by Jeremy Lent
(Excerpt modified from the introduction to Ecocivilization: Creating a world that works for everyoneto be published by Melville House on 26 May).
The case for reimagining civilization from the ground up
Few people have influenced the recent direction of the world like Tina. In virtually every major policy decision in nearly every country on the planet, Tina has shaped the debate — telling people what they can and can’t say.
Why didn’t you listen to Tina? Because Tina is not a person, but an idea. Or perhaps more accurately, idea killer. TINA is an acronym for Margaret Thatcher’s famous 1980 declaration: “There is no alternative.” With these four words, Thatcher signaled an unrelenting attack on the delicate balance between public and private enterprise that had developed in Great Britain since the end of World War II.
Tina’s cult didn’t stop at Britain’s shores. After Ronald Reagan’s ascension to the presidency of the United States, the two leaders expressed an ideology to the world that would spread for decades. That ideology—now called neoliberalism—holds that humans are individualistic, selfish, calculating materialists, and that, for this reason, unfettered free-market capitalism provides the best framework for all forms of human activity. It has since become the governing doctrine of virtually every aspect of human endeavor, permeating its core beliefs in politics, finance, culture, education, technology, and agriculture.
A decade after neoliberalism took hold, the Berlin Wall fell. Capitalism won the Cold War. One winning commentator infamously declared it “the end of history”. There was no other option. game over TINA now reigns supreme.
Since that time, neoliberal adherents have transformed the world into a gladiatorial arena in which markets are the governing force of human activity. Regulations have been shattered around the world. Billions of people suffer from malnutrition while mega-billionaires fight for planetary dominance. Profit-seeking corporations have surpassed nation states in economic power. Animal populations have been decimated. And every year brings our civilization closer to the catastrophe of climate breakdown.
People increasingly realize that the system is not working for them. Angry and desperate, they turn to the only voice that recognizes their plight — vowing to dismantle the structures that extremist authoritarians have destroyed. Yet those who are genuinely concerned about the state of the world still organize their activities around the unquestioning acceptance of TINA. Virtually all serious policy proposals work within the framework of the current system rather than examining the system itself.
It’s time to depose Tina. Actually, there is an alternative.
A faulty operating system
The alternative is not how Thatcher and Reagan spent their careers. Throughout the twentieth century, the choice has always been between capitalism and socialism — between the market and the state — to the exclusion of any other possibility. Yet these opposing sides share more than they care to admit. Both are ideals worth more than the dignity of ordinary life. Both worshiped economic growth as the highest policy aspiration. And both are nothing more than a resource for the entire world to absorb in that growth pursuit.
This pursuit of endless growth on a finite planet has driven us down a terrifying trajectory. Our civilization is already running above forty percent of its sustainable capacity. Global animal populations have declined by 73 percent since 1970 Climate scientists warn that current policies put us on track for three degrees of warming by the end of the century — with wide-ranging feedbacks potentially making things worse. In 2017, more than fifteen thousand scientists from 184 countries issued a stark warning: “Soon it will be too late to turn from our failed path.”
Instead of changing course, though, we put the pedal to the metal. The growth imperative underlying this juggernaut is built into the very fabric of our global economic system. Even in the face of this catastrophe for the living world, global production and consumption levels are projected to more than double by 2060. Yet there is virtually no mainstream discussion of the system—only proposals that tinker with the details within it.
We can think of our civilization as a faulty operating system with multiple bugs. Every time engineers fix a bug, it complicates the code, creating new bugs that require more heroic fixes. In the end, someone has to be willing to say: the problem isn’t just software – a whole new operating system is needed
It doesn’t take a PhD in economics to see that. It only takes the courage of a fifteen-year-old like Greta Thunberg, who told world leaders at the UN climate conference: “If it’s so impossible to find solutions within the system, maybe we should change the system itself.”
