“When you’re in a world that is careening out of control, where we’ve broken through seven of the nine safe dimensions of safe operating space that scientists have discovered, it’s unrealistic in my view to focus on those little things and think that will lead to a real better outcome. What’s realistic is backcasting.” — Jeremy Lent

There Is An Alternative. That is the central argument of Jeremy Lent’s new book, Ecocivilization: Making a World That Works for All. Margaret Thatcher’s historically materialist TINA — THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE — was both the most seductive and disempowering message the neoliberal establishment ever produced. As long as everyone believes in the inevitability of free market capitalism, nothing will ever really change. Anti-agency is the name of agency. We just push for slightly higher carbon taxes and slightly fewer fossil fuel subsidies and give it the euphemism of “progress.” For Lent, however, this is environmental capitulation.

Jeremy Lent imagines a genuinely sustainable world — one where humans have a long-term relationship with the living Earth. From that vantage point, the steps that look realistic to the incrementalists seem timid or counterproductive. He reminds us that we’ve broken through seven of the nine safe operating dimensions that scientists have identified for a stable Earth system. No, incrementalism isn’t realism. Rather than progress, it’s a trance-like slide into the apocalypse.

Rather than state control or free markets, the alternative Lent introduces in Ecocivilization is the commons — Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom’s third way in which humans self-organise in the collaborative ways of the natural world. It is already happening, he says, in places as far apart as Cleveland, Ohio and Jackson, Mississippi. Maggie was wrong, the Anglo-American Lent insists. TINA is bunk. THERE IS AN ALTERNATIVE.

Five Takeaways

•       The Consensus Trance: Why Nobody Is Freaking Out: Everyone knows who’s in and who’s out in Washington today. Everyone knows their team’s sports score. Almost nobody is aware of some of the bigger existential questions facing all of us. Lent’s explanation: we have media owned by billionaires who don’t benefit from people freaking out. The entire system is designed to lull people into what he calls a “consensus trance.” We broke through seven of the nine safe operating dimensions that scientists have identified for a stable Earth system. In normal times that would be front-page news every day. Instead: the news cycle moves on.

•       Backcasting vs Incrementalism: The Two Realisms: There are two ways to use the word “realistic.” Realistic given the forces of destruction and oppression all around us right now: push for slightly higher taxes on the uber-wealthy, slightly fewer fossil fuel subsidies. Realistic given what a genuinely sustainable world would actually look like: start from the destination and work backwards. The first kind of realism may be taking us in the wrong direction. Lent’s argument: when you’re in a world careening out of control, the timid steps of incremental realism are not realistic. Backcasting is.

•       The Commons: Ostrom’s Third Way: The political debate of the last hundred years has been between state control and free markets. Both have failed. Lent’s alternative, via Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom: the commons. Not the state owning things. Not markets extracting profit. Humans self-organising together in the way they evolved to do — collaboratively, cooperatively, with attention to the common good. Ostrom showed, empirically, that commons governance works. The Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland, Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi: these are working prototypes of what Lent means.

•       TINA Is the Most Disempowering Message Ever Produced: Margaret Thatcher’s “there is no alternative” — shortened to TINA — is, for Lent, the central ideological achievement of neoliberalism. As long as everyone believes there is no alternative, people will just try to improve the situation that little bit and nothing will change fundamentally. Ecocivilization is Lent’s counter-argument: there is an alternative. The first step is to believe it. Once you believe it, the second step is to figure out what the practical steps are to get there. The book is those practical steps.

•       The Authoritarian Moment: Why People Vote for Strongmen: People drawn to authoritarian strongmen feel in their gut that the system is designed to screw them. They’re right about that. They’re wrong about the solution — the strongmen are offering greater inequality dressed as populism. Lent’s prescription: what AOC, Bernie Sanders, Mamdani represent is the alternative — the courage to actually stand for human dignity. When things swing to one extreme, they tend to swing back. We could be surprised at the speed of change. It’s already happening in local communities — islands of coherence in a sea of chaos — and it can happen at the mainstream level too.

About the Guest

Jeremy Lent is an author and speaker described by George Monbiot as “one of the greatest thinkers of our age.” He is the founder of the Deep Transformation Network and the nonprofit Liology Institute. He is the author of Ecocivilization: Making a World That Works for All (Melville House, May 26, 2026), The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning, and The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe. He lives in Berkeley, California.

References:

•       Ecocivilization: Making a World That Works for All by Jeremy Lent (Melville House, May 26, 2026).

•       Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons — the Nobel Prize-winning work on commons governance referenced throughout.

•       Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics — referenced in the conversation as a related framework.

•       Wilkinson and Pickett, The Spirit Level — the study showing higher well-being in more equal societies, referenced by Lent.

•       The Evergreen Cooperatives, Cleveland, Ohio — referenced as a working prototype of commons governance.

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.

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