Donate
Kate Raworth: It’s very good to be here in conversation with you, Jeremy. You’ve written a book on Ecocivilization. You’ve written many books that have looked at the deep roots, the deep schisms and challenges of our culture. When I wrote Doughnut Economics, published in 2017, it was a great joy to show off all the different ideas I had discovered having not been taught them in economics: ecological economics, complexity economics, feminist economics, commons theory – I wanted to make these ideas dance on the same page. So, I took a great joy in celebrating other people’s ideas – what happens when you bring this idea together with that – and I very much see you doing that in your new book. And I love the way you’ve incorporated Doughnut Economics.
Jeremy Lent: I’m so curious how you have seen the take-up of this reframing of economics. You’re just saying, “Here’s another way,” but really what you’re doing is turning the entire way of thinking about economics around – this kind of Copernican Revolution. Do you feel the movement happening, or is there a frustration? You know that famous Max Planck theory that the only way paradigms shift is when the old thinkers die out.
Kate: When I began writing that book in 2014, my goal was to change the curriculum of economics in universities. Mainstream economics has changed little in response – it’s probably one place where it really hasn’t had uptake. I hear from economic students around the world: “I read Doughnut Economics, I went to university to study economics, but they’re teaching the stuff you were saying was the old stuff. It’s still the 20th-century version.” I find that profoundly distressing – that 21st-century students are being taught ideas that just do not serve our times.
Does a discipline change one funeral at a time? I worry not. Once I was in Belgium talking to some professors of economics and in the break one of the young professors came up to me quietly over coffee and said, “I love the ideas in your book. I would love to teach them to my students, but I’m on track for getting tenure and I have to be cautious.” So sometimes it’s the older professors who’ve had tenure who are actually much more exploratory. That was the one thing that stuck with me – how institutional incentivisation stops dynamic young professors going outside that scope.
So in mainstream economic courses it’s scratching the surface still. But what happened – and I didn’t anticipate this at all – is the take-up in other disciplines: from law to health to development to urban design to civil engineering to fashion studies. It’s blown me away that people across such different intellectual disciplines have picked the tool up and said, “Actually, this is a really useful concept for us, thinking about change in this area.”
But beyond academia, it’s been astounding. The number of practitioners - whether teachers in schools, mayors and town councillors, people in progressive companies or community organisers - who have got in touch and said, “I love the ideas in this book and I’m putting them into practice.” “I’m making a game.” “I’m taking it to my community meeting.” “We’re putting it on the table as we discuss the future of our company.” “I’m a town councillor. I want to put this at the heart of my town’s future vision and strategy.” “I’m an architect. It’s on the table as I design a new district of my city.” It blew me away. That’s what really drove me to co-found Doughnut Economics Action Lab – putting these ideas into action – and it’s a lab because it’s one big experiment to see how far we can go.
And it comes back to something you said: you need to do everything to make it work. However, a town councillor can say, “Right, we’re going to adopt Doughnut Economics here.” It gets voted through. They start putting it into practice. But a town is embedded in a district, in a nation, in a region, in a world – hampered by not only national regulation, but the global financial system. It’s never going to be able to go all the way to transforming and living in the Doughnut from the bottom up, and yet people start. That’s what I love about it. People begin anyway, even knowing they’re going to run into the wider system that will constrain them. There are now over 50 towns, cities and districts around the world where local government have put Doughnut Economics at the heart of their policies and practices. And that’s motivating to others to get started.
But I’m going to flip this back to you. You’ve spelled out a civilisational design; we need to do everything to make it work. And yet there’s the catch: we’re never going to get everything going all at once. How do we proceed knowing that? There’s going to be this fragmented tension between the old and the new jostling.
Jeremy: That is the whole point. Your experience is so interesting – the core traditional part of the system completely rejecting it, and yet everything around picking it up. Systems thinking in science has been a tradition for 100 years or more. Edward Lorenz, a developer of chaos theory, won the Kyoto Prize for what he wrote about the butterfly effect in the 1960s – and you still, in mainstream scientific journals right now, see people coming across systems science as if this is a brand new thing. Most people still get trained into a system and they’re not even aware that’s happening. So take heart – it’s not just in economics.
