It's a good thing I know who I am – more or less. Over the last 50 years, I've learnt to live with a splendidly diverse range of dismissive insults: “deluded dreamer”, "dangerous zealot”, "a meddling muesli-muncher", and my favourite – "not so much a 'green guru' as a 'false prophet'."

There's been one dismissive constant throughout these decades: “doom-and-gloom merchant”. Oddly enough, that's the one that really rankles. I was a full-on peddler of hope and upbeat futures throughout my first quarter-century; it just got harder and harder as I watched an entire generation of politicians, business leaders, and self-styled intellectuals squander all the astonishing opportunities we had back then to get to grips with the emerging climate crisis, the seemingly unstoppable assault on nature, steadily worsening pollution, and so on.

So I just keep working away at staying hopeful in the shitstorm that has engulfed us over the last 20 years – without for a single second bowing down to the phoney optimists, the facile technofixers, and today’s noisy army of ‘stubborn solutionists’ who seize on every little shaft of light without for a moment commenting on the darkness from which it has emerged.

Which is why this piece is all about paying tribute to two wonderful soulmates, both of whom strive in the way I do to help others stay strong in such difficult times: Rebecca Solnit and Jeremy Lent.

I love this title of Solnit’s new book: “The Beginning Comes After The End”! It does sometimes feel like we're already living in the end times – climate and nature breakdown, genocide, AI, militarism, grotesque inequality, the resurgence of fascism, and so on. I wince when I hear people try to capture this as “our generation's polycrisis”: it's so much more than that and has affected so many generations before us, albeit less visibly.

But Solnit reminds us that this is as much the beginning of something even more extraordinary, drawing on all the transformations she's lived through since the time of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.

I see the immense impact of human rights campaigns, including anti-racist, feminist, immigrant, disability-rights and queer-rights movements; see the rise of environmental awareness and its application in creating laws and systems to protect the natural world; see decolonisation as an actual shift in governance over huge territories in my lifetime, but also a decolonisation of the imagination; see the slow decline or maybe ‘denormalization’ of authoritarianism, in the home and in personal relationships, as well as in public life.

Solnit doesn't shy away from the fact that the backlash against all of this is fierce. Many are feeling the pain of that backlash. Much has been undone. But the resistance to it is already mighty – and getting mightier all the time.

Which is exactly where Jeremy Lent’s “Ecocivilisation: Making a World that Works for All” comes into play. At every turn, both he and Rebecca Solnit challenge the very notion of the superiority of 'Western civilisation’, demolishing so many of the foundational pillars on which that particular idea of civilisation is built.

Lent summarises this through the lens of a particularly powerful myth found amongst many First Nations people – the myth of the Windigo:

Windigo (also known as Wetiko) is the name given by the Ojibwe people to a cannibalistic monster driven by insatiable hunger. The more it consumes, the more ravenous it becomes. It can never be satisfied, because its appetite is not directed towards nourishment, but towards devouring for its own sake. For the Ojibwe, the European invaders who arrived on their lands seemed animated by just such a force. They recognised this as a kind of spiritual derangement, a hunger that turned everything it encountered into an object for exploitation.

And that's pretty much where we are today, trying to make sense of things in a world driven by the tyranny of now, by the myth of instant gratification, by clicks, swipes, and likes, and by endless forlorn attempts to compensate for a sense of inner emptiness by buying stuff. And then buying more stuff. This is tellingly captured in these words from Acharya Prashant:

We don't consume because we need more. We consume because we feel insufficient. Advertising doesn't sell products. It sells inadequacy. Endless growth is not just an economic model. It is a psychological pattern: I am not enough; therefore, I must accumulate. We cannot expect a system designed to amplify inner emptiness to suddenly function without it. But understanding can bring an end to compulsive consumption, status anxiety, and extractive ambition.

The sheer scale of the economic transformation over the last 50 years is staggering. The population of the world in 1976 was around 4 billion, and global GDP amounted to $6.5 trillion. There are now more than 8 billion of us, and according to the IMF, global GDP in 2025 was $126 trillion. And dear old Planet Earth was the same as it was back in 1976.

Which probably explains why we're coming to the end of this phase of destructive, consumptive capitalism. If this 50-year explosion in people and GDP had led to a world in which the majority of humankind shared much more equitably in the vast store of wealth created, then you could argue that this represents a much more acceptable trade-off. Nature would still self-correct in the end, but we would have had one hell of a party along the way!

But that's not what happened. The lion's share of this store of wealth has ended up in the hands of fewer and fewer people – epitomised by today's 3,428 billionaires – whilst more and more people struggle just to ‘get by’ in the rich world and even to survive in the poor world.

All of that is brilliantly interpreted in Jeremy Lent’s ‘Ecocivilisation’. But that's not what makes it so special. Having dug deep down into the corrupted and toxic roots of Western civilisation, he invites us to think ahead to a very different kind of civilisation, “representing an entirely new phase of human history — one that redefines the possibilities of the collective human experience by applying our evolutionary legacy to a technologically advanced common global society”.

This represents an inspired reworking of one of the most important teachings of Aristotle when he drew a distinction between 'hedonia' – transient pleasures arising from acquisition, consumption, status, and material comfort – and eudaimonia, the deeper well-being that arises when a person strives to fulfil their true nature and realise their unique potential. As Lent puts it, "Our dominant consumer system is engineered around hedonia, locking people onto a treadmill that drives perpetual economic growth. An ecocivilisation, by contrast, would be designed to cultivate eudaimonia."

I have to admit that ‘the politics of eudaimonia’ may not be the catchiest way of challenging today's consumptive capitalism! But both Jeremy Lent and Rebecca Solnit are urging us to understand the true nature of the transformation on which the future of humankind depends – and that's where the deepest wellspring of hope is to be found.

References

Jeremy Lent, ‘Ecocivilisation: Making A World that Works For All’, Melville House, 2026.