Ecocivilization and Our Discontents: Jeremy Lent on Why TINA Is Wrong

00:00:30 Andrew Keen: Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States, with world-leading commentators and thinkers.

00:01:24 Andrew Keen: Hello everybody. As we crawl towards summer, temperature records are breaking again. It's hot all over the world, and it's of course, unfortunately, time for another show on global warming.

00:01:43 Andrew Keen: My guest today, Jeremy Lent, is a distinguished activist and writer. He has a new book out; it's called Eco-Civilization: Making a World That Works for All. Jeremy, congratulations on the new book.

00:01:57 Jeremy Lent: Thank you so much, Andrew. Glad to be here today.

00:02:01 Andrew Keen: Jeremy, should we be more aware of the coming apocalypse? I mean, that kind of goes without saying. Why do most people just shrug it off?

00:02:12 Jeremy Lent: Yes, well, that is actually one of the questions I look at in the book. And a large reason why is because we have media owned by the billionaires who basically don't gain anything from people freaking out about what's going on. And so this entire system really is designed to sort of lull people into really what I call a “consensus trance.” So that, you know, everyone knows what's happening in Washington that particular day, who's in and who's out, knows what teams are scoring well in the sports, but almost nobody is aware of some of these bigger, bigger existential questions facing us all.

00:03:09 Andrew Keen: So in other words, we shouldn't become too preoccupied with Trump and MAGA, that that is perhaps not really the issue—it's the broader structural problems.

00:03:21 Jeremy Lent: Yeah, well, it's always a case of sort of “yes and” to me, if you will, because this stuff is right in our face, and it is affecting people's lives every day. And every day, there are people rounded up by ICE and all kinds of things happening that we have to be aware of and do something about. But at the same time, you know, we'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. When you're in such places of inequality, that things are breaking apart, it's unrealistic in my view to try to focus on those little things and think that will lead to a real better outcome. To me, what's realistic is something that is known in planning circles as backcasting, and that's really what this book is about. And what backcasting does is it starts off saying, “What actually would the world look like to be sustainable? To be one that we could actually have a human relationship with the living Earth that could truly flourish for a long time, where people actually have the minimum they need to be able to live a decent life.” And you look at that and then you work backwards. You say, “Okay, so we're obviously a long way from there; what are the steps that need to be taken to get to that realistic outcome for a long-term, better future?” And then you can go back to the first steps—I'm not saying that you have to sort of give up on those steps to get there—but then it helps to orient what those steps are, and sometimes the steps we focus on are actually likely to take us in the wrong direction rather than the right direction.

00:05:37 Andrew Keen: You used another “R” word earlier, not realism but regeneration and regenerative agriculture; we've done a number of shows on that. Kate Raworth, of course, has popularized the notion. How important is the concept of regeneration and regenerative agriculture? How much of a role does that play in your vision of an eco-civilization?

00:06:13 Jeremy Lent: I'd say it's super important, because again, we'll start from the basis of realizing that we have been destroying the richness, the abundance of this living Earth for centuries now, and we're doing it at a faster and faster rate. And so it's not enough—we have to move away from the actual word I have used a couple of times in this conversation—we need to move away from this word “sustainable.” Because if you're living in an Earth which is already suffering, which is barely even in—like a tiny fraction of the richness and abundance of life that has been—to then say, “Well, let's make that sustainable,” is not really that good. What you really want is, for true flourishing, you have to focus on regeneration. And so what regeneration means, well, in agriculture, what it means fundamentally is getting away from the kind of agriculture that these few big ag companies have essentially imposed on humanity over the last few decades, which brings them tremendous profits and makes peasants' lives absolutely miserable, and also leads to consumers becoming either sort of obese or malnourished in many parts of the Global South, or combinations of those both. But regenerative agriculture is something completely different. And it's probably best seen in the work of this amazing group called La Via Campesina—who probably most people have never heard of; I didn't hear of them until I started to do the research for this book. They're probably like the largest peoples' movement in the world, of hundreds of millions of peasants working on the ground in Latin America and they're now including Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. And they focus on what's called agroecology, actually bringing the agriculture down to the local area, working with the land, and doing it in a way that is regenerative, not just for the land itself, but for their communities—there's really no distinction then between the community and the culture and the way in which they grow the produce on their land. And this has been shown in a number of studies that this kind of regenerative, agroecology approach can be every bit as efficient as this kind of fossil fuel-based agriculture that is forced on us.

