For decades, one idea has quietly ruled the modern world.
It is not a law, a politician, or a specific policy. It is a belief system so pervasive that most of us rarely question it.
TINA: There Is No Alternative.
This phrase, popularized by Margaret Thatcher and reinforced through the Reagan era, became the foundation of what we now call neoliberalism: the assumption that unrestrained free-market capitalism is the only realistic way to organize society.
At its core is a belief in unrestrained markets, perpetual growth, and the idea that human activity is best guided by the logic of competition and profit. It’s a system that’s been built around extraction, exploitation, and elite wealth accumulation.
Even when well-intentioned policymakers propose solutions, they generally try to fix what’s wrong while missing the underlying reality: The system isn’t broken—it’s doing exactly what it was intended to do.
People increasingly intuit that this system isn’t 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.
Ultimately, what we need is a system built on an entirely different foundation. What would it look like? What would be its organizing principles?
These are questions I’ve spent the past five years researching, and the result is my new book, Ecocivilization: Making a World that Works for All
This book constitutes the dethronement of TINA. There is, in fact, an alternative.
A Life-Affirming Civilization
The alternative I explore is not a return to twentieth-century ideological battles between capitalism and communism. Both systems shared common flaws: they treated the Earth as an object to be exploited in service of economic growth, and both prized their particular ideology over the dignity of ordinary human lives.
Instead, this book maps the contours of something fundamentally different: an ecological civilization.
An ecocivilization is a society designed around life-affirming principles, with the overriding objective to set the conditions for all beings to thrive on a regenerated Earth. Rather than extraction, it’s based on regeneration. Rather than zero-sum competition, it’s rooted in mutually beneficial cooperation. Rather than endless growth, it’s oriented toward long-term flourishing.
Across the chapters, the book explores how this shift could transform every major domain of modern life, including:
Technology reconfigured to empower people rather than entrench centralized power.
Cities designed for wellbeing, community, and balance with nature.
Democracy reinvented so regular citizens—rather than oligarchs—shape collective destiny.
Corporations legally restructured to serve life and people, not just profit.
Enforceable Rights of Nature legislation protecting all of Earth’s sentient beings.
Around the world, activists, organizers, scholars, and communities are already building these alternatives, often without realizing they are part of the same larger movement. This book highlights their work and ideas, and weaves their strands together.
Co-creating Our Future
We are experiencing a century of transformation, one of the few times in human history when everything changes for nearly everyone. But transformation to what?
To complete civilizational collapse?
To a high-tech AI-enhanced dystopia ruled over by oligarchs and billionaires?
Or to a future we co-create that sets the conditions for all to thrive on a vibrant Earth?
In a time of civilizational unraveling, this book doesn’t offer easy reassurances. You won’t find hopium here.
Instead, it’s an invitation to cast our vision beyond TINA, to see the alternatives already emerging, and to join in the most important collaborative project humanity may ever undertake: creating a civilization that allows humans and the living Earth to flourish symbiotically into the indefinite future.
There is an alternative. Let’s do all we can to make it happen.
Ecocivilization: Making a World that Works for All
Melville House: available May 26, 2026
PREORDER: Bookshop.org | Penguin Random House | Amazon US | Amazon UK
Eager to read. Vital topics.
I understand the strategic reason for wanting to avoid Cold War binaries, but I do think there’s a risk in flattening the twentieth century into “capitalism vs. communism,” because that framing can obscure many of the traditions most relevant to ecological civilization: anti-colonial movements, labor movements, democratic socialism, social ecology, Indigenous resistance, environmental justice, feminism, cooperatives, commons traditions, food sovereignty, and ecological Marxist work around things like metabolic rift.
It also risks treating “capitalism vs. communism” as a set of symmetric evils, when any sober historical analysis has to distinguish between actually existing capitalist imperialism, authoritarian state-socialist regimes, and the many democratic, ecological, anti-colonial, labor, and commons-based traditions that were often crushed or marginalized.
For me, the point isn’t that EcoCiv needs to become Marxist or adopt a left identity as its destination. It’s that historically left analysis provides important safeguards. It helps identify class power, ownership structures, colonial patterns, labor exploitation, green capitalism, technocracy, and the ways ecological language can be co-opted by authoritarian or even ecofascist tendencies.
That matters because environmentalism has always had contested currents. Some are emancipatory, democratic, Indigenous, socialist, feminist, and justice-oriented. Others have been Malthusian, colonial, exclusionary, anti-migrant, or authoritarian. So if EcoCiv wants to avoid dangerous forms of ecological politics, it needs a historically informed critique of power — not as an ideological cage, but as an immune system against co-optation.
So maybe the stronger framing is: ecocivilization moves beyond Cold War binaries, but it should not move beyond political economy, historical memory, or critique of domination.