It’s critical to recognise, just like you said, that it’s the system as a whole that is this destructive mechanism. We can try working on any part of it and we simply are not going to succeed, because the system will reject it. There are foundational ideas – one is rethinking economics, just like you’ve done. And there’s all these others: universal basic income, which would be absolutely transformational if it were truly applied; a triple bottom line requirement (people, planet, and profit) on big corporations that their charters only get renewed if they meet them; legally enforceable rights of Nature at the UN; deliberative democracy. But even those best ideas could only work if they were part of something bigger. The whole system has to change – different strands connecting with each other to create a new fabric. That seems like, how is that ever going to happen? But the internal contradictions of the system itself, as it’s unravelling, create those degrees of freedom.
What I find really helpful is the adaptive cycle – a model of change that has been shown to be true for any complex nonlinear adaptive system, which means any living system, from a cell to an ecosystem. This also applies to human systems. There are four phases as a spiral – a forest is a nice easy way to understand it. Imagine a growth phase with new trees, new species taking over an ecosystem. Then a conservation phase, which can last for a very long time, when everything is tightly interconnected and stable and it’s very difficult for new seeds to take root. But that stability over time begins to become brittle, almost creating the seeds of its own destruction: in a forest, the dead pine needles and branches that collect. Then suddenly something can happen to take you to the release phase: in a forest, a fire that burns everything down; in our human world, a market crash or a civilisational crash. It’s a terrifying time, but that release phase leaves new terrain where whatever couldn’t have taken root before can take root and start the new cycle.
I don’t think many people would disagree that right now we’re pretty much in some version of the end of that conservation phase, or the beginning of that release phase. Exactly where we are is a whole other question. Depending on where you live, you might be clear we’re deeper in the release phase if you’re being bombed by dominant cultures trying to destroy anything you stand for. Or you might feel your life is still relatively stable, but you’re scared, and you can see things unravelling. But it’s in that unravelling that there is potential to reweave society’s fabric – maybe before the entire thing burns down. Which is what Milton Friedman talked about, and he was one of the most successful change agents of the 20th century. It’s when things collapse and people look for the ideas that are lying around, and it’s our job to make sure those ideas are there for those people to pick up.
Kate: I’m sitting with that exact quote on the screen. That’s so funny. And I look at Holling’s Adaptive Loop, and our team at Doughnut Economics Action Lab look at it and we think, OK, if we are going into release phase, what kind of organisation are we? What role do we play?
And it’s precisely in response to what Friedman said: “Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.” And here comes my favourite bit: “That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”
The actions that are taken during crisis depend on the ideas that are lying around. Why would you want ideas only lying around? You want them up and running – places and people you can point to. And in your book you’re pointing to practice.
The second thing I want to say about that quote is that he says our function is to develop alternatives to existing policies until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable - and that’s extraordinary. We are so used to the neoliberal norm that it’s hard to imagine that it was once for Milton Friedman the politically impossible.
I want to ask you, how have you, through the writing of this book, both found for yourself and also tried to make visible and make encouraging for the reader the real possibility that we could actually have an ecocivilisation?
Jeremy: Yeah, that’s a great question. This vision of an alternative future is not some utopia. It shows that there is a coherent, feasible and real-life version of what this world system could look like if it were simply designed to set the conditions for all beings to thrive on a regenerated Earth. Probably if you asked anyone right now, “How do you think our system should be designed?” my guess is maybe 98% would say, “Well, of course we should design our system like that” – and yet it’s the opposite of what our system is actually designed around.
I love that we’re getting inspired by some of the most destructive minds of the 20th century. And I’ll go back to another one, which is right around the same time. This notion of TINA – There Is No Alternative – this famous hallmark of Margaret Thatcher. I begin my book with that reference, because the whole system of destruction thrives through this very powerful version of what Antonio Gramsci called cultural hegemony. This whole intellectual class – whether it’s economists or thought leaders – basically telling people There Is No Alternative. “This is the system, and it’s not just a system – it’s the best one available.”
This consensus myth has to be broken. The most important aspect of the systemic transformation we’re talking about is the mere recognition that there actually is an alternative. I start Ecocivilization by saying this entire book is a refutation, a dethroning of TINA.