00:09:14 Andrew Keen: In other words, it's rather like the argument about building roads, improving traffic, saving us time, but the more roads that are built, the more traffic there is, and of course, the more environmental decay.

00:09:35 Jeremy Lent: Yes, right, and that's another example of that Jevons paradox. One that goes along with that: fuel efficiency, you'd think, would lead to people using gasoline less over the decades—it's done the opposite. Every time cars get more fuel efficient, people drive longer distances because they can and they can afford it. And so that's another example of that.

00:10:00 Andrew Keen: Jeremy, you and I are talking in our home state of California, in Northern California, in San Francisco. Is the dystopia that you imagine of high-tech companies surveilling us and creating ghettos of privilege where everybody else fries—is Northern California or California in general, does that represent a kind of sneak preview for the rest of the world?

00:10:34 Jeremy Lent: Actually, if you want a sneak preview for the rest of the world, the place to look is parts of the Global South. And in fact, there's reports I've read firsthand from people I know of experiences they're having, like say in South Africa, which is really much more of a sense of what that world actually looks like. And in South Africa you actually literally have almost like an absolute distinction, a sort of fortresses of, usually white, but not always white nowadays, upper, wealthy elites barricaded off. And you have basically miles upon miles of ghettos and impoverished areas where most people are forced to exist. And when people go there to travel to have a luxury vacation, you sort of go from one encapsulated thing to a locked train to go to the next, and you see all the impoverishment all around you. That's a sort of an example of the kind of thing I'm talking about. And that is very much a dystopia. And South Africa, not surprisingly, it actually turns out is, literally, the most unequal nation on the entire Earth. And that inequality is a part of what we're moving towards all around.

00:12:12 Andrew Keen: Jeremy, we've done a number of shows on the themes that you write about in your new book. Tim Jackson, a fellow Brit, wrote a book about Life After Capitalism, so you're not alone in making this argument. What are you arguing in Eco-Civilization that is new, that hasn't been made before?

00:12:40 Jeremy Lent: Yeah, thank you. Well actually, a big part of this entire book is to point out exactly what you just said: that I'm not alone. In fact, really what the book is primarily about is lifting up and showing all the amazing work that people have been doing in every aspect of what we call civilization. Whether it's economics or technology, agriculture, urban design, governance, and show that you can weave it all together and you have a fundamentally different, coherent system. So what I feel is new in the book is simply that weaving together. In every single chapter, I don't come up with the excellent ideas that are there; that's happened through years of research I've done to find out who is already doing the thinking or organizing on the ground to make this stuff happen. What I do think though is most of the time people get caught in their particular silos, and they don't realize that what they're doing in one area is super-connected with what people are trying to do in other areas. And one of the points about the book is that any one solution, quote-unquote, like any one sort of breakthrough that could really be life-affirming, if taken by itself, wouldn't work because the rest of the system would kind of blow it away. And so it's only when you put these different ideas together that they begin to make a coherent whole—and you actually can begin to see there is a fundamentally different alternative system available to us.

00:14:34 Andrew Keen: Can you have a market-based regenerative economy, Jeremy?

00:14:45 Jeremy Lent: That's a great question, I'm glad you asked that. And I would say, not market-based, but I want to be really clear about that. I'm not envisaging in the book making any claims that markets themselves are bad or that we need to get rid of markets. They're an amazing, wonderful institution that's evolved with humans over millennia; they're not even really part of capitalism, they're not really defined as capitalism. I think it's important to make this distinction between what is capitalism and what are markets. So basically, markets can be very helpful as long as they are part of a bigger system. And we mentioned Kate Raworth, and in her book she uses an analogy that I then—

00:15:40 Andrew Keen: This is the Doughnut Economics.

00:15:42 Jeremy Lent: Exactly, her book is Doughnut Economics. And she talks about markets like fire. And when we look at fire, for example, we all agree fire is a really good thing. I mean, ever since we've been around as humans, we use fire to cook our food, it keeps us warm, all kinds of wonderful things. But nobody goes around saying, “Fire is so good that we should have no regulation on fire, it should be absolutely unregulated, and once things burn, they should just be able to burn freely until everything burns out.” Of course not, we regulate it very carefully because of its incredible power. Markets are the same way. So markets have an absolute place in any kind of civilization, including an ecological civilization, but they need to be really kept within quite tight confines and not be allowed to dominate our entire system the way they are now.

00:16:50 Andrew Keen: So to get to this vision of an eco-civilization, Jeremy, does it require radical regulation? How do we get there?

