Ecocivilisation is Jeremy Lent’s third book, and a departure from his first two, The Patterning Instinct and Web of Meaning. While those diagnose how our worldview emerged and what a better one could look like, Ecocivilisation tries to build a civilisation on it. Lent is careful to distinguish this work from utopian imaginings through backcasting. Whereas forecasting uses research and current efforts to predict trajectories, backcasting focuses on genuinely desirable futures and works backward to see what is needed to achieve them. The book is a series of civilisational areas that, woven together, create the tapestry for human flourishing.

The book begins by asking the question “how did we get here?” It approaches historical unfolding through the emergence and spread of capitalism across its different stages: the enclosure systems in Europe that created the conditions for urban industrialisation, the colonisation of lands and peoples and the hegemony of the transnational corporation. Lent then makes the case for systems change by comparing modern capitalism to the Windigo, the Algonquian cannibalistic spirit that grows hungrier the more he eats. As capitalism pervades our physical and mental existences, Lent evokes the different levers that bring on systems change, from lower-level levers that fix political problems (e.g. taxes, subsidies, efficiency improvements) to civilisational paradigm shifts.

Ecocivilisation uses two anchors to ground its levers: Three Horizons and human flourishing. The Three Horizons model reads change across three coexisting timeframes: H1 the present system sustained by managerial habit and short-term planning, H2 the entrepreneurial middle where innovation either props up H1 or bridges toward what’s next, and H3 the visionary seeds of a new paradigm still marginal today. Each chapter is structured as a sequential walk toward each horizon, through the ideas and existing works of practitioners and organisations across the world. What might governance, the economy, technology, infrastructure, wealth and other areas look like over the three horizons in the service of human flourishing?

Ecocivilisation is a bold move of the Overton window. It was written with unapologetic intentions to normalise the marginal through the telling of existing ideas, initiatives and data to show what is already happening as well as sketch what might be possible. Education, for instance, is framed within the systems of neoliberalism within which it is embedded. Lent describes how EdTech and STEM-based education prepare students to become effective contributors in the growth economy, a First Horizon contour. He reimagines education through the Second Horizon, describing educational approaches reoriented toward prosocial values, such as cooperation and holistic learning, through Waldorf, Montessori and Reggio Emilia schools. Lent then takes us toward the Third Horizon by backcasting education as centred for vibrant community life, promoting intergenerational connections, and where learning is in the service of self and others rather than the market. Lent has similar structures designed to shift the conversation in the domain of agriculture, first looking at the prevalent uses of chemicals in farming and the domination of corporations through ownership of genetic crops and the dependency this creates. He then takes us toward the second horizon calling for food sovereignty over trade agreements and the elimination of subsidies for industrial farming. He paints the Third Horizon with agroecology, the abolition of factory farming and the worldwide adoption of mostly plant-based diets.

Through this chapter structure and the strength of his arguments, readers discover that the unimaginable may be possible should we begin to imagine. Lent admits by the end of the book that it will not be easy, but the levers of change exist in our localities and how we make every day decisions as well as on regional, national and global scales. Women’s suffrage, LGBTQ rights and socialised healthcare movements started on “islands of coherence” (a concept which may or may not be attributable to Ilya Prigogine) and are now, albeit not universally accepted, at the centre of many societies’ values.

While the Three Horizons model is a solid anchor, what constitutes human flourishing is only lightly alluded to. Lent evokes buen vivir and sketches the contours of a Third Horizon in which humans live in greater harmony, but by beginning at the end, he never establishes the basis on which these horizons lead to flourishing. He never explains what flourishing entails. The reader accepts and agrees without a shared understanding or how this understanding may come about, and the strokes are broad enough that agreement costs nothing: none of Lent’s readers would stand against less social discrimination, more transformative justice, life within planetary boundaries. The difficulty lies in that ends no one contests can stand unexamined, and unexamined ends do little work in preparing us to move. The question Ernst Bloch (Reference Bloch1986, Part Two) put to utopian thinking is whether the future is read from a tendency already latent in the present or projected onto it as a blueprint, and only the first does political work. Lent’s Third Horizon is drawn from initiatives already underway, which should place it firmly in the first category. Backcasting risks conversion back into the second, that is, a future held as a goal rather than as provocation, particularly if neglecting the work of examination and the deliberation (the political move). Otherwise, we are told to make the world realisable through levers to move toward desirable futures as if we were separate from the very systems that make the realisation of these futures so difficult.

Moreover, human flourishing. “Human flourishing” leaves room for extraction. It risks entrenching separation. Human exceptionalism runs through it, and within the species, individualism does too. Lent certainly doesn’t intend it that way, but the entrenchment in the human is the very fetter that will prevent an ecocivilisation from coming about. Human flourishing can only exist as relational flourishing, not humans flourishing in relationship, the relations themselves. What relational flourishing (within the more-than-human) might be is the subject of another book, perhaps, but it is surprising that Lent binds ecocivilisation to the human. Then again, maybe not, given the root of civilisation: from Latin cīvis, citizen, and beneath it the Proto-Indo-European *ḱey-, to lie down, to settle, a word for the household before it ever meant a stage on a ladder. Ecocivilisation could never be about relations with the living world, and it would always be anthropocentric. Perhaps this is deliberate, a move on the Overton window. But set beside Val Plumwood (Reference Plumwood2012), who placed the human inside the food chain as something edible, or Baptiste Morizot (Reference Morizot2022), for whom the question is what diplomacy with other-than-human others requires of us, the boldness is hard to find. In fairness, neither of them does what Lent does. They dismantle without proposing what replaces it, and leaving the future as emergent is not a cost they have to pay. But it is also why the omission lands differently here: a book that builds a civilisation on flourishing cannot leave it undefined.

Lastly, Ecocivilisation flattens the world, homogenises it, sees no difference between one region and the other in the way it is organised and self-organising. This is the very move of modernity Lent rejects. Lent does question the future of the nation–state but his framework globalises rather than localises. There is a more salient question than how will the world agree? and it asks whether this is preferable. Lent’s evocation of bio-regionalism is left as gesture when it contradicts the globalist nature of his ecocivilisation (note the singular). The cut into domains is legitimate: governance, economy, technology, infrastructure have to be separated to be thought about at all. The real test is whether they recompose. Reading the chapters, the sectors sit alongside each other in better arrangement rather than turning out to constitute one another, which is what the entanglement the book asserts would require. This alacrity to cover the material opens the book up to irresolvable contradictions that Lent could have avoided with a firmer stance. The book never addresses the critical point around planetary and microlocal transformation, an offshoot of the vagueness of flourishing as well as relationship with the more-than-human.

I should say that I know Jeremy and that the two earlier books did real work for me when I was entering the territory of alter politics. Ecocivilisation was always intended to open possibilities, to make the unimaginable realistic. What it does that nothing else does at this scale is put scattered initiatives into structural relation so that people working in isolated domains can see themselves as part of a single movement rather than a set of local efforts. That is worth the book on its own. The questions above are the ones the book invites by being ambitious enough to raise them.

The book will one interesting for activists, practitioners and educators already working in sustainability or environmental fields who want a structured sense of what comes after neoliberalism, particularly those looking to connect their own domain to a wider transition.

This book relates to environmental awareness in the following ways: it situates ecological crisis inside the economic system that produces it: it is structural rather than behavioural and thus reversible. It treats the reader as an ally who may now want to know what a whole civilisation organised differently might look like. For educators, it is an accessible entry into Three Horizons and backcasting.