with renewal tied to proven social and environmental accountability.
- The expression of deliberative democracy — with citizens’ assemblies and sortition-based governing bodies making binding decisions, from local planning to national climate policy.
- Legal rights for nature: giving oceans, land and their inhabitants standing as entities, not just property for human use.
- Replacing GDP as the main measure of success with models like Doughnut Economics, which tracks whether people’s needs are met without exceeding planetary limits.
“These ideas are not in the utopian world but actually being done,” Lent said. “It will take a huge amount of effort and work, but a different kind of future is available to us if we all pull together to actually make it happen.”
