Ecocivilization: Making a World that Works for All

Few people have had as much effect on the recent direction of the world as Tina. In virtually every major policy decision considered in just about every country on the planet, Tina has been the one to shape the debate. It’s Tina who tells people what they can, and can’t, talk about.

How come you’ve never heard of Tina or seen her picture in the press? Because Tina isn’t a person, but an idea. Or perhaps more accurately, a killer of ideas. TINA is the acronym of the famous statement made by Margaret Thatcher in 1980, “There Is No Alternative,” as she pushed through an unyielding assault on the delicate balance between government and private enterprise that had evolved in Great Britain since the end of the Second World War.

But the underlying creed of TINA was not limited to Thatcher’s Britain. Following the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan to the presidency of the United States, the duo unleashed onto the world an ideology that had been incubating for decades, and has since become the de facto governing doctrine of virtually every aspect of human endeavor, infiltrating its core beliefs into areas as wide-ranging as politics, finance, culture, education, technology, and agriculture. This ideology, generally referred to nowadays as neoliberalism, holds that humans are individualistic, selfish, calculating materialists, and because of this, unrestrained free-market capitalism provides the best framework for every kind of human activity.

A decade after neoliberalism took hold of the world, the Berlin Wall fell, signifying the end of the Cold War that had defined global politics for nearly half a century. It was a jubilant moment, liberating millions from the ruthless grip of a morally bankrupt regime. In the battle between capitalism and communism, capitalism had won. As one triumphant commentator infamously proclaimed, it was “the end of history.” There was no longer any alternative. Game over. TINA now reigned supreme.

Since that time, neoliberal adherents have succeeded in transforming the world into a gladiatorial arena where markets have become the ruling force of human activity. Regulations have been shredded across the globe. Billions of people are malnourished while mega-billionaires vie for planetary domination. Profit-seeking corporations have surpassed nation states in economic power. Animal populations have been decimated worldwide. And each year brings our civilization ever closer to the cataclysm of climate breakdown.

People increasingly intuit that the system is not working for them. Angry and desperate, they turn to the only voices that seem to recognize their plight—extremist authoritarians promising to dismantle the structures that have immiserated them.

Yet, most people—even those concerned about the dire state of the world—accept TINA unquestioningly. The only way to structure society, it is assumed, is in the form of growth-based consumer capitalism—a system in which corporate profits ultimately drive the decisions that affect the lives of everyone on the planet, the health of the living Earth, and the destiny of future generations. Virtually all policy proposals under serious consideration to fix our grave problems work within the framework of the current system rather than examining the system itself.

This book constitutes the dethronement of TINA. There is, in fact, an alternative.

A faulty operating system

The alternative we’ll be exploring, though, is not the kind that Thatcher, Reagan, and countless adherents of market-based capitalism had been railing against. Back in those days, and in fact throughout the entire twentieth century, the battle lines were clearly drawn between capitalism on one side and socialism (or, in its extreme form, communism) on the other. A society could either be organized primarily by the market or by the state. There were, of course, many countries that attempted a blend between the two, most notably European nations after the Second World War that explored possibilities of a welfare state with a meaningful safety net for those who fell through the holes ripped open by the market. In the United States, after FDR’s New Deal, the state played a significant role in people’s lives. But the choice was always between the poles of market and state, closing off any other possibility for organizing human activity.

Surprisingly perhaps, these opposing sides shared considerable common ground. Both prized their particular ideology over the dignity of normal human lives: Submit, people were told, either to the invisible hand of the market or the authoritarian fist of the state. Both worshiped at the altar of economic growth as the supreme aspiration of policymaking. And perhaps most consequentially, both viewed the entire Earth as nothing more than a resource to exploit in the interest of pursuing that growth.

This pursuit of endless growth on a planet with limited resources has propelled human civilization onto a terrifying trajectory. The uncontrolled climate crisis is the most obvious danger: Even as we reel from the impact of little more than one degree Celsius of global heating, the world’s current policies have us on track for a staggering three degrees increase by the end of this century—and climate scientists publish dire warnings that amplifying feedbacks could make things far worse than even these projections.

But even if the climate crisis were somehow brought under control, continued untrammeled economic growth in future decades will bring us face-to-face with a slew of further existential threats. Our civilization is already running at forty percent above its sustainable capacity. We’re rapidly depleting the Earth’s forests, animals, insects, fish, freshwater, and even the topsoil we require to grow our crops. Animal populations worldwide have declined by a staggering 73 percent since 1970. In the oceans, coral reefs are on track to be virtually annihilated by the middle of this century. At this rate, we’re well on the way to causing the sixth great extinction of species since life began on Earth—except this is the first driven by the actions of a single species. Surveying this devastation across the board, in 2017 over fifteen thousand scientists from 184 countries issued an ominous warning to humanity that time is running out: “Soon it will be too late,” they wrote, “to shift course away from our failing trajectory.”