For me, the last five years have been inspiring. As the world has been falling apart – an authoritarian takes over the most powerful nation on Earth, the genocides we see taking place – somehow I have not been totally sucked into despair, because day to day I’m looking at these great ideas, seeing how practical they are, seeing them actually working.
Citizens’ assemblies are a great example. Most people don’t even know what a citizens’ assembly is, and when it’s explained that it’s people chosen at random by sortition to deliberate on the most complex issues of the day, their first response is, “What a ridiculous idea. How could they possibly have a clue?” And what we find in real life is the exact opposite. When facilitated properly, people end up respecting each other, changing their polarised opinions, and developing smarter, more thoughtful solutions than any of the political parties would have come up with.
When we come together in the right ways, rather than in conditions that are designed to set us apart from each other, humans are amazing. We evolved to flourish, not through the systems that exist right now, but through these systems of communing, of working together, that some of the leading thinkers of our time are showing can be done in this complex modern world.
Kate: And you’ve come to the topic I really wanted to pick up on: the nature of human nature. Studying economics, I was taught the character of ‘rational economic man’. His traits: he’s standing alone with money in his hand, ego in his heart, a calculator in his head, and Nature at his feet. He hates work. He loves luxury. He knows the price of everything, and he can never get enough. These are the traits written into humanity in many still highly influential economic models.
My concern is not only how absurdly narrow it is, but that evidence shows that the more students are taught this character – that this is a good enough model of us – the more they actually start to mimic it. The more they value self-interest over altruism, competition over collaboration. Who we tell ourselves we are shapes who we become.
The literature shows that we are super cooperators, the most prosocial of all mammals. The naked mole rat is the most social, but only with next of kin. I travel around and find myself on a train or in a conference room meeting humans I have never met before, and yet there we are collaborating, interacting as if we are kin – but we are kin. We have so much prosociality in us. And yet, going all the way back to David Hume and Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, we have, as Hume put it, something of the dove kneaded into our bosom, but also the serpent. We are all so competitive and we love competitive sports.
Having raised twins who are now 17, I have watched very close up the collaborate/compete. We all have in us the capacity to collaborate – and we know when it’s safe to do that. We have in us the capacity to compete and we can feel it viscerally in our bodies. It’s the room you step into that determines which part of yourself will be activated.
I’m very influenced by Elinor Ostrom’s core design principles that enable the commons to work. I think she tapped into something much bigger – what enables humans to collaborate and cooperate whether in markets, commons, the state or the household: deep principles of mutual reciprocity. And building on that, David Sloan Wilson said our cooperative selves are like the soft body of a turtle – we need to know that the conditions are right, that it’s safe to put our soft bodies out. I just think it’s a beautiful metaphor. When does the turtle know it’s safe to come out of the shell?
Many of the institutions that we find ourselves in now are built on competition. We need to make enough space for that collaborative way of interbeing to come through. How else are we going to re-common – to bring back the commons and enable this version of ourselves to thrive together again?
Jeremy: I love that focus on Elinor Ostrom’s principles of the commons and how David Sloan Wilson took that and generalised it to look at how we can create true prosocial behaviour. To add to those two, I would focus people’s attention on the work of David Bollier – in my view one of the leading thinkers of how communing, as a verb, applies in the real world. When I first came across the commons I was a little taken aback. In my traditional education I’d learned to associate the commons with some sort of medieval notion of sheep – “What is this? How does this relate to what actually happens in our dominant world?”
What Bollier talks about is commoning as an ontoshift – an ontological shift from the notion that we’re conditioned as individuals looking at every other person or the rest of the world as resources to exploit, to getting back in touch with our evolved human nature of flourishing as part of a group, looking out for each other, recognising our own place in the largest set of groups. His book with Silke Helfrich, Free, Fair and Alive, goes into the deeper layers and gives a ton of examples of commoning in the real world today.
One example we might check out every day is Wikipedia, which out-cooperated all the great encyclopaedias of the past by simply being non-commercial and bringing in people’s shared desire to build knowledge together. And there’s a great example in the Netherlands of a healthcare network called Buurtzorg, developed as a commons. Rather than a hierarchical approach to home healthcare, it put the focus on the relationship between the carer and the person who needs the care – rather than maximising profit and minimising time, focusing on wellbeing. It’s ended up being an incredibly successful network where people get much greater work satisfaction and those they care for end up with far less hospitalisation because it’s been organised around the actual notion of caring rather than the system.