00:17:05 Jeremy Lent: Yeah, I would say not radical regulation in the old-fashioned way that we've seen, really over the last hundred years; the debate has always been between the sort of right versus the left. The right wanting the free markets, left wanting to bring state control—it's always this battle, right? Between the state and the market essentially, or capital essentially, or free markets. What I'm envisaging, and what so many different other people are exploring in this book, is a way to sort of bypass that kind of stalemate between the two. There absolutely has to be strict constraints on these unregulated markets, on unregulated wealth, getting to this place where we have centi-billionaires or whatever, absolutely. But that doesn't necessarily come from states then applying control and then the problem that we see with so much of the past, like in communist countries, where you get now domination by the state rather than domination by markets, equally bad. What we're talking about is pushing power down to local communities above all, and giving local communities their own autonomy in how things work. But not then sort of fighting against other communities elsewhere, but actually organizing things so people within the community are incented to want to do as we evolved as humans to do, to be collaborative and cooperative with others, and communities then actually work cooperatively and collaboratively with other communities. This is stuff that—you might say, “Well, this sounds so utopian because it's so different from the world we live in today,” but it's actually very aligned with our core human evolved needs. And it's been shown to work incredibly well throughout history. There's a Nobel Prize-winning economist, Elinor Ostrom, who wrote about the commons, the principle of the commons, which is a third way—it's not state, it's not market, it's humans self-organizing together in the way that allows them to flourish, and that's the kind of different thinking that this book calls for.

00:19:45 Andrew Keen: Subtitle of your book, Jeremy, is Making a World That Works for All. But the people you don't like, you call them the “billionaire class”—I mean there are many members of that billionaire class, not all wealthy people are billionaires—millionaires, people who work for large agricultural companies… why wouldn't they be opposed to this? How would it work for them?

00:20:20 Jeremy Lent: Yeah, thanks for asking that. So, well, the kind of mega-billionaires, the Elon Musks or Jeff Bezoses of the world, are very likely to be opposed to this because it absolutely calls out their drive to try to essentially dominate the rest of human society. But what's really interesting is ordinary, let's say ordinary wealthy people, people who aren't centi-billionaires or billionaires, but do have wealth, it turns out that actually they are happier and they do better in societies that are more equal and egalitarian than societies that are truly unequal. There's this really excellent book called The Spirit Level, written by a duo, Wilkinson and Pickett, which studied this extensively. And the amazing outcome is that if you look at countries, levels of health and well-being in different societies and you correlate that with levels of inequality, the more equal societies are far higher in levels of well-being and overall happiness, and both mental and physical health, than the unequal societies. And even people at the upper levels who enjoy that wealth show greater well-being. And it's really easy to understand when you think about it, because they live in societies where people trust each other far more. In a more equal society like Sweden, the level of trust is a huge multiple of the level of trust that we see in a society like the United States. In Sweden, somebody leaves their laptop by accident on a train, and there's these stories that are more normalized in a place like Sweden—somebody else picks it up, finds out who it is, gets in touch with them by text and gives them the laptop two stations down to meet them or whatever. This is a different kind of experience people can have when they live in a more equal and trusting society. And that's why it truly is a world that works for all. Maybe we need a little asterisk there, saying, “Well, with the exception of the mega-billionaires.” But even people who live that kind of life live lives of such isolation that it personally wouldn't be my choice to live that kind of life. You might get all kinds of power, all kinds of material flourishing, with all your different estates and your superyachts and everything else, but the separation that they have from other people—the gulf must be huge—and my invitation is for us to basically reconnect with what actually makes us flourish as human beings, which comes back to the sense of being in community, feeling truly fulfilled because we're part of something that actually feels connected with us, rather than disconnected.

00:24:15 Andrew Keen: Jeremy, some people are going to be listening to this and saying, “Ah, I've heard all this before: collaboration, community, blah, blah, blah. If we only became more like Sweden,” usually it's Denmark, but it's Sweden or Finland or Holland or Northern Germany. But that's not going to happen in America and it's all very well talking about this utopia, but it doesn't seem in any way—and I use the R-word again—realistic. How is it going to happen in the United States? You've talked about some regenerative movements in the South, in Latin America, in parts of Africa, though they're certainly not egalitarian societies. But leaving that for the moment, how does this begin in America? Is it political? Is it in terms of organization? Where's the evidence that this is anything more than a pipe dream in the United States?