A civilization based on the design principle of life
What does it mean to change the operating system? Around the world, activists, scholars, and community organizers are already paving the way toward a life-affirming future — driven by a shared imperative to care for others, nurture the living world, and leave a healthy world for future generations. Increasingly, people are giving this growing global movement a name: a transition toward an ecological civilization
An ecological civilization – or “ecocivilization” – takes its inspiration from the principles of life itself. Without human disturbance, ecosystems thrive in rich abundance for millions of years, remaining resilient in the face of adversity. A central principle of life is mutually beneficial symbiosis: a process by which both parties in a relationship mutually give and take. There is no zero-sum game — each side’s contributions make the whole greater than the sum of its parts. The pursuit of symbiosis naturally moves away from extractive and exploitative behavior and leads to life-enhancing practices across society.
Ecosystems are structurally fractal—small cells nested within organisms, nested within populations, nested within ecosystems, nested within living worlds. In all cases, the long-term health of the larger system requires the improvement of each of its parts. This is the policy Fractal richness It inspires the ultimate purpose of an ecocivilization: to create conditions in which the development of each individual naturally contributes to the greater well-being of the system in which we are all embedded.
Such a civilization would align with what is needed for human development. We didn’t find happiness in taking orders from the boss, eating fast food stuck in traffic, or staring at a screen for hours. We spent ninety-five percent of our species’ history in nomadic hunter-gatherer bands, where welfare depended on how well we got along with those around us. Over thousands of generations, we have evolved into a highly cooperative species, thriving in egalitarian communities that value fairness and kindness. The core principles of an ecocivilization derived from our evolutionary heritage include virtues that most of us tend to prize, such as justice, respect for others, reciprocity and dignity, along with a sense of belonging both within our community and as part of the living world.
Let’s be realistic
A reasonable person might say: it is so far removed from our present reality that it hardly seems worth considering. Let’s be realistic.
There are two ways to think about “realism”. One way is to start with what’s happening now and try to improve things incrementally—using less fossil fuels, advocating for higher taxes on the rich. But when conditions continue to deteriorate despite our best efforts, it is unrealistic to believe that more of the same will produce different results. It makes no sense to believe that we can continue with infinite growth on a finite planet, and yet this becomes realistic in today’s mainstream discourse.
Another way to think about “realism” is to sketch the conditions that would allow human civilization to thrive into the indefinite future, then work toward those conditions. Planners call it Backcasting. By focusing on a truly desirable future and working backwards, we avoid limiting our imaginations to the narrow parameters of what is possible from where we stand now.
This is what Greta Thunberg implied when she declared: “There is no hope until you focus on what needs to be done rather than what is politically possible.”
By thinking beyond the TINA-limited options of our daily news feed, we find tremendous possibilities. The social institutions we take for granted — law, finance, education — were designed from the beginning to reinforce the power of wealthy elites and can be redesigned to benefit us all. Advanced technology can be repurposed to empower ordinary people instead of mega-corporations. Cities can be redesigned to promote wellness rather than consumerism. Democracy can be restored so that regular citizens, rather than wealthy oligarchs, thoughtfully determine the best policies for society. Corporations can be legally restructured to work for people and the planet rather than for mere profit. Enforceable laws of nature can look out for the welfare of other sentient beings with whom we share this world.
This is not “hopium” – assuring you that everything is going to be okay. The gap between the illustrious future of an ecocivilization and today’s dire reality is stark. But the amount of meaningful hope that emerges emerges from the very cracks of our current brokenness. As the fabric of our hegemonic system unravels, the possibility of reshaping our social fabric into a new design emerges.
Systems thinker Ilya Prigogine describes how complex systems transition from one stable state to another. At first, things look very messy – like mush inside a cocoon, the dissolved flesh of a caterpillar ready to become something else entirely. But in the midst of chaos, there is a glimpse of a new steady state to which the system can transform. Prigogine called these “small islands of harmony in a sea of chaos” that had the “power to lift the whole system into a higher order”.
Those islands exist today. Whether they can coalesce and rise high enough to form a new landmass will only be known on the other side of the turbulence ahead. But if we can map them and weave them together with others, we can lay the foundations for a new chapter in humanity’s story — an ecology where humans and our nonhuman relatives can thrive together into the indefinite future.
This project begins with a simple but radical act of imagination: believing that there really is an alternative.
Ecocivilization: Creating a world that works for everyone
Melville House: Available May 26, 2026
Pre Order: Bookshop.org | Amazon US | Amazon UK
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Previously published Reprinted on and with resilience permission
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