What we see time and again is that these commons systems work when they are given the conditions to. But we live in a world where the conditions are the opposite. And that leads to one of the core elements of whatever we might call hope, or a sense of the possibility of transformation. Sometimes people say what we need is a new level of human consciousness or a collective awakening – which is all wonderful stuff and I’m all for it. But we don’t actually need that to get to this world that works for all. What we need is a simple reconnection with our evolved human nature, because it’s in our evolved human nature to act in this commons way.
Another thinker worth looking into is Darcia Narvaez, an evolutionary psychologist who developed the concept of our evolved nest – looking at how infants in nomadic hunter-gatherer societies grow up in a way that’s almost exactly the opposite of the way they are raised in our dominant society. Her point is that it’s not surprising that people end up conditioned into being unhappy and acting in antisocial ways, because we didn’t get raised according to our evolved nest.
This work is about reconnecting people with their true evolved nature – to feel warmth, to feel connected, to love, to be part of a thriving community rather than in separate isolation on some sort of superyacht. That is what makes us thrive, and that’s the secret sauce for the possibility of this transformation.
Kate: Relating to reconnecting with our evolved human nature and the word ‘ecological’, here’s a concern I have. Just at a time when we have understood how much we need to reconnect with the living networks of Earth – the thrill of understanding mycelial networks, planetary boundaries, making visible to ourselves the web of life in a far richer way, the interconnectedness of the Earth system processes that hold Earth in this extraordinary balance, the only known living planet in the universe – along come digital networks and AI snapping up our attention. I have a hunch that our brains will have a capacity either to deeply absorb and immerse in the living and the ecological, or to be drawn into and wired towards the digital. And so much energy and demand is telling us it’s obligate to be immersed in AI and the digital – otherwise you will be left behind, you will become redundant. How do you sit with that deep tension that it is time to reconnect with the living world if we are even to have a chance of an ecocivilisation, and yet all of the energy and attention is being drawn towards digital networks that pull us in such a different direction?
Jeremy: I do share all of those concerns with you, Kate. What we see with the rise of digital media, even before the rise of AI, is what I’ve seen called epistemic chaos – people losing touch with reality. And there’s a word for when somebody loses touch with reality: psychosis. So what we’re looking at in the world right now is some form of collective psychosis. And we need to recognise that it’s not a function of the technology, not a function of the internet and social media capabilities. It’s a function of the driving incentives behind those who control that technology. It’s crucial to understand that, because it’s only by understanding that – and that’s what most people miss – that we can explore the possibility of undoing this mess.
Those who have developed that technology own the data – essentially enclosing the data that belongs to all of us within a tiny group. And they are doing all that for a particular purpose: to get wealthy and powerful. They are part of the whole capitalist infrastructure, which means that even if there’s some dude who actually wants to do something good, there’s nothing they can do about it, because they’re all part of this shareholder-driven system that forces them to maximise profits and shareholder value. False news travels roughly six times faster and is 70% more likely to be reshared than true news. There is an actual profit incentive for their algorithms to highlight lies. And then AI comes along and catalyses that to the whole next level, creating more powerful lies that can be even more effective than before.
What we’ve got to understand is that this epistemic chaos, this collective psychosis, has risen as a result of the shareholder-driven model of global capitalism. But the system isn’t broken. The system is doing exactly what it was intended to do – intended for extraction and exploitation, to activate what’s known as the wealth pump that sucks people’s attention, life and the living energy of all life on Earth up into a tiny elite. That’s a wealth pump that’s been around for millennia, but now, with global capitalism, the internet and AI, it’s even more powerful.
If you’re watching this wealth pump happening and trying to work on something downstream to stop it, the suction is so powerful it’s just going to overwhelm you. What we’ve got to do is look at the mechanisms of that wealth pump itself and start to change that. It’s a huge ask, but it’s the only way we’re going to turn this around – drawing people’s attention to that system of extraction and exploitation and looking at what is needed to rework it.
