In a single sentence, the social critic Fredric Jameson captured something profoundly true about our moment: “For most people, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” This observation has only grown more acute with time. We are today closer than ever before to
Barbarization scenarios, and the question of how to steer toward an alternative path, one of authentic socio-ecological transformation, has never been more urgent.
Part of the answer lies in understanding how we arrived at Jameson’s quip. Antonio Gramsci, writing from a Fascist prison in the 1930s, described how ruling classes maintain power not only through coercion but through what he called “cultural hegemony”: the conditioning of entire populations, through education, media, and cultural institutions, to perceive the dominant order as natural and inevitable. Neoliberalism, instigated by the Mont Pelerin Society in the 1940s, has been the most successful exercise in cultural hegemony in modern history.1 Ever since it achieved dominance in the 1970s, it has naturalized the assumption that humans are individualistic, selfish, calculating materialists, and that unrestrained free-market capitalism is simply the expression of that nature—not a political choice, but a fact of life. The result is a foreclosure of the imagination encapsulated by Jameson’s quip: a civilization so thoroughly hegemonized that it cannot picture its own transformation, only its ending.
We need to break out of this consensus trance. My new book, Ecocivilization: Making a World that Works for All, lays out the potential for a fundamentally different world system—an ecological civilization based on life-affirming principles rather than principles of extraction, exploitation, and elite wealth accumulation. This vision is based on the groundbreaking work already being done by visionary thinkers, leaders, and communities around the world who are showing how all aspects of civilization—not just economics but also technology, agriculture, finance, urban infrastructure, education, governance, and law—can be redesigned as a coherent whole, setting the conditions for all people to flourish on a regenerating Earth.2
Backcasting Technique
In the face of civilizational crisis, there are two ways to think about what a “realistic” response is. The first begins with the present and asks what incremental improvements are currently possible. This is the approach of most mainstream discourse—and it has brought us to a world accelerating toward a precipice, with no sign of reversing.
The other way to think about “realistic” is to sketch out the conditions that could enable human civilization to prosper into the indefinite future, and then work backward to understand what is needed to achieve them. This approach, known as backcasting, traces the pathways that could lead to a genuinely desirable future. It is emphatically not the same as wishing for a utopia. Instead, it is grounded in empirical research, existing evidence of what works, and the logic of living systems that have sustained themselves successfully for millions of years. By focusing attention on a desirable future and then working backward to see how we might achieve it, we avoid constraining the imagination into the narrow parameters of what appears possible from where we now stand. As Greta Thunberg put it in 2018, “Until you start focusing on what needs to be done rather than what is politically possible, there is no hope.”
Principles of an Ecocivilization
If the dominant civilization is structured around extraction, what would a civilization structured around flourishing look like at its foundations? An ecocivilization takes its inspiration from the design principles of life itself. Without human disruption, ecosystems can thrive in rich abundance for millions of years, remaining resilient in the face of adversity. What would it mean to organize human society according to nature’s own design principles?
Three core principles emerge from the logic of living systems. The first is mutually beneficial symbiosis. Life’s great evolutionary leaps have been driven not primarily by competition and conquest but by symbiosis: relationships in which each party offers something the other needs, creating a whole greater than the sum of its parts. An ecocivilization would organize human society around this same principle—not merely minimizing harm to other beings and systems, but actively contributing to their flourishing.
The second is fractal flourishing. Ecologies are themselves fractal: cells nested in organisms, organisms within populations, populations within ecosystems, ecosystems within the living Earth. In a healthy fractal system, the wellbeing of the whole depends on the flourishing of each part. An ecocivilization would embody this principle: creating the conditions in which each person’s flourishing naturally contributes to—rather than diminishes—the wellbeing of the larger systems in which we are all embedded.
The third is integration—unity with differentiation. A flourishing ecosystem is diverse and differentiated, and precisely because of that diversity, more resilient and generative than any monoculture could be. An ecocivilization would honor and embrace the diverse ways in which cultures and individuals pursue their own forms of wellbeing, weaving that diversity into a richer whole.
These principles contrast significantly with those underlying the dominant civilization.