00:25:20 Jeremy Lent: Yeah, well I think it begins at the community level, and it makes inroads at the city and the state levels, and it can even have an impact on mainstream political levels with the ideas of people like Bernie Sanders or people like Mamdani and those people who are critiquing the mainstream Democratic establishment. And honestly, I believe, my analysis of our situation in the United States, is the reason why people are drawn towards these authoritarian extremist strongmen that we're experiencing right now is because they feel in their gut just what my book is saying—what I said at the beginning of this conversation, that the system is designed to screw them essentially. And they feel that. And when somebody comes along and says, “Knock it all down, break it down,” in their gut, they relate to that, even if they're basically being lied to and essentially it's just greater inequality that's being foisted on them by these strongmen. So, what I feel is absolutely crucial is for people like AOC, for like Bernie Sanders, Mamdani, and so many others to have the courage to actually stand up for human dignity, to actually push for things that actually need to be done, but to go even further than they feel they can get away with going right now. What this book really offers is a moral vision and a realistic vision, to come back to that word, of what actually is possible if we break out of the confines that we're in right now. So, in my sense, I think that we could be very surprised because when things swing to one extreme, they have a way of quite easily swinging to the other extreme. We could be very surprised in years to come at the kind of changes we could see at the mainstream level. But it's already happening at local levels. It's like in places like Cleveland, Ohio, for example, there's this great network of cooperatives called the Evergreen Cooperatives, movements where cooperative organizations get together, they work with local institutions like hospitals, schools, etc., and they've built a whole network of co-ops improving people's well-being on these very principles I'm talking about. You see something similar in Cooperation Jackson, where people have really pulled together different co-ops working together. You see that in many places in the US where indigenous people have been empowered to claim their own rights and to actually, in some cases, even get the rights of nature, the rights of rivers recognized in law. So even though they're relatively small, what we call islands of coherence in a sea of chaos, as one systems thinker described it—they might be small in these local areas, but there's also this bigger canopy of this mainstream push towards more radical ways of thinking, which can actually tie in with that. [Andrew, there appears to be a jump in the audio here: the “no alternative” / TINA discussion below begins mid-thought, with the setup about Margaret Thatcher's “there is no alternative” not captured on the recording. Flagging for your review.] And that was such a famous phrase, it got shortened to this acronym, TINA, right? And that is the absolute disempowering message that the billionaires and the neoliberal establishment want to put out there. And as long as we all believe there is no alternative, then we'll just try to improve the situation that little bit because there's nothing else we can do. This book shows that is actually not correct. There is an alternative. The first step is to recognize that. Once we recognize that, the second step is to then figure out, on practical terms, what do we need to do to get there?

00:30:25 Andrew Keen: You mentioned Greta Thunberg, a very prominent young activist within the environmental movement, who has been advising international organizations on addressing a lot of these issues. How realistic, Jeremy—and I know you're probably not particularly keen on the ‘R’ word—how realistic is eco-civilization? Does it require a catastrophe? Are we like Lenin before the First World War or during the First World War saying that the only way we get to paradise is through hell?

00:31:10 Jeremy Lent: Yeah, well, you know, I actually do like the fact that you bring up that ‘R’ word, realistic. And in fact, I talk about that at the beginning of the book. And there's two different ways you can think about realistic: there's kind of realistic in terms of where we are right now, and what is realistic given all the forces of destruction and oppression all around us. Well, you know, it's realistic to maybe push for a slightly higher tax rate for the uber-wealthy, or realistic to push for maybe just slightly better regulations on fossil fuel pollution, or maybe slightly fewer subsidies going to the fossil fuel companies—you could say, “Well, that's realistic.” But when you're in a world that is careening out of control, where we've broken through seven of the nine dimensions of safe operating space that scientists have discovered, when you're in such places of inequality that things are breaking apart, it's unrealistic in my view to try to focus on those little things and think that will lead to a real better outcome. To me, what's realistic is backcasting: you start by asking what the world would actually look like to be sustainable, one where we could have a human relationship with the living Earth that could truly flourish for a long time, and then you work backwards to figure out the steps needed to get there. And that orientation helps reveal that some of the steps we focus on today are actually likely to take us in the wrong direction rather than the right one.

00:33:30 Andrew Keen: Well there you have it: Eco-Civilization: Making a World That Works for All. Jeremy Lent, thank you so much for your time.

00:33:38 Jeremy Lent: Thank you, Andrew. It's been a real pleasure.