People look at my work and say, “God, I wish I was as optimistic as you.” And I have to respond, “No, you don’t. I’m not optimistic at all.” I’ve got one voice on one shoulder looking at despair every day. It says, “This is absolutely hopeless. You gotta be kidding.” That would be a reasonable way of looking at the dynamics we see unfolding. But what gives me that sense of possibility is that all of these systems are non-linear, self-organised, complex systems. By their very nature, they are not predictable in the way that sense of despair thinks they might be. And what we know about these self-organised systems is that the way they change is not necessarily through one single external shift, but through the whole system itself going through chaos and then reorganising in a different way.
That frames what this is about: to look clearly at how dangerous, how destructive and how seemingly desperate these dynamics are – and in spite of that, look at what’s actually possible. It’s almost like imagining you’re in a dark tunnel, getting darker and darker as you go forward, and it seems hopeless. But in that darkness, the tiniest glimmer of light can attract all the attention because of the darkness around. And that sense of the potential for something in the middle of all this unravelling is what those of us who are looking at that possibility can give ourselves to entirely, because of the possibility of its power.
Kate: I have a similar experience. People often come up to me and say, “I love your optimism.” And I say, “I’m not sure I said that.” Don’t be an optimist if it makes you relax – if it makes you say, “We’ve got this, humans are ingenious, we’ve done this before, don’t worry.” Because that’s not true. But don’t be a pessimist if it makes you give up – if it makes you say, “This is too hard, it’s too late, we are too many, it costs too much, it’s too complex.” Because you’ll just make that true if you give up. Be in action – at the school gates, in the boardroom, as an author, as a student, put up your hand, challenge people, how you vote, how you invest, how you divest, how you volunteer. We can all be in action.
And I just wanted to pick up on the shareholder-maximising model. When companies come to us at Doughnut Economics Action Lab and say, “We like the Doughnut, we want to engage with it,” we say, “We don’t want to talk to you about the design of your products. We want to talk to you about the design of your company.” It all sits in your deep design. What’s the purpose of your company? Why does it even exist? What are the networks of relationship you hold with your suppliers, your customers, your employees? How is your company governed? Let’s go deeper – I call it corporate psychotherapy. What’s its purpose? How is it networked? How is it governed? How is it owned? And how is it financed? Because where the finance is coming from is going to profoundly shape what that finance expects to extract and what it reinvests in the purpose. And when you have the deep design of a shareholder-owned company, the finance is coming from shareholders who expect it to be governed to maximise their quarterly dividends.
Good luck if you think you’re going to become regenerative under that pressure. I often hear people working inside these companies saying, “I’d love to design regenerative clothing or do regenerative agriculture. We could. We know how. We have the technology. We have the people who know how to transform the plastics. But we can’t do it because we are constrained by the financial model which has got to deliver this absurd 15%, 20% to the market.” It’s based on nothing on this Earth. The Earth is being drawn to devastation and finance wants its 15% – how do we pull down that financial fiction and reconnect finance so that it’s in service of life?
Redesigning finance so that it invests in enterprise that’s a vehicle for regenerative and distributive futures is key. The deep clash between finance and life: I’m so caught up with it I’ve been putting it on as a circus. I’m the ringmaster and bring someone up from the audience to play Nature, someone comes up to play finance with a great big extractive hose attached to the briefcase, and we look at the design tensions between Nature and finance and ask what it will take to transform finance so that it serves life instead of destroys life.
Jeremy: I love that so much and that is another part of what I explore in Ecocivilization – around finance. What we see is there are different available options, sometimes incredibly simple. One of the core concepts is that money itself is created as a debt instrument – not by governments, but by private banking institutions designed to be there for profit. And the way it’s created is by increasing the debt obligations of people, and the rest of society, every time a single pound or dollar is created. Why? This makes no sense.
It’s a reframe of finance, like your Doughnut Economics reframe. There have been carefully thought-through proposals by financial scholars: money can simply be created by a government to go where it’s needed most – it doesn’t have to go into this debt-financing place. That is so different from the way our system works, but it’s absolutely doable. We could start it tomorrow. There’s nothing utopian about it.
