Ecocivilization challenges selfishness with a different system

Ecocivilization – Jeremy Lent argues that the feeling people have of a selfish species is tied to an “operating system” built on exploitation and extraction—ideas he traces to modernism’s rise in early modern Europe and its view of nature as a machine. In his book Ecocivilizati

On a planet where wars have been fought over fuel, where wealth is increasingly lopsided, and where overconsumption continues even as the Earth burns, the idea that humans are inherently selfish can feel almost intuitive.

Author Jeremy Lent has a different starting point. In a conversation about his new book, Ecocivilization, Lent argues the problem isn’t a rotten core in human nature. It’s the system humans built—an implicit set of assumptions driving economics. culture. and even how people understand their relationship to one another and to the rest of life.

Lent frames this as changing the “operating system of the entire world. ” a phrase he says means the underlying rules that quietly shape behavior. In his telling. today’s worldview can be traced to the rise of modernism in early modern Europe around the 17th century. That shift, he says, helped power astonishing advances in technology and science—an achievement he doesn’t deny. But it also changed how people thought about nature: increasingly. nature was treated less as something living and interdependent. and more as a machine to be broken down into parts.

He points to Francis Bacon’s idea of conquering nature. which Lent describes as inspiring and as part of what underlaid the scientific revolution. In that worldview. humans were seen as separate from the rest of living Earth. and life itself became something to be extracted from. He links that perspective to European views of other people as resources. the rise of colonialism. and ultimately the structure of the global economic system today.

From there. Lent says the logic runs straight: if extraction and exploitation are framed as “good. ” then selfishness and greed can start to look like a natural response—something science. he argues. does not have to endorse. He says that research across many fields has suggested those assumptions are illusory. and that a different set of foundations could lead to more flourishing than the present system does.

Lent doesn’t present Ecocivilization as a distant utopia. The book, he says, builds on a sense of interconnectedness and asks what it would look like if the entire world system were designed to set the conditions for all beings to thrive on a regenerated Earth.

To get there. he says his broader body of work follows a pattern: interdisciplinary research aimed at giving ordinary readers accessible insight into deep research that is often kept niche and compartmentalized. He describes Ecocivilization as the third book of a trilogy. The first. The Patterning Instinct. he calls a “diagnosis” tracing how humans have made sense of the universe from hunter-gatherer times to the present. showing major shifts in worldviews—from a nomadic hunter-gatherer perspective. to early agrarian civilizations. to the split he describes between an East Asian and a Western worldview in the last couple of thousand years.

The second book, The Web of Meaning, is where Lent says his alternative “operating system” takes more shape. There. he describes an approach grounded in separation replaced by deep interconnectedness. drawing on traditions he says have long expressed that idea—alongside what he calls scientifically rigorous work from modern disciplines. He argues that modern science often carries assumptions that originated in the 17th century or later and have become so pervasive they appear to be neutral.

One example. he says. is reductionism—cutting systems into smaller parts to understand them better—an approach he attributes to René Descartes. Lent says reductionism is a strong methodology. but he calls out “ontological reductionism. ” where success leads people to conclude that reductionism is the only way to make sense of anything and other approaches must therefore be wrong. He points to systems sciences over the past 100 to 150 years—ecology. complexity theory. and cognitive sciences—as evidence that connections between things can sometimes explain a system better than isolated details.

That shift. Lent says. supports a recognition that humans are deeply connected to the rest of life—an idea he says Indigenous knowledge traditions. Buddhism. Taoism. and other East Asian philosophies have long emphasized. He adds that modernism’s assumed split between “science” and “wisdom traditions” is itself a made-up mythology.

Once he moves from ideas to structures, the book’s central claim becomes clearer: the modern system is built like a wealth pump. Lent describes it as extracting and exploiting, designed to suck wealth from the work of people and from the rest of life, funneling it to a tiny elite at the top.

He argues the evidence for that structure can be seen in corporations, which he says dominate the global economy. He points to a figure that among the 100 largest economies in the world today. roughly 69 are transnational corporations rather than nation-states. In his account. corporations are designed not to use efficiency for the benefit of people. but for the benefit of shareholders—one reason. he says. why so much feels suboptimal for so many.

To show alternatives are possible, Lent highlights Mondragon, a huge cooperative conglomerate in the Basque Country in Spain. He says it has the size of a large transnational corporation and is among the biggest and most successful corporate entities in Spain. He describes it as operating across multiple industries and employing something like 80,000 people. He says the profit it makes is for its own employees. and that it maintains a very tight pay ratio: he says the highest-paid CEO has no more than six times the salary of the lowest-paid person in any of the companies—contrasting it with corporate America. which he describes as having ratios closer to a thousand times.

When Feltman asks about pushback—whether these ideas are naive or whether change is unrealistic because systems are entrenched—Lent turns the argument to where the dominant civilization is heading. He points to publicized warnings from many scientists about how unsustainable the current system is.

One example he gives is the Stockholm Resilience Center. which he says has mapped out nine parameters of a safe operating space for the Earth. He says they spent years calculating what those parameters are. naming examples such as greenhouse gas pollution and the acidification of the oceans. Lent says that in seven of those nine cases. humanity has already blown through the barriers for the safe operating space. He also references the United Nations secretary-general saying the world is on a path of “collective suicide.”.

In that setting, Lent argues that treating the future like a series of manageable incremental steps is actually the least realistic assumption. Instead, he says, his book relies on a planning methodology called backcasting.

Backcasting. he describes. begins by asking where society needs to end up in the future—where people can flourish. be born into a regenerated world. and live lives of fulfillment. Only after that destination is defined does it work backward to determine what steps should be taken from where society stands now. Lent says this approach still starts with the present. but can produce different choices than those offered by what seems most doable in the short term.

That brings him to what he calls concrete action for everyday people. One of the most important tasks, Lent says, is to recognize and reject what he describes as a myth that people must outcompete, that everything is a zero-sum game, and that the only smart move is to look out for number one.

He argues that humans evolved to cooperate. that people experience real pleasure through community—through being cared for. respected. and able to contribute to collective flourishing. Once people reorient around that, he says, they don’t need a hero fantasy of changing the whole world alone. Instead. he says. working with others collectively to put things right in local ways can drive the shift—along with millions of people doing the same across the world.

By the end of the conversation, Lent’s central claim has become more than a moral argument about selfishness. It’s a claim about design: if the rules that govern economics and culture are built to extract and exploit. then greed can come to feel like a law of nature. If those rules are rebuilt around interconnectedness and regeneration. he argues. then human behavior and human institutions can be organized toward something more stable than crisis—toward a future where flourishing isn’t reserved for a tiny elite.

Lent’s appearance also comes with a reminder that the conversation is part of a wider series. Science Quickly is produced by Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Sushmita Pathak and Jeff DelViscio. The episode was edited by Alex Sugiura. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check the show, and Dominic Smith composed the theme music. The segment concludes with a note that the show will return on Friday with a conversation about how humans and machines have evolved together—from cuckoo clocks all the way to ChatGPT.

Jeremy Lent Ecocivilization selfishness interconnectedness modernism Francis Bacon reductionism systems science backcasting Stockholm Resilience Center Mondragon cooperative economics wealth pump