It’s not unusual to hear of widespread ecological devastation in soundbite horror stories: Amazon rainforests are disappearing at the astonishing rate of an acre a second; the world’s ocean will soon hold more plastic by weight than fish. It’s both shocking and numbing. Lent (The Patterning Instinct, 2017, and The Web of Meaning, 2021) interrupts our reality with a freshly imagined future—one that looks to ecological systems of Earth to create a life beyond what we’ve been presented. He begins by charting how we got here: the system of exploitation, extraction, and elite wealth accumulation known as capitalism. Capitalism, he argues, has created increasing inequality in our societies and irreparable damage to the planet by incentivizing profit over all outcomes. Yet, policy proposals too often work within capitalism’s framework to imagine solutions. Lent challenges us to chart another path, toward what he calls a “third horizon”: a transformative way of thinking at the broad scale of humanity. Through this, he proposes “a new era that could be defined, at its deepest level, by a transformation in the way we make sense of the world, and a concomitant revolution in our predominant value.” Symbiosis, or mutually beneficial relationships, form the backbone of this reframing. What might we become if we oriented ourselves away from competition and toward cooperation? Weaving threads of humanity’s shared hunter-gatherer history, the post-colonial present era, and an imagined ecological future, Lent charts a compelling case for how and why we should change course. He calls ecocivilization “a practical, levelheaded framework based on our shared evolutionary heritage that could provide all people the opportunity to experience well-being on a healthy Earth.” In other words, nothing short of changing the world.