In place of the dominant culture’s human supremacy, claiming innate superiority over nonhuman nature and granting moral license to destroy ecosystems, an ecocivilization would recognize the intrinsic value of all life. Where the economy now gives primacy to the proliferation of capital above all else, an ecocivilization gives primacy to the essential dignity of all people and their right to flourish. Whereas global capitalism drives commodification and homogenization—monocrop agriculture and standardization of food, education, and cities—an ecocivilization supports heterogeneity. Where the wealth pump relies on hierarchical structures to centralize power, an ecocivilization would devolve decision-making through the principle of subsidiarity. Rather than the structural inequality of the dominant system, an ecocivilization aims at structural equity—equivalent opportunity for each person to fulfill their unique potential. And where today’s system motivates selfish behavior from childhood onward, rewarding it with wealth, status, and power, an ecocivilization would be built on core design principles for successful cooperation aligned with our evolutionary inheritance.
These principles are already being enacted, in partial and emergent form, by communities, organizations, and movements around the world. The book draws on myriad examples to show that the building blocks of a different civilization already exist. What are frequently referred to as “small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos” that have “the capacity to lift the entire system to a higher order” are already here. The task is to recognize them, connect them, and create the structural conditions for them to scale.3
The Scope of Transformation: An Integrated Weave
A defining feature of the ecocivilization framework is its scope. The polycrisis cannot be addressed domain by domain; it requires the coherent redesign of the world system as a whole. Ecocivilization moves through a wide range of domains such as economics, finance, technology, agriculture, governance, law, urban design, and education, drawing on visionary thinking in each field.
Economy: a Wellbeing Economy in a Doughnut Economics framework. Kate Raworth’s Doughnut reorients the fundamental question of economic governance from “How much are we growing?” to “Are we meeting everyone’s needs within the living world’s limits?” Paired with the emerging Wellbeing Economy movement and related initiatives, it offers a rigorous alternative to the growth imperative.4
Finance: transforming money to work for us all. Money is not a neutral medium of exchange; it is a design system, and has been designed to concentrate wealth. Alternative financial architectures—sovereign money issuance, public banking, and complementary currencies—exist and provide models for a fair and sustainable framework.
Technology: distributed information for collective empowerment. Advanced technology, currently structured to serve the surveillance and profit imperatives of a handful of platform monopolies, could be redesigned around open-source, distributed, and commons-based architectures that amplify collective intelligence and democratic participation rather than commodifying human attention.
Law: a new relational paradigm interweaving rights and responsibilities. Modern law, like money, was designed from the outset to reinforce the power of wealthy elites, and can instead be redesigned for the benefit of us all. Earth jurisprudence, Indigenous legal traditions, and the emerging Rights of Nature movement point toward a fundamentally different legal paradigm: one in which rights are embedded in relationships and responsibilities, not abstracted from them.
Global governance: subsidiarity, bioregions, and rebalancing colonial inequities. The current international order, shaped by colonial history, systematically advantages the Global North and extracts from the Majority World. An ecocivilization would require governance architectures organized around bioregional realities, the principle of subsidiarity, and genuine reparative justice—redistributing not just aid but structural power.
Four Structural Cornerstones
Four structural cornerstones, in my view, would be fundamental to such a genuinely transformed world system: a guaranteed social dividend from the commons, a triple bottom line requirement for corporate charters, citizens’ assemblies enacting authentic democracy, and binding rights of nature legislation. Taken individually, each is game-changing. Woven together, they could form a solid foundation for systemwide transformation.
A Social Dividend for All
A more accurate name for what is generally referred to as universal basic income is a “social dividend”—which reframes the entire moral discussion.5 We are all heirs to a common legacy: a vast treasure of knowledge, infrastructure, and technology that has been forged collectively by the sweat, enterprise, and genius of untold generations of ancestors. We are all the rightful beneficial owners of this common legacy: the commonwealth.
Beyond reducing poverty, a social dividend would fundamentally alter the paradigm of capitalism that has commodified human lives since its inception—liberating people from the compulsion to accept degrading or ecologically destructive work, empowering unpaid care and community contribution, and sending a radically different message about human dignity.6
Corporate Charter Reform
The requirement of for-profit corporations to maximize for shareholder returns above all else is a major driver of planetary harm. The corporate charter is a legal instrument that society can choose to grant if an entity exists for the benefit of society as a whole, and to take away if that is no longer the case. A simple but profoundly far-reaching modification could require all major corporations to meet a triple bottom line—people, planet, and profit—with a five-year charter expiration date and renewals granted only by a sortition-selected panel of affected stakeholders, if “people and planet” parameters are met. Senior executives who currently feel trapped by a system they cannot escape individually would find themselves on a level playing field—and might even feel liberated to let their moral conscience inform decision-making.
