Finding a Lever to Move the World
How can we be most effective in the immense task of civilizational transformation?
The Power of Leverage
“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world,” said the ancient philosopher and engineer Archimedes — reflecting on the power of leverage to shift what appears immoveable. As I laid out in my last piece, we are living through the unraveling of a five-hundred-year civilizational order, lurching toward a release phase that could go several ways. The question pressing on all of us who desire a better future reprises that of Archimedes: where do we find the lever that could actually move the whole world?
Systems scientist Donella Meadows spent much of her life studying this question. In her influential paper “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System,” she mapped nine intervention points in increasing order of effectiveness. The least leveraged are the ones that dominate mainstream political discourse: taxes, subsidies, regulatory standards, efficiency improvements. Higher up the ladder are the rules of the system — laws, constitutions, trade treaties. Close to the top are the goals of the system — under capitalism, that means such goals as growing the economy and perpetually increasing the return on invested capital. And at the very pinnacle of leverage is the mindset or paradigm out of which the entire system arises.
When Copernicus showed that the Earth is not the center of the universe, and when Einstein theorized that matter and energy are interchangeable, they didn’t just advance their fields — they opened up the possibility of an entirely different paradigm with which to make sense of everything. Established approaches were shown to be either limited or erroneous, and a new conceptual space emerged for improved models of reality to be developed. We have reached a comparable place with our world system. The old paradigm has passed its expiration date. It’s still important to pay attention to fixing obvious faults within the system— to alleviate unnecessary short-term suffering and even delay the onset of collapse — but it will not provide an alternative pathway out of our global predicament.
A Worldview of Interconnectedness
The paradigm on which our world system is based arose in early modern Europe alongside the Scientific Revolution. Building on a root metaphor of the universe as a machine, the modern worldview perceived nature as a resource with no intrinsic value other than its usefulness for human exploitation. It was a worldview of separation: humans as fundamentally separate from the rest of nature, individuals as separate from each other, each person split between a mind and body that were essentially distinct. This worldview proved a tremendous boon for scientific discovery, giving rise to the powerful methodology of reductionism that split everything into smaller and smaller units to understand how it all worked—while it also caused tremendous harm to those on the wrong side of the power structure.
Kepler’s model of the solar system: The dominant system is based on a mechanistic view of nature.
More recently, however, a large and growing body of scientific disciplines — complexity science, systems biology, network theory — have proffered an alternative conception of the universe, recognizing that the ways in which things connect are frequently more important than the things themselves. The deeper implications of these scientific disciplines lead to a realization shared by many of the world’s great wisdom traditions: a recognition of our deep interconnectedness, within ourselves, with each other, and with all of life.
If a civilization builds its version of reality by seeing nature as a resource and each individual as distinct from the other, it makes sense that its goal would be to extract as much as possible from nature, and that its rules would encourage individuals to exploit others. Capitalism can thus be understood as the predictable economic system of the dominant worldview.
An ecological civilization, by contrast, would be the expected system of a worldview arising from a realization of the deep interconnectedness of all life.
The Three Horizons
But here is the conundrum. As our civilization veers ever closer toward a precipice, shifting an entire civilizational paradigm might seem like a luxury we can’t afford. Even with their limited impact, aren’t the lower rungs of Meadows’ leverage ladder the best option available as we face impending catastrophe? Do we really have time for anything else?
There is a way of thinking about political transformation that helps us sit with this tension. Imagine you have set out on a long journey in an unmapped land with rocky terrain. It might seem sensible to keep your gaze down, focusing on the next few footsteps to make sure you don’t trip. But there are no signposts on this journey, so every now and then you need to look up and check where you’re heading. Your destination is still so far away that it lies beyond the furthest horizon you can see. How do you even know if you’re going in the right direction?
There is a powerful planning tool known as the Three Horizons Model that uses this analogy to shed light on how various strategies and tactics fit into the ultimate objective of transformative change. Developed originally for business strategy, it has been applied equally well to social and political planning. The first horizon relates to short-term planning — essential for daily and monthly accomplishments, but only if the right direction has already been set. The second horizon extends beyond incremental thinking, potentially disrupting conventional practices to achieve greater impact while remaining in the same ballpark. The third horizon refers to ideas outside the ballpark altogether — shifting the entire paradigm and thus permitting possibilities that could never have been imagined within the first two horizons.
Applied to our global predicament, first horizon activities might include advocating for greater investment in renewable energy, eliminating subsidies for fossil fuel companies, or strengthening pollution regulations. Second horizon thinking can appear seductively attractive: Tesla spectacularly disrupted the conventional automobile industry; carbon capture and storage — if it were to work at scale — promises to turn energy production into a carbon-neutral enterprise. But these disruptive technologies continue to reinforce the same paradigm that caused our crisis in the first place: the relentless pursuit of economic growth within the context of a globalized capitalist system that rewards extractive and exploitative behavior above all else.
The Three Horizons model helps us understand that each horizon has an essential role to play. If you don’t pay attention to your next steps, you will stumble before you ever reach your destination. And when you glance up to check direction, you may find several second horizon alternatives beckoning. This is where it’s critically important to have a general sense of the third horizon. Some second horizon destinations might appear alluring but lead you in the wrong direction. You may not know exactly what the third horizon will look like when you get there, but it’s crucially important to keep its general whereabouts in view with every step you take.
Which pathways lead to the Third Horizon we desire?