Rather than shifting course, however, we’ve been going pedal to the metal full speed ahead. The growth imperative underlying this juggernaut of destruction is built into the very fabric of our global economic system. Because of this, even in the face of this despoliation of the living Earth, global production and consumption levels are projected to more than double by 2060. Yet there is virtually no discussion in the mainstream media about this conundrum. Even those policymakers who profess to care about our civilizational crisis propose solutions that merely tinker with specific elements of the system rather than considering the system itself as a whole.

We can think of our entire economic and political setup like a faulty operating system with multiple bugs. Each time the software engineers fix a bug, it complicates the code, leading inevitably to a new set of bugs requiring even more heroic workarounds. Ultimately, it may become clear to someone that the problem isn’t just the software: An entirely new operating system is required. But nobody wants to hear that, because they’re all so busy working on their particular piece of the puzzle.

It doesn’t, however, take a software engineer or even a PhD in economics to see what’s wrong. Like the folk tale of the emperor who had no clothes, it just takes someone with the courage to call it out. Someone like fifteen-year-old Greta Thunberg who told world leaders at a UN Climate Conference in 2018, “If solutions within this system are so impossible to find, maybe we should change the system itself.”

A civilization based on life’s design principles

In this book, we’ll begin answering Greta Thunberg’s call. We’ll embark on a journey of discovery to map out the contours of a fundamentally different way of organizing human activity—one that is so far-reaching that it encompasses not just economics but every major domain of modern civilization.

At first sight, this might seem like a daunting task, akin to exploring an uncharted wilderness, but in fact we’ll have plenty of guides to help us. Around the world, activists, changemakers, scholars, and community organizers are assiduously laying down pathways toward a life-affirming future. In many cases, they may not see themselves as part of a larger movement, but they’re driven by a shared set of core human imperatives to care for others around them, nurture the living Earth, and leave a healthy world for future generations to inherit.

Increasingly, people are putting a name on this burgeoning global movement that might just have the potential to become the greatest collaborative human project in history: a transition toward an ecological civilization. In the chapters that follow, we’ll home in on these diverse strands of visionary ideas, grassroots movements, and community initiatives, and see how, in every domain of society, life-enhancing alternatives exist that, woven together into a cohesive fabric, could intertwine to form a fundamentally different society.

What does it mean to change the operating system of the entire world? We’ll discover how our civilization is based on a foundation of extraction, exploitation, and elite wealth accumulation. These are not unfortunate side-effects of our way of doing things—they are founding principles. An ecological civilization, by contrast, would be one that’s designed from the bottom up on life-affirming principles, setting the conditions for all people to flourish on a thriving, living Earth.

As its name implies, an ecological civilization (or “ecocivilization” for short) takes its inspiration from the principles of life itself. Without human disruption, ecosystems can thrive in rich abundance for millions of years, remaining resilient in the face of adversity. Clearly, there is much to learn from nature’s wisdom about how to organize ourselves. This is a central idea underlying an ecocivilization: using nature’s own design principles to help us reimagine the basis of our own world system.

One central principle of life is known in biology as mutually beneficial symbiosis. Living systems are characterized by both competition and cooperation. However, the major evolutionary transitions that brought life to its current abundance were all the results of dramatic increases in cooperation through symbiosis: the process by which both parties in a relationship give and take reciprocally, reflecting each other’s abilities and needs. There is no zero-sum game with this type of symbiosis: The contributions of each party create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. We’ll see in the pages ahead how the pursuit of mutually beneficial symbiosis naturally leads away from extractive and exploitative behaviors, and toward life-enhancing policies and practices throughout society.

Look around the natural world, and you will see fractal patterns everywhere. From microscopic living structures to the entire Earth system, nature uses a fractal design with similar patterns manifesting at different scales. You can see them in the shapes of tree branches, coastlines, cloud formations, lung brachia, and neural networks, to name just a few. Ecologies are themselves fractal, with tiny cells that are part of an organism, which is nested in a population, which is embedded in an ecosystem, which is integrated into the living Earth. In all cases, the long-term health of the larger system requires the flourishing of each of its parts. This universal principle of fractal flourishing inspires the ultimate objective of an ecocivilization: to create the conditions in which the flourishing of each of us naturally contributes to the greater wellbeing of the systems in which we’re embedded.

Within an ecosystem, every species has its evolutionary niche: a particular constellation of conditions and behaviors that give rise to its unique form of wellbeing. As humans, we have our own evolutionary niche. We didn’t evolve to find happiness in taking orders from the boss, eating Big Macs while stuck in traffic, or gazing for hours at a screen. We spent ninety-five percent of our species’ history in nomadic hunter-gatherer bands, where our welfare depended primarily on how well we got along with those around us. Over many thousands of generations, we evolved to become a highly cooperative species, thriving in egalitarian communities that valued fairness and generosity. As a result of our evolutionary heritage, most of us to continue to prize qualities that are core principles of an ecocivilization, such as justice, respect for others, mutuality, and dignity, along with a sense of belonging both within our community and as part of the living Earth.