Deliberative Democracy
In its current form, what we know as electoral “democracy” could be more accurately described as electoral oligarchy. Every few years, people choose between two alternating power elites, neither group representing their own preferences. Elections themselves are structurally inadequate, selecting for those who are charismatic, wealthy, connected, and ambitious—a dangerously unrepresentative sample of the population. By contrast, modern citizens’ assemblies—groups of randomly selected citizens engaging in sustained facilitated deliberation—have demonstrated that ordinary people, given sufficient time, skilled facilitation, and access to expert opinion, can reach thoughtful conclusions on the most complex topics. According to many observers of these assemblies: a shared civic consciousness emerges spontaneously, and participants, freed from the pressure of reelection, focus on the common good.
Rights of Nature
Perhaps the most fundamental transformation of an ecocivilization is a revolution in legal standing: the recognition that the living world has rights that human law is obliged to respect. Current law is entirely anthropocentric, reducing the rest of life on Earth to the status of property. Around the world, this cognitive revolution has been enacted into law: Ecuador’s 2008 constitution recognized the rights of Pachamama; New Zealand granted legal personhood to the Whanganui River; the Stop Ecocide movement is working toward making reckless destruction of ecosystems a prosecutable international crime. This represents an ontological shift: a recognition that we are participants in the web of life, not its owners and managers.
These ideas cannot succeed in isolation. The principles of an ecocivilization are not a menu of separate reforms from which to pick a few favorites. When intertwined as a coherent whole, they reinforce each other, becoming an internally consistent, deeply integrated and resilient system. A social dividend without corporate charter reform will be captured by the same system it seeks to transform. Rights of Nature without deliberative democracy lack the governance structures needed to enforce them. Each thread requires the others to hold it.
Theory of Change
This scope of transformation may strike many as impossibly ambitious. As the juggernaut we are on accelerates ever closer to the precipice, we might ask whether societal transformation is even possible before civilization comes apart. But to the extent meaningful hope does arise, it emerges out of the very ruptures of our present breakdown. As the weave of our dominant system unravels, possibilities emerge to reweave our societal fabric into a new design.
Reweaving society’s fabric even as it is unraveling, through a deft intertwining of movements and ideas, defines the challenge facing all those who desire a better future. It is a task fraught with difficulties, and there is no guarantee of success. The psychic distress caused by social breakdown frequently engenders feelings of panic, fear, and rage, which can lead people further into the sway of authoritarian strongmen fueling those very emotions. Alternative ideas already exist—as this book demonstrates—but the task of multiple groups, frequently working in isolation, weaving them into a cohesive fabric, in the face of ever-worsening dislocations, presents a daunting challenge. Difficult as it is, this is nevertheless the calling that the times demand.
References
1. The Mont Pelerin Society, founded by Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and other related thinkers, accomplished their success through a series of coordinated, interconnected strategies. They built academic hubs, most famously at the University of Chicago, to further develop and give intellectual credence to their ideas. They pioneered the creation of numerous think tanks, launching entities such as the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the American Enterprise Institute, to transmute their theories into practical policy proposals. They circulated ideas through media outlets such as the National Review, Reader’s Digest, and the Saturday Evening Post, to influence the general public. And they systematically developed alliances with the business community, churches, and broadcast media, converting influential organizations to their way of thinking.
2. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to the Great Transition Network. Many of the ideas I explore in Ecocivilization I first encountered, or deepened my understanding of, through earlier GTI forum conversations: “Corporations in the Crosshairs“, “Universal Basic Income: Has the Time Come?,” “The Pedagogy of Transition,” “Visions of a New Political Order,” “Technology and the Future,” “Conservation at the Crossroads,” and “The Population Debate Revisited,” among others.
3. This quote, frequently attributed to Ilya Prigogine, has been traced to Barbara Marx Hubbard, Birth 2012 and Beyond: Humanity’s Great Shift to the Age of Conscious Evolution (Chicago: Origin Press, 2012)—whose work was deeply influenced by Prigogine.
4. Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2017); for more information on the Wellbeing Economy Alliance (WEAll), see https://weall.org/.
5. My thinking in this area was significantly shaped by Guy Standing’s work, summarized well in Guy Standing, Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen (London: Pelican Books, 2017).
6. Readers are directed to the GTI’s own forum on UBI for the full range of evidence and debate.
By the same author:
AI and Ecocivilization: Exploring the Perils
and Unexpected Opportunities
AI and Ecocivilization: The Unexpected Opportunity
AI and Ecocivilization: Part 3, forthcoming
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