Change theorists using the Three Horizons model characterize second horizon initiatives as either H2− (leading back to the first horizon) or H2+ (leading toward the third). Geoengineering to reflect the sun’s rays back into space, for example, is a prime example of H2− thinking: a radical “solution” that enables systemic harm to continue unabated while creating new centralized technologies requiring continual maintenance to avoid catastrophic rebound effects. By contrast, legal frameworks that recognize the rights of nature, or policy changes that shift the goals of the economy from GDP growth to human and ecological flourishing, are examples of H2+ thinking — disruptions that open a door rather than close one.
Frequently, contentious disputes can arise between change advocates immersed in different horizons. From the first horizon, third horizon visions can appear irrelevant. From the third horizon, first horizon actions can appear self-defeating. Achieving systemic transformation will require those working in each horizon to coordinate with each other, creating off-ramps and on-ramps that allow initiatives to transition seamlessly from one horizon to the next.
Islands of Coherence in a Sea of Chaos
Powerful as the Three Horizons model is, it risks giving an impression that the Third Horizon only exists in a distant, barely attainable long-term future.
This is where the work of Nobel prize-winning systems thinker Ilya Prigogine offers a different and inspirational metaphor. Prigogine famously described how complex systems transition from one stable state to another. At first, things look very messy — like the mush of dissolved caterpillar flesh inside a cocoon. But within the mess, inklings begin to appear—known as imaginal cells—of a new stable state into which the system might transform. Prigogine called these “small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos” which, he explained, had “the capacity to lift the entire system to a higher order.”
Imaginal cells form the basis for the butterfly’s transformation
We are currently living within the kind of chaotic medium Prigogine had in mind — a world system flickering erratically as it approaches a tipping point. That instability, for all its terror, also represents an opening. As the coherence of the dominant civilization unravels, its cultural hegemony begins to lose its grip. New generations are likely to become increasingly open to radically different alternatives. And this is the moment when islands of coherence become strategically decisive.
We can think of islands of coherence as communities of practice already prefiguring the world of an ecocivilization — in bioregions, neighborhoods, commons-based groups, and cooperative networks, among others. They are groups that have chosen to live or work according to principles consistent with an ecocivilization: emphasizing cooperation over competition, respecting the intrinsic value of all life and the dignity of all people, and holding a shared commitment to justice, diversity, and subsidiarity.
Living Exemplars of a Different World
In the words of Buckminster Fuller: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” These living exemplars already exist, scattered across every region of the planet.
Some of the most compelling are Indigenous and land-based communities consciously living according to their traditional values. La Vía Campesina — representing over 200 million people in 81 countries, perhaps the world’s single largest island of coherence — helps communities pursue food sovereignty through principles of agroecology, in the face of existential threats including land grabs by powerful financial interests. The Amazon Sacred Headwaters Alliance, spanning 74 million acres in Ecuador and Peru, brings together 25 Indigenous nations in Indigenous-led governance of a “Bioregional Life Plan” inspired by the principle of buen vivir.
In the Global North, islands of coherence have arisen in urban wastelands left behind in capitalism’s frenzied rush to greener pastures. Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi and Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland have pioneered worker-owned models — the latter’s Cleveland Model now emulated in Preston, England, and elsewhere. Buurtzorg has reinvented homecare in the Netherlands through self-guided autonomous teams with no middle managers, achieving a 30 percent reduction in emergency room visits while generating far higher staff and patient satisfaction. And the Ecoversities Alliance — over 400 transformative learning spaces in 40 countries — is reinventing education from a third horizon perspective.
Turning Islands of Coherence into a Continent
In decades to come, as the dominant system continues to unravel, there is a potential for these islands of coherence to become self-sustaining and to build bridges between “archipelagoes” of related islands. Ultimately, if successful, these archipelagoes might join together to form a new “continent of coherence” — a living, evolving, sociopolitical, cultural, and conceptual platform for an emerging new civilization.
Can islands of coherence ultimately form a new continent?
However, since these communities function according to a different set of criteria than those of the dominant system, they tend to face persistent pressure from external forces that sometimes threatens their very survival. Identifying and actively supporting their collective flourishing is therefore a critical factor in steering the world system in a positive direction.
For these islands of coherence to be collectively powerful, their impact must be visible and transmissible through a process known as fractal scaling: whereby successful principles of an initiative can be reproduced elsewhere, while each particular manifestation remains unique to its specific locality and community. Additionally, to achieve planetwide systemic change, these transformative practices must be amplified by an underlying cohesive framework that can augment their power and support their diverse trajectories.
As Archimedes understood, what matters is not raw force but the placement of the lever. While the islands of coherence already spreading across the planet might appear to some like peripheral curiosities, they potentially represent the fulcrum of civilizational transformation. This helps define the work of our time: to augment them, connect them, and ensure that as the dominant system unravels, there is something coherent and life-affirming waiting to take its place.
In my next piece, I’ll explore what this work looks like in practice — the specific strategies and structures that might allow these islands to multiply, link, and grow into the continent of coherence that just might offer humanity a better future.
Ecocivilization: Making a World that Works for All
Melville House: available May 26, 2026
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Jeremy Lent, 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. He is founder of the Deep Transformation Network and co-founder of the Ecocivilization Coalition. His previous two books were The Web of Meaning and The Patterning Instinct.
Excellent essay. Virtually an 'island of coherence' itself!
Wise and excellently written, (both Vision & Craft)!!!