“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-organize 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.
