Dreaming a World that Works for All

Wells helped found the Living Earth Movement and co-led it for a little over a year. It chose to focus only on relations between the United States and China, which was not his passion. With others from that group he started the Alliance for Ecological Civilization. It became an important discussion group with very senior people, some now in the coalition's leadership, but it produced nothing for the world and went quiet. When the coalition formed, he invited them in as the Ecocivilization Visioning Forum. He calls it the coalition's in-house think tank, and plans policy briefs and statements from it.

The forum began as mostly North American and European white men, with a few women. Wells says that was never going to work for a movement meant to be global. So the forum is working hard to widen both its membership and its leadership group, so that both better represent the majority world. He calls it a big task. Alongside it he helps build the coalition's infrastructure: the sociocracy structure Lent described, communications strategies, resources to share, and a grassroots community network. That network will run on Hylo and should launch within a couple of months.

The main purpose of the coalition, Wells says, is to be connective tissue between projects and organizations already doing the work. His estimate is at least tens of thousands of them, and hundreds of thousands if local community groups count. They tend to be siloed. He describes three levels. First, make connections between organizations around the globe. Second, help catalyze a movement in which they cooperate and see one another. Third, build a global grassroots community able to see that all of this is happening at once.

Wells cites 2024 research: 80 percent of people want their governments to do more about climate change, and 69 percent would give one percent of their income toward it. Recognizing climate change is not enough, he says. People need to see the need for fundamental civilizational change, with no domain of human activity left untouched. What gives him hope is that the change is already happening. If people can see those islands of coherence, which he prefers to call beacons of light, they can keep hope and not fall into the despair that stops action.

Wells avoids the word fix, because fixing implies keeping the civilization we have. The aim is a new way of being human, in relationship with the rest of nature. He reads from the coalition's overview. Its argument is that the current system cannot get there. Jeff Wells: "It's not because it's broken and needs to be fixed. It's because it was always meant to be this way." If the coalition succeeds at all, he says, the result will be a post-capitalist civilization.

Wells names the coalition's strategies. Shift the mainstream narrative, which he explains as moving the Overton window so that a flourishing web of life becomes part of ordinary conversation. That would reach decisions in business, government, economics, architecture and farming. Amplify the movement by finding the projects already working and showing the world they exist. Uplift those pathfinders, once the coalition is large enough, by getting them funding or influencing the funders who can. And nurture a global people's movement, which he thinks could grow to millions, perhaps billions, over ten to twenty years.

Wells shows the founding team to give a sense of its breadth. Osprey Orielle Lake of the Women's Earth and Climate Action Network, whom he had heard speak the night before. Julia Kim, who worked on Gross National Happiness in Bhutan. Mirian Vilela of Earth Charter International. There are members from Britain, Canada, the US, Brazil, India, Morocco and the Amazon basin. A group of advisory partners numbers close to fifty, by his count. He expects the reach to grow much wider in the next year or two.

Wells had sat in on the mapping session in the same room the day before and called it mind-opening. He found it scalable and aligned with the coalition's values. He imagines a map within a year of every island of coherence the coalition knows about. Someone could drill down to everyone working on regenerative farming, or on doughnut economics and wellbeing economies, and find hundreds or thousands in each category. Someone in the room explains that the maker is Arcos, which has built a new information ecosystem over about six years and launched a Climate Week app.

Asked how a movement against extraction can live on platforms owned by the opposite, Wells says the coalition uses technology aligned with its goals where it can. Its community space will be on Hylo, which he describes as a nonprofit built for communities and collaboration, not out to make a lot of money. Hylo's users meet monthly in a builders' community to shape the platform. The coalition's mailing list runs on EcoSend instead of Mailchimp. A co-host adds that the mapping work is meant to strengthen local connection, so people find who is working near them.

Asked how the coalition relates to other networks doing similar work, Wells says it wants to connect with them and amplify each other. The goal is communities of communities across the globe, sharing what worked and what did not. He wants to start one locally: a collaborative group of people in or near New York City, first on Zoom or in person, and he will send an invitation. He is also the coalition's representative to the Next Economies Forum, which meets in Cairo next year, and a few New Yorkers he met on its calls could help form a core.