A Map for the Mess We’re In

If you’ve spent any time in the world of system change, whether its co-ops, commons, regenerative agriculture, solidarity economy, take your pick — then you know the feeling. You’re surrounded by brilliant, passionate people doing genuinely important work, and yet somehow it all feels fragmented. Everyone’s speaking a slightly different language. Everyone’s convinced their piece of the puzzle is the most important one.

Jeremy Lent’s Ecocivilization: Making a World That Works For All  is a book I’ve just finished reading that actually helps with that problem.

Lent has been doing this synthesis work for years. His earlier books The Patterning Instinct and The Web of Meaning laid a lot of the philosophical groundwork but this one gets practical. He moves through economics, agriculture, technology, finance, governance, and more, and somehow doesn’t lose the thread. The through-line is always: what does it actually look like to build a world that works for people and the planet?

At Common Earth, that question is basically our whole reason for being. Our foundational work is about how we get to a post-carbon, caring society and Lent is wrestling with exactly the same problem. What struck me reading this is how much his approach mirrors what we try to do in our courses: rather than jumping straight to solutions, he roots everything in first principles. What kind of world do we actually want? What values and ways of understanding need to underpin it? What are the hard planetary boundaries within which we must operate? You can’t build a life-affirming future, he argues, without being clear on what “life-affirming” actually means. That resonates deeply with how we work.

The Three Horizons framework he uses is genuinely useful. It helps you figure out what you’re actually doing and why. Whether you’re working within the system, trying to crack it open, or building something the system can’t even see yet. That last category, horizon three, is where Lent’s heart really is. And honestly, mine too.

The Windigo metaphor from the Ojibwe at the opening hit hard. That image of insatiable hunger; the idea that the more you eat, the hungrier you get, is one of the most honest descriptions of capitalism I’ve come across. It doesn’t moralize, it just names the thing clearly.

My only caveat: this book asks a lot of you. It’s dense with ideas and examples, and Lent is genuinely trying to cover everything. But if you’re already in this work, that’s a feature, not a bug. This is a book to dog-ear, argue with, and press into the hands of the people you organize with.

Lent makes a nod to most of my heroes from Meadows to Capra to Wall-Kimmerer. Among them he cites a quote from Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine that I keep coming back to: when a complex system is far from equilibrium (unstable, chaotic) small islands of coherence have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order. Look around. If that’s the condition required, we’re definitely there. The climate is destabilizing, politics are fracturing, the old certainties are gone. But what Lent does, beautifully, is help us see that the islands of coherence are already out there; the projects, the movements, the communities quietly building different ways of living. The question isn’t whether they exist. It’s whether we can connect them, amplify them, and let them do what Prigogine said they could: lift the whole system into a new, life-affirming order. Ecocivilization is a pretty compelling argument that we can.

I highly recommend you picking up a copy and if you want to hear more from the man himself, here is a presentation he gives on the topic:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hHLlQTCDi0