How we build an Ecocivilization

Lent set out to write a book about how to fix the system. Two years into the research he reached a different conclusion: there's nothing to fix. The system is doing exactly what it was built to do — extract, exploit, and run a wealth pump that accelerates the more it consumes. That design isn't human nature or ancient fate. It's only four or five hundred years old, born in the Scientific Revolution when Francis Bacon promised to make us "the masters and possessors of nature." Beneath it runs a story of separation: nature is a machine, humans stand outside it, and the Earth is a resource to exploit.

The wealth pump didn't begin with factories — it began with conquest. Lent walked through the engine: the genocide of the Americas wiped out roughly 99% of the Indigenous population; one silver mountain at Potosí cost more than eight million lives and shipped out the equivalent of $165 trillion in today's money — about a third of all the private wealth on Earth; twelve million Africans were enslaved to work the plantations. The economist Jason Hickel's line inverts the story we're taught: "Europe didn't develop the colonies. The colonies developed Europe."

The Ojibwe told of the Windigo — a ravenous ten-foot monster with a heart of ice, doomed to grow hungrier the more it ate; one bite and you became one too. When the Anishinaabe watched Europeans strip the land of beaver, timber, everything, they named it: a Windigo virus. That same hunger is now encoded in global capitalism, a system built on perpetual growth that has to consume more each year just to survive. It has produced the greatest inequality in history — twenty-six billionaires now hold as much wealth as half of humanity — and grown so large that sixty-nine of the world's hundred biggest economies are corporations, not countries.

Since the Second World War the scale of human consumption has gone vertical — what scientists call the Great Acceleration — and standard economics projects global production to triple again by 2060. The Stockholm Resilience Institute mapped nine planetary boundaries that define a safe operating space for humanity; we've already blown through seven. This is why the warnings have turned blunt: the World Scientists' Warning to Humanity says it will soon be too late to change course, and the UN Secretary-General calls the trajectory "collective suicide."

Lent zoomed out to the longest view. In all of human history there have been only two transformations total enough to remake how everyone lives — the move from hunter-gatherers to agriculture, and the Scientific Revolution. Almost everyone who studies the present agrees a third is coming this century; the only question is which. Collapse, the path the scientists keep warning about. A "fortress earth" where elites wall themselves off while the rest is hollowed out — in Lent's read, arguably worse than collapse. Or a genuine transformation to sustainable flourishing: an ecological civilization.

Before showing his answer, Lent had the room build it: in groups of three, attendees popcorned the principles of a life-affirming world, and when he advanced his slides almost every one was already there. The vision of an ecological civilization, he argued, belongs to everyone — it surfaces in Buen Vivir and Ubuntu, agroecology and the rights-of-nature movement, engaged Buddhism and liberation theology. Its deepest source is life itself. Every major leap in evolution came not through competition but cooperation — "Life did not take over the world by combat but by networking," as Lynn Margulis put it — and what makes humans distinct is our capacity to cooperate even with those who aren't kin.

An ecological civilization, in Lent's frame, is a single transformation in the basis of civilization — from wealth-based to life-based, a change in the operating system of the whole world. Its goal is to "create the conditions for all people to flourish as part of a thriving living Earth." He distilled it into six flips from the dominant culture's defaults: from human supremacy to the intrinsic value of all life; from the primacy of capital to the primacy of human dignity; from homogenization to diversity; from hierarchy to subsidiarity (pushing power down to the lowest feasible level); from structural inequality to structural equity; and from incentives for selfishness to designing for cooperation.

What does it look like in practice? Start with how we keep score. GDP rises for oil spills, hurricanes, and terminal cancer, and falls when you grow vegetables and cycle to work — it measures money moving, not life thriving. Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics replaces it: stay above a social foundation, below an ecological ceiling. Then reclaim the commons. Most wealth — language, knowledge, the internet, the living Earth — is inherited common wealth; Facebook merely fenced off a corner and funneled $180 billion to one person while half the world earns under $5.50 a day. A universal social dividend would pay everyone their share — and where it's been tried, people don't get lazy; they get more prosocial and entrepreneurial.

Lent's institutions go after the wealth pump directly. Corporations would hold renewable charters, granted every five years only if they meet a triple bottom line — people, planet, profit — judged not by revolving-door regulators but by ordinary citizens chosen by lottery, with firms able to go "socially" or "environmentally" bankrupt. Government itself would change: what we call democracy is really an "electoral oligarchy" the U.S. founders deliberately designed, one that rewards grandstanding over deliberation. The alternative is citizens' assemblies — representative panels chosen by sortition that, given facilitation and time, consistently reach wiser, less polarized decisions. And the natural world gains legal standing of its own, with ecocide recognized as an international crime.

How do we get there? Lent's answer starts with the unraveling itself: a civilization coming apart from its own contradictions opens degrees of freedom to reweave it. When Ilya Prigogine studied how a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, he found "imaginal cells" forming in the mush — small islands of coherence that link up and lift the whole system to a higher order. Those islands already exist: cooperatives, bioregions, commons-based communities — and, Lent said, this very room. The pathway is personal too: acknowledge the gravity, share the grief, build community, then act on what could shift the system — joining existing groups rather than starting new ones, and empowering the others around you. The exit from the Anthropocene is the Symbiocene: a civilization that learns to tend the Earth.