And the options are available to us on corporate structure too. Mondragon and these examples of co-ops at scale can play the game against capitalist entities and be as successful as or more successful than many of them. There are entire ecosystems of cooperatives, like we see in Emilia-Romagna, Italy, where lots of small co-ops work together very effectively.
If you come up with the best possible idea to do good, the most important thing is not to start it as a for-profit corporation – even if you believe you’re going to do good with it. Because the more successful you are, the better your idea is, the more it will get sucked up by that hose and turned into exactly the opposite of what was intended.
Kate: Exactly. When I was writing Doughnut Economics, I had no idea that it would be picked up by city councils, businesses and community groups and turned into games, graffiti and tools. Thank goodness – I think I would have found that so intimidating that I would have found it impossible to finish writing the book. But it’s been extraordinary, and to me that is evidence of the hunger for ideas that fit our times. Many people have said, “I’m already doing this. I just never had the name. I never had the picture that I could point to that says this is the world that I’m working towards, but I’m already putting this into practice.”
I find myself returning to Milton Friedman’s quote – seeking to have ideas not just lying around, but up and running. And hope and optimism – I don’t believe that this is the most probable future, certainly right now when powerful men are literally dropping bombs of hideous destruction, deeply pushing us in utterly the wrong direction. But I stand not with the most probable right now, but with the possible – this point of light in a dark tunnel.
The rise of AI, since you began writing your book, has been extraordinary, and you’re launching it in this moment of deep geopolitical tension and violence – a book of this beautiful possible world that could be. What would you hope that it connects into, in this emergent possible future, that it feeds into bringing about that reality in some way?
Jeremy: What’s coming to my mind is a vignette I discovered writing this book. There was a time in the 20th century when the majority of people were supportive of the idea of planetary governance – a world government that could have more power than single nations and try to bring a humane and positive future forward. And the interesting thing is when that time was. It was roughly 1945–46 – after the devastation of the world wars, after the genocides, after the nuclear explosions had gone off – and people like Albert Einstein and others were pushing for this possibility. Some of the most mainstream political leaders of the time supported that idea because they could see how screwed up everything was and could see the need for something better. Sadly, that didn’t end up taking place. The geopolitical power bases of the US and USSR ended up going right back to the nation-state system we have right now.
But when I discovered that, it struck me as another source of this potential: it’s right at the time when people see everything unravelling that they are truly looking for something different. My hope from this book is that it may be coming out at the very most opportune time – not one that I would ever have wanted to happen. As we look into this darkness, people know that the so-called solutions of the past don’t work any more. The Greta Thunberg generations will grow up saying we don’t accept what our parents’ generations have told us. Some of them will get sucked into this whole machine and move towards authoritarianism or tech epistemic chaos. But those who can connect with something else will look at what is actually possible. My biggest hope is that people will see there is an available future waiting for us and that it’s not some leap of faith. We need to recognise what’s possible and realise there are millions of groups working together towards that future.
Just like the Mont Pelerin Society beginning the whole process of neoliberalism gave this sense of a shared manifold of meaning – this idea of individual liberty - that millions of people could interpret in their own unique ways. All of them felt they were working towards something together, which created this disaster we’re in right now. Can there be this sense of shared meaning-making – a manifold of meaning – working together towards that life-affirming future? There are those words attributed to Buckminster Fuller: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” That’s what you’re doing, Kate. That’s what Ecocivilization is pointing to – not building the model, but pointing to all the different people who are already building that model, making this old system obsolete.
Kate: You quoted one of my favourite quotes, which I put very early on in Doughnut Economics – it really inspired me to write that book and build a new model. I began with the frustrations of the economics I was taught, but I’m just not interested in purely critiquing – I think the moment and times of critique are past. Sometimes the most powerful form of protest is to propose something new, which is what I was doing in Doughnut Economics: not only new, but ideas that have been left in the wings for decades, bringing them centre stage and on the page. So be propositional. That‘s why I also think that 21st-century economics will be practised first and theorised later – I’m hanging out with the practitioners. And you’re foregrounding the practice in your book, showing us so many examples from around the world, that patchwork of the possible future already visible to us, if we bring it together in one place. Here’s to the power of protest when it’s proposing something new.
Jeremy: Absolutely. Just speaking with you is an inspiration.
Kate: Likewise. Pipes me up for the day.
