On Christmas Eve in 1968, something extraordinary happened.
Three astronauts aboard Apollo 8 had just completed their mission photographing the Moon’s surface. As they turned their spacecraft, Earth suddenly appeared in the window—a luminous blue sphere rising above the barren gray horizon of the Moon.
“Oh my God,” astronaut Frank Borman exclaimed.
It was the first time any human had ever seen our entire planet floating in the darkness of space.
The photograph they sent back—later known as Earthrise—became one of the most iconic images in history. For many astronauts, moments like this produce what researchers now call the Overview Effect: a profound sense of awe and a sudden awareness of the fragility of our shared home.
Earthrise: a photo that changed the world
“The Earth,” said Chinese astronaut Liu Yang, reflecting on the experience, “is like a vibrant living thing.”
Others describe feeling something even deeper: a sense of responsibility. Looking down at the delicate blue atmosphere that protects all life, they recognize how thin the boundary truly is between a flourishing planet and a lifeless one.
More than half a century after that photograph was taken, humanity is facing a stark truth: we are failing to protect the only home we have.
A World in Crisis
If we compress Earth’s entire history into a single day, modern humans would appear only in the final second. Yet in that brief moment, our species has altered the planet on a scale rivaling the great forces of nature. Today we are living through what scientists call the Anthropocene—an era in which human activity has become the dominant influence on Earth’s climate and ecosystems.
The signs of this transformation are everywhere: Extreme heatwaves, floods, droughts, and fires increasingly dominate the news cycle. Oceans are warming and acidifying. Rainforests are disappearing at staggering rates. Rivers that once flowed freely now fail to reach the sea. Insect populations in many regions have collapsed by as much as ninety percent. Scientists warn that we are dangerously close to triggering climate tipping points—feedback loops that could accelerate planetary warming beyond human control.
But climate disruption is only part of a much larger crisis. Across the living world, the systems that support life are under immense pressure. Pollution spreads through oceans and waterways. Plastic waste accumulates in the seas. Species are disappearing at rates not seen since the last mass extinction.
By 2050, at current rates, there will more plastic in the ocean than fish
Meanwhile, alongside this ecological breakdown, inequality has exploded.
While billions of people struggle to secure the basics of life—clean water, adequate food, safe shelter—a tiny fraction of humanity has accumulated unprecedented wealth. A few dozen billionaires now control as much wealth as half the world’s population. This stark disparity is a collective moral failure that reflects the structural logic of the global system that governs the modern world.
It’s a system that has its roots in five centuries of European colonialism and oppression that evolved into global capitalism—and even deeper roots in millennia of agrarian civilizations characterized by patriarchy, hierarchy, and empire. These are the underpinnings of the dominant global system that 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 its founding principles.
Shattering the Myth
Since the late twentieth century, that system has become so all-embracing that it gave rise to a powerful myth that now dominates mainstream consciousness: that unrestrained markets and perpetual economic growth are the only viable path for organizing human society.
Margaret Thatcher captured the idea succinctly: There Is No Alternative.
As a result, as famously remarked by Fredric Jameson, “for most people it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” But as our civilization careens toward ecological and social collapse, we can no longer accept this myth. We have an overriding moral imperative to imagine what a genuinely post-capitalist society would look like.
Over the past five years, I have been researching this crucial question. The result is my new book, Ecocivilization: Making a World that Works for All.
Making a World that Works for All
The book begins by confronting the scale of the crisis we face. To imagine a different future, we first have to look honestly at the damage our civilization has inflicted on the living Earth. We have to recognize that, for all its disasters, the system isn’t broken—it’s doing exactly what it was intended to do.
From that starting point, Ecocivilization explores the possibility of a fundamentally different kind of society—one designed not around extraction and endless growth, but around regeneration and the flourishing of life.
An ecological civilization would measure success not by how fast economies expand, but by how well human communities and natural systems thrive together. It would redesign our institutions—from cities to corporations to political systems—to support long-term wellbeing rather than short-term profit.
Across the world, people are already experimenting with ideas that point in this direction: new forms of democratic participation, regenerative agriculture, rights-of-nature laws, community-centered economies, and technologies designed to empower rather than dominate.
These efforts may appear scattered, but together they hint at the outlines of a new civilizational story.
Humanity now stands at a pivotal moment. The systems that shaped the past century are pushing the planet toward dangerous thresholds. Yet the same moment of crisis also opens the possibility of transformation.
The image of Earthrise reminds us of something both simple and profound: we share a single, fragile home.
The question before us is whether we can figure out, in time, what it takes to build a civilization worthy of it.
Ecocivilization: Making a World that Works for All
Melville House: available May 26, 2026
PREORDER: Bookshop.org | Amazon US | Amazon UK
As climate chaos, inequality, and social fragmentation intensify, humanity faces an imminent choice: continue with a system built on extraction and endless growth, or reimagine civilization itself.
Leading thinker Jeremy Lent offers that reimagination: an ecocivilization, grounded in proven design principles of ecosystems and in humankind's evolved inclination toward justice, mutuality, and dignity.
The book doesn’t merely diagnose what’s broken. It reveals how our current civilization—designed for exploitation, accumulation, and elite power—is functioning exactly as it was intended. In its place, Ecocivilization charts a radical yet feasible alternative.
Jeremy Lent, described by Guardian journalist George Monbiot as “one of the greatest thinkers of our age,” is an author and speaker whose work investigates the underlying causes of our civilization’s existential crisis, and explores pathways toward a life-affirming future.
His award-winning book, The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning, examines the way humans have made meaning from the cosmos from hunter-gatherer times to the present day. His more recent award-winning The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe offers a solid foundation for an integrative worldview that could lead humanity to a sustainable, flourishing future.
"The Patterning Instinct" and "The Web of Meaning" set a very high bar for a third book by Jeremy Lent. Now, we expect perhaps more than anyone can deliver. However, Lent's work is precisely in the right direction: how to form an ecological civilization in the aftermath of a collapsing industrial-consumer political-ecological overshoot we are already experiencing.
I doubt that Jeremy will be able to 'cover' the myriad methods of transformation that will have to be developed along the way. Nobody else had dared tackle that monumental task yet. I am certain that much of the transitional methodology will have to evolve by using our human patterning instincts and the meanings of our most cherished values.
This will be an important book guiding us to a better understanding of the only option open to humanity in the Anthropocene: an ecological civilization.
You hit the mark for me with: 'These are not unfortunate side-effects of our way of doing things—they are its founding principles'.
I also think the remarks about the overview effect are beautifully rendered in Samantha Harvey's novella 'Orbital'. So many observations from the astronauts and cosmonauts, I could quote but find this one the most insightful:
'And we stand there gaping. And in time we come to see that not only are we on the sidelines of the universe but that it's a universe of sidelines, that there is no centre, just a giddy mass of waltzing things, and perhaps the entirety of our understanding consists of an elaborate and ever-evolving knowledge of our one extraneousness, a bashing away of mankind's ego by the instruments of scientific enquiry until it is, that ego, a shattered edifice that